March 28, 2009 
By Rebekah Sanderlin
On March 8, 2003, I sat in my wedding gown in a hotel room in Key West, Fla. and counted the costs of being a military wife. My soon-to-be husband was already standing on the beach with his brother and his buddies, sweating in their tuxedos and waiting for me. I took my time because I wanted to make sure that I knew what I was doing. I had no doubts about the guy, but was I ready for military life? For the possibility of frequent moves? The long absences? For the Army to take priority over me? Even though I knew I wasn't walking down the aisle and into a dream life, I decided that I could accept military life and all the drama that goes with it. I didn’t have kids back then so I didn’t have to consider what this life would mean for them. The kids I now have didn’t get to count the costs like I did. They were drafted into service.
There's a phrase being tossed around military installations, "the new normal." Maybe you've heard it, certainly you've lived it. Living in the new normal means that this, this life of repeated deployments, prosthetics, and memorial services, this is what life is going to look like for us for awhile to come, so we had better learn to deal with it.
My son was just two weeks old the first time his father deployed to Afghanistan. My husband was on his third deployment there when our son turned four last fall. My little boy is so used to this life of ups and downs that he thinks it is normal - the old normal. It’s not even new anymore. For him, life is abnormal when my husband is home. My son doesn't know that there are kids in the world who can call their Daddies on the phone anytime they want. Months into this last tour my son tried to convince me that I should let him go “fight the bad guys with Daddy.” He said, “I’ll push those bad guys down, punch them in the butt and call them ‘peanut butter and jelly head’.” He had decided that his best chance for seeing his father was to go to war, too.
My daughter was born during this most recent deployment. She didn’t meet her father until she was almost five months old. For the first months of her life she knew her father as an 8x10 picture taped to the backseat of the car . My husband knew his daughter as the screaming voice in the background during our phone calls.
Like my kids, most young military children don't know their situation is unusual. They can’t remember life before mommies and daddies went off to war and many of their friends have parents who’ve been deployed, too. That’s not going to change anytime soon. Even as the fighting in Iraq calms down, fighting in Afghanistan is amping up. Troops who have just shaken the last bit of Iraqi dust out of their uniforms are now packing their bags for Central Asia, preparing for harsh mountain winters and more brutal desert summers. Their families are preparing for yet another year apart, more missed birthdays, anniversaries and Christmases.
The reality of life in a war-time military family means that my kids won’t have the childhood I had. They'll grow up much faster than I did. My kids will grow up with a higher sense of community, purpose and responsibility than I had, but they’ll also have memories of a perpetually empty seat at the dinner table and of mom being the one who taught them to fish. They will remember the bitter pain of hugging their father goodbye knowing that they’ll be three inches taller when they see him again. They will remember that some of their friends never got to see their fathers again.
I believe wholeheartedly in the mission our country has undertaken with this war and I am extremely proud of my husband for being one of the very few who has stepped up and volunteered to shoulder the burden. I'm proud of myself, too, for somehow holding it all together during the deployments and for sacrificing my own happiness for something that is bigger and more important than me. But, truthfully, I don't like this new normal very much. The pride and strength it offers us comes at a steep price. Still, we are living in the new normal, and we’re going to have to deal with it.