Many of us have endured deployments, and we can all relate to each other in terms of frustrations and Murphy’s Law attacks. But, many times, the wife overseas gets overlooked in her story and her triumphs. Today we are featuring Julie the Army Wife as our guest blogger. Julie is currently in Germany, and she is here to share her voice and her story.
HI! My name is Julie and I have been an Army Wife for a little over 4 years now. We are stationed in Germany and have been through two deployments over here. I was asked to blog about what that was like.
I have never been stationed in the United States so I don’t have a deployment from there to compare things to but I can tell you about my experiences over in Germany.
Germany overall is such a great experience! However, there are some things I find hard about being over here and during a deployment, those things become that much harder. You are not in your familiar surroundings, you usually can’t speak the language and you will be really far from your family. It can be hard and expensive to visit or have family visit. This can make a deployment a very lonely time for people.
But because we are so far from friends and family I think we try that much harder to connect with our military family. I never would have made it through our deployments if it weren’t for my support system. I would go to weekly coffees, have dinners at the park while the kids played, sleepovers, plan holidays together and go on fun trips. I was very involved in PWOC and just stayed busy.
One big challenge I had to face was during our first deployment. My 2-month-old son developed RSV and had to be in the hospital for about 4 days. This was hard. You never want your child to have to be in a hospital and you never want to have to do that while your husband is away but it happened. I had to call the Red Cross to even let him know what was going on. He felt so far away during the whole thing. I was blessed to have a friend I trusted be able to watch my other little boy during this time.
Another big challenge for me was winter. I was born and raised in California. If we want to see snow, we head for the mountains for the day. It is very different here. Well during our second deployment, we got snow from November until March. It started snowing about 2-3 weeks before my husband deployed and I was very scared about having to do all the driving in the snow. I even thought for a few minutes that maybe I should stay the whole deployment with my parents. But I knew I didn’t really want to do that.
Even though this whole experience has been hard, I don’t think I would change it for anything. It has helped me to grow and it is why I am the person I am today.
So if you are experiencing a deployment overseas and you are scared, that is ok. It is a new experience. But just remember that it is something you can do and something you can get through and you will become stronger through it all.
I am already looking forward to telling my Grandchildren about the 4 years we lived in Germany 
To read more from Julie the Army Wife, visit her blog.
Tags: deployment while overseas, germany, military lifestyle, military wives