When you become a military wife or significant other you quickly learn there is nothing that could prepare you for this new role. About 4.5 years ago, I had a rather shocking initiation becoming a Marine Corps wife.

After Mike came home from a 3-month deployment to Afghanistan, he proposed to me. We were so excited and the thought of him leaving again in the near future never really entered our minds. So we proceeded to plan for the wedding. Our families (luckily our parents are close friends) thought we were crazy trying to plan a wedding in a 6-month time frame. Little did they know that 6-month time frame was going to be drastically cut short.

About 3 months into the wedding planning, we learned we had to move our wedding up 2 months because Mike was scheduled to leave for Iraq sooner than expected. After shedding lots of tears, we quickly began calling the wedding party, the church, photographer, banquet hall and on and on telling everyone about the date change. Our families once again were frantic wondering how we could pull off a wedding in less than a month.

A few days after we sent wedding invitations giving guests a few weeks short notice, Mike received another call from his caption saying we needed to move the wedding up again. But this time, we only had a week to plan it. I was hysterical. A week? How can you plan a wedding of your dreams in a week? And our honeymoon could only be a few days because he had to report back for training.

Once again, our families were frantic, but managed to stay focused on the task at hand. We once again called the wedding party, the church, photographer, banquet hall, guests and on and on. It was every bride’s worst nightmare.

While we were able to pull together a beautiful wedding in a short amount of time, it certainly wasn’t the wedding I had dreamed about. We decided to do a luncheon instead of a reception because a week wasn’t enough time to logistically pull everything together.

Still to this day I hold a grudge against the Marine Corps for taking that away from us. But what I learned is this isn’t going to be the first or last thing the military takes from us. And just like we did with the wedding, you need to roll with the punches because at the end of the day, you cannot control the military’s schedule and neither can your spouse.