When you join the military or marry into it, your family life changes. If you get orders overseas, or assigned to a base – like Minot AFB – that is a lengthy drive away from your home, your relationships with your family are going to evolve. They have to.
There is a monumental shift in a mil person’s life when their everyday activities no longer involve their extended family. You don’t go to church together or have family BBQs. You don’t see each other at kids recitals or even many major holidays. Your parents, in-laws, grandparents, siblings, cousins, nieces, nephews, aunts and uncles no longer share the everyday parts of your life.

You start to experience each other’s lives through social media and shared videos rather than alongside each other in real life. But despite these technological enablers, the harsh reality is that you are now creating a life without your extended family physically in it.

This can be a hard reality to accept. It sets in as you get settled in a new place. It causes your relationships to evolve. Your mindset needs to evolve too. You start to build a life, a world, or a family in your new given space. You create your own traditions. Friends may take the place of family on major holidays. You adapt to the new lifestyle and the place you are living becomes a part of you. And it should. This is your home now, not the home you left behind. You create a new family, whether through marriage or with friends sharing this experience with you.
This is a heavy aspect of mil lifestyle. Leaving family and hometown friends can feel like a betrayal. Some feel the constant nag of guilt for not visiting “home” more. Others feel a constant, intense longing to be back. All of these feelings are normal. Almost everyone experiences them.

Meanwhile, while you grow as a mil family or independent person, these familial ties and hometown longing will always be a part of you. It’s where you came from, and maybe where you want to get back to. But, as you continue to grow, your own individual life here evolves without your extended family. And that’s ok too.
When mil families are placed in a situation where they are very far away from their hometowns, I’ve noticed that families and individuals often fit into one of the two following ends of a spectrum:

1. They miss home so much. They Facetime family and friends almost daily. They don’t try to like where they are and complain about their circumstances all the time. They take every single opportunity to go “home” and visit. They don’t make new friends. They don’t take advantage of new opportunities.
2. They always seek adventure and the new. They use all their vacation budget to explore the places around them. They create an entire new life for themselves. They stop talking to their friends and family back home because they don’t have much in common anymore. They don’t go “home” to visit because it’s too hard to be pulled in two directions in once.
   

Now, ideally, you are able to achieve a happy medium between these two extremes. Every family does what feels right to them based on income, work commitments, distance, family health, school and what’s best for them. No one can tell you what is the exact amount of time to go “home” and visit every year. It varies on so many things. What works for one military family may not work for you, and that’s ok.

But, what we can tell you is that it is ok to evolve your perspective on what it means to stay connected to your now extended family. It may vary based on the season of life, and the place you live. It can and should change as life goes on.

Consequently, living your life here doesn’t mean you don’t care about the life or family you left, it means that you are channeling your pre-military life to create your own beautiful family, and evolving your important relationships along the way. It may look very different from the way you were raised, and that’s ok too. That’s the military lifestyle, which is now a part of your family too.