So I’ve been gone from the blogosphere for a month as will sometimes happen when the work/life scale gets overweighted on the work side.  Getting back some of the groove now and I offer up this blog post I actually wrote about a year ago but never posted. ______________________________

I think back to the person I was in high school and I wonder sometimes who that was.  And then I remember that despite the many experiences I had had that were beyond the general scope of my peer group, I was still emotionally immature.

I suppose it can’t be helped.  We are all young in the beginning and that means so much more than young in age.  I remember back then I couldn’t imagine why anyone would ever enter the military.  Why would anyone want to become part of an organization that systematically broke down an individual in order to recreate them as part of a group?  We spend so much of our time in Junior High and High School trying to figure out who we are – why would you give up that hard-won identity?  Why in the world would you let someone yell insults at you, force you to exercise into a state of abject misery and then ship you off someplace where you might get killed at the whim of some suit in Washington D.C.?  I just didn’t get it.

A few of the kids in my graduating class of about 100 joined up immediately. One was even part of the group I ran with that took all the college-prep classes.  I always figured he joined up because his home life wasn’t great and he’d never been told he could go to college, even though he took all the same classes we did.  I never got it, but I figured it was his way out.  Already my prejudice was set:  smart people went to college, not into the military.  I never stated the inverse, of course:  not smart people go into the military…  that just didn’t seem PC at all.  But that’s what was lurking in the background.

But then life happened.  About 20 years passed between graduating high school and the finalization of my divorce.  It wasn’t the divorce itself that made me respect the military.  It was the year after.   Sure, as a country we’d had Desert Storm and Operation New Hope, we’d had 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina.  And I’d had a whirlwind romance,  the wedding of my dreams, two amazing kids and a marriage that collapsed into the shitter as my spouse descended into the morass of addiction and I became a person I didn’t even recognize in trying to cope with it all. Life had hurled insults at me and made me exercise my psyche into complete and utter exhaustion.  And it had been my choice to enter into the situation at every step along the way.

It was only then that I became aware of something I’d missed in my growing up process – an understanding of how to depend on others.  I’d never really had to.  I was able to handle ALL the challenges that had been thrown my way by using niceness, native intelligence and that college education I’d gotten.   I didn’t need to depend on anyone else.

But then came the kids and I finally realized how arrogant I had been up ’til then.  Having someone else be utterly dependent on you is hard, no matter how much you might love babies in general (and I wasn’t one of those), or how smart you might be in how you go about raising them.  The weight of the responsibility and the grind of meeting the daily needs are overwhelming.  You need help, even if you don’t admit it.

And then came the divorce and the realization that I couldn’t do all that I had to do with respect to growing my kids into responsible adults without some outside help.  And I don’t mean the kind you pay for like counselors and babysitters, though I have made use of both of those too.    I mean the kind where you depend on someone else to help you for no reason other than that you need help and they’re willing to give it. I didn’t really know what it meant to be part of a community that extended beyond the bounds of familial relationships.  But I had no option but to build exactly that community after the divorce because I have no blood family here and I’d made the choice that it was more important to keep the kids near their (now sober) dad than it was for me to be near to my family.

I won’t ever be able to say that I fully understand the ‘bonds of brotherhood’ experienced by those in the military.  But having experienced a bit of life that broke me down and the life-changing community that grew around me and lifted me up in the aftermath of my broken marriage, I now have a great deal more respect for those who choose the military experience.  I know, just as they know, that my community has my back and that if I ever fell, it would carry me to safety.

And that’s a really nice feeling that I’m not sure I would have ever understood the importance of before divorce.