When life gives you lemons....

I think everyone has heard the phrase 'When life gives you lemons, make lemonade'.   Both soldiers and military spouses have to be experts at this.  It doesn't seem to matter how much planning goes into planning something, there generally will be hitch in the situation.  The real challenge comes in how it's handled. 

When I was still in uniform, you see many different reactions when someone is under pressure.  Some are cool, calm and collected, while others act like the world has just ended.  I was told multiple times before my first deployment that you will learn a lot about yourself when you're deployed.  There wasn't much weight put into that thought for me since I was 24 when I deployed the first time - I didn't think there was anything else I could learn about myself... but I was wrong.  I learned how to make lemonade and how many ways I was capable of making lemonade during that deployment.  I did things I never thought I would be able to do and came away so much stronger for it.

Now, being a spouse, I realize that these lemonade challenges come in a different form and more on a daily basis.  Whether it is a trip that has to be cancelled last minute, that darn deployment gnome that always strikes when they are gone or the deployment/redeployment ceremony that we aren't able to attend for a possible thousand different reasons.  Each one of these situations causes frustrations and sometimes heartbreak depending on how much our heart had been set on something, but we may cry a tear or two and then we find a way to make it work. 

Recently, a good friend of mine contacted me in the heartbroken state.  She had planned on travelling back to where her husband was stationed to welcome him home when he returned from Afghanistan.  But because of a new job that limits her time off and the constant of the moving timeline, she isn't able to be there.  When her husband first brought up her not coming - she went through the normal emotions - the feeling of heartbreak, the disappointment, etc.  Then she shifted her thinking... since she wasn't able to be at his home station when he returned, she would recreate his welcome home ceremony at the airport when he comes home on post-deployment leave. 

In this life, you have a choice, you can take the lemons you get handed more often than you would like and become a sour puss and hate the military lifestyle or you can take the lemons and make some sweet lemonade and enjoy this lifestyle....