We all find ourselves in unfamiliar territory. Whether it be a new marriage, new kids, or a new duty station, sometimes we are knocked off our feet. How we choose to stand again is often in the eye of the beholder. Leeana, our first Navy SEAL wife, is here to talk about it!
Steve and I had been married just eight days when we boarded a plane and flew far, far away from anything familiar in my life. Where we landed, a tiny island in the Persian Gulf called Bahrain, embodied everything foreign to me. I had three distinct cultures I would need to learn to navigate: the foreign culture of the Middle East, the foreign culture of the Navy, and the foreign culture of our marriage.
Steve and I met right after he finished a post-9-11 tour to the Middle East, five years into his career as a Navy SEAL. Within weeks of our engagement, Steve moved to Bahrain for the first of a two-year tour. When the war started in the midst of our long-distance engagement, I was given my first dose of the vulnerability that arrives the minute after you attach your life to someone in the military. Where was he? What was he doing? Was he safe? Would he get to come home for our wedding?
Welcome to a life of questions with few answers.
Life routinely deposits us—expectedly or unexpectedly—in foreign places. Sometimes those foreign places are around the world, like an overseas tour. Sometimes they find us, right in our living room. Illness. Marital issues. Financial reversal. Job loss. Parenthood. Military life. Every one of these “foreign places” is difficult to navigate and harder still to find ourselves in.
After fourteen months of separation, Steve flew home on leave, and we were married in San Diego, in a Spanish-inspired courtyard in Balboa Park. After a short honeymoon in Lake Tahoe, we were off jet-bound for the other side of the world.
We stumbled through those early days of marriage, learning each other and learning ourselves, too. We explored Bahrain together, taking in the exotic aromas and savory flavors, trying to create space—as two wars raged—for a relationship to grow and flourish.
Seven years later, we are still stumbling through life most days. After a brief stint in the reserves, we have been mobilized back into active duty, and we realize now more than ever that we have no guarantees, little control, and few answers for the future. Though we are no longer in Bahrain, we still find ourselves in very foreign territory.
Our relationship has never been one of convenience. We’ve always had to fight for each other, for intimacy, for connection. We’ve had to believe in being together even when thousands of miles separated us. We’ve had to learn to do marriage in many contexts with many contentions. And yet, somehow, we’ve continued.
Our faith, our families, our friends, our community . . . all of these forces have conspired together to save us, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year. And though we’ve had to manage challenging seasons—a year of depression after re-entry back to the States, workups and deployments, the loss of a SEAL teammate, the journey of infertility, the intense days of parenting young children—we have found an unlikely beauty in the chaos and uncertainty.
South of the Grand Mosque, out in the middle-of-nowhere-Bahrain, you’ll find a tourist destination called the Tree of Life. The climate is temperamental and fussy in this region of the island, and when I first made the drive out to visit the renowned tree, my hair whipped me in the face and my clothes snapped like a sail.
The whole scene wasn’t much to look at, if you ask me. Everything was the blah dessert beige of rocks and sand. Oil pipelines snaked across the dry ground here and there, but the black tubing was the only interruption on an otherwise monotone, landscape. That is, except for the Tree of Life.
Legend has it that the Tree of Life, a four-hundred-year-old mesquite, is the only tree in all of Bahrain that grows from natural irrigation. Though surrounded by barren nothingness, this one huge tree shoots up, green and leafy and alive.
The tree is a monument to the unexpected art of our Creator. Even in the most desperate places, even in the most desolate deserts, even in the most foreign of soils, something beautiful can and will grow.
Leeana’s first book, Found Art: Discovering Beauty in Foreign Places, begins as she steps off the plane in Bahrain, the pin-dot island in the Middle East where she and her Navy SEAL husband spent their first year of marriage. Found Art follows Leeana as her life and her soul are changed forever. To learn more about Leeana, visit her blog.
