A Letter Written in the Middle of Change
My Dearest Friend,
By this evening, the bins in my garage will be gone.
Not all of our things, and not even most of them, but the first thousand pounds of our life packed into plastic totes and sent ahead overseas before we are ready to follow. It is an odd kind of shipment, this unaccompanied baggage. Not quite essential in the way passports and medicine and suitcases are essential, but not extra either. These are the things we decided we could live without for a while, but not forever; the things we knew we would want waiting for us when the other side of this transition stops being an idea and starts becoming the place where we wake up each morning. A few kitchen comforts. Favorite toys. Board games we love enough to miss. Small pieces of ordinary life chosen carefully and then surrendered early, because sometimes the things that help a place feel like home have to leave home before we do.
That is the strange part: the house does not look dramatically different yet.
The walls are still decorated, the furniture is still here, the kitchen still looks lived in, and there are no empty rooms echoing back at us the way they will after the main packout. If someone walked through quickly, they might not realize we are already in the middle of a move. But I notice the quiet absences. I notice the gaps on the board game shelves where familiar boxes used to sit. I notice the toys my daughter may ask for next week already sealed away in bins that will soon be somewhere between here and there. I notice that my son had to choose two weeks worth of clothes ahead of time because once those bags leave today, there will be no reopening them for one forgotten sweatshirt or favorite shirt. The house is not empty, not even close, but it is no longer untouched. Something has shifted, and once you are the one living inside that shift, even the smallest missing pieces seem to announce themselves.
That is the part of transition I find hardest to explain from the outside. Not the anticipation before anything happens, and not the dramatic packout when everything is wrapped and carried out and the house begins to look less like yours with every passing hour. This is quieter than that. This is the middle stage, the one where life still looks mostly normal while pieces of it quietly become inaccessible. It is the strange mental pause before reaching for something because you cannot remember whether you already packed it. It is the beginning of purge piles in corners, the soft calculation of what has survived enough moves and what probably should not make another one. It is the slow realization that your home can still be full and familiar while also beginning to loosen around the edges.
And still, life does not pause just because transition has started.
My daughter still has speech therapy today while my husband handles the pickup. He still has another month in command. I am still balancing newsletters and volunteer work and turnover while also trying to establish roots at our next duty station before we ever arrive there. There is still school and laundry and grocery shopping and dinner to cook, because the ordinary needs of a family do not politely step aside for moving logistics. They simply fold themselves into the middle of it all, asking to be tended even while the garage becomes a staging area and the calendar begins to look like a map of departures.
Maybe that is why I have become so determined to protect the ordinary parts of our life right now. I still cook dinner four or five nights a week, even when it would be easier to let the whole month dissolve into takeout and paper plates. Not because cooking is convenient in this season, but because sitting around the table, enjoying a home cooked meal together, still matters to me. Especially this week, when my oldest son is about to leave for the summer and I am painfully aware that I do not want his final memories of this house, in this season, to be only stress and bins and the constant hum of everything changing. So we are still planning movie nights. We are still letting him choose takeout before he leaves. We are still trying to make ordinary evenings feel meaningful, because this version of our family, in this exact house, during this exact season of life, only exists for a few more days.
And by then, the bins will already be gone.
I felt the emotional weight of it most while packing board games. Not the ones we rarely touch, but the opposite: the ones we love enough to miss. The ones we pull out after the kids go to bed, the ones that make us laugh after long weeks, the ones we use to build community and friendship wherever we land. Sealing those away felt unexpectedly personal, not because they are irreplaceable objects, but because they represent the version of life we are trying to build again on the other side of this move. Quiet evenings together. New friendships around unfamiliar tables. Familiar routines recreated in rooms we have not seen yet. Those pieces of our life already exist somewhere ahead of us now, not fully here anymore and not fully there yet either, just suspended in transit while we remain behind, still making dinner, still folding laundry, still trying to live fully inside a home that has already begun to send pieces of itself onward.
And maybe that is what this stage of military life really is: learning to live in transit before you ever leave. Holding onto normalcy while pieces of your life move ahead without you. Remaining present in a home that is still yours, but no longer entirely settled. Letting go in small, practical ways before you are ready for the larger goodbye.
It is not the end yet, and it is not the beginning either.
It is the quiet, complicated middle where change has become visible, but life still demands your full attention anyway.
The Lesson
I think one of the hardest things about military transition is that it rarely arrives all at once. It comes gradually, through a bin packed here, a shelf emptied there, a favorite object quietly disappearing from daily life weeks before you actually leave. It comes while children still need comfort, spouses still need support, dishes still need washed, dinner still needs cooked, and people still need you. There is something deeply disorienting about existing inside active change while still being expected to function normally through it, but perhaps there is something deeply human about it too. We continue building routines and memories and connection even while life rearranges itself around us, not because it is easy, but because ordinary life is often the very thing that steadies us through extraordinary change.
Eventually, the bins will arrive. The games will come back out. The kitchen tools will return to drawers. The toys will be rediscovered with the delight of something almost forgotten. And one day, somewhere far from here, this same ordinary life will begin again in a different home. Not all at once, perhaps, and not without effort, but slowly enough that one morning we will look around and realize that the things we sent ahead were not just belongings after all.
They were small promises to ourselves that life would become recognizable again.
To the Spouse Living in the Middle of Change
If your house feels slightly unsettled right now, not empty exactly but no longer entirely untouched, I hope you know there is nothing wrong with you. This stage of transition is uncomfortable precisely because it is so ordinary. You are expected to keep showing up for your life while quietly dismantling pieces of it at the same time. You are still parenting and working and grocery shopping and answering emails, still trying to make memories for your children while mentally tracking what has already been packed away, what still needs to be sorted, and what must somehow remain accessible until the very last moment.
That balancing act is exhausting, but there is also something profoundly resilient about continuing to choose ordinary life in the middle of uncertainty. About still cooking dinner while the bins wait in the garage. About still laughing with your children while parts of your home slowly disappear. About still building community before you even arrive somewhere new. You do not have to stop living in order to move forward.
Sometimes, the bravest thing we do is continue living fully while life changes around us.
