This article first appeared on militaryspouse.com’s website on August 8, 2017.

It’s happened to us all, or it will. It’s the day you finally give up, the day you realize that nothing is in your control and you surrender to it all. It’s very liberating. And as a military spouse, I wish all of you the peace and happiness you will find when you throw in the towel.

When I was first married, I was as bright eyed and hungry for adventure as most are. How could I not be? My fiancé had promised me a life of travel and experiences. While he was still at the Air Force Academy, he filled in his dream sheet.

Ah, the intoxicating form that makes us all go crazy.

It is billed as a way to state your desires and have them fulfilled. And at this point in our lives, I believed it. We wrote down our wishes and fantasized about where we would start our Air Force career. Our top choices were, of course, overseas assignments. After that came locations on the East or West coast. We are New Englanders after all and the ocean calls to us.

Imagine our surprise when assignments dropped and we were relocating to Omaha, Neb.! That’s nowhere near an ocean OR anywhere exotic.

Let’s call this Disappointment No. 1.

But as a good military spouse, I looked at it as a new adventure anyhow. Nevertheless, it was somewhere I’d never been.

We arrived at Offutt AFB in the middle of the summer and my husband began his life in the command post.

That job required shift work so our schedules very rarely meshed. Disappointment No. 2.

Our first Christmas had him working mids while I had the time off since I taught in public schools.

That would be Disappointment No. 3. I cried quite a few times that holiday season.

After a year, my spouse cross-trained into a new field and we were heading to Florida for training! Woohoo! I get my ocean!

But wait, Disappointment No. 4 is on the horizon.

We are at Tyndall AFB and located nearby is a papermill. So, every day the breeze would deliver that lovely smell. I tried to be positive since I got my coastal living but it was hard since I was pregnant and my senses were heightened.

I knew that after training, we would be heading to Oklahoma. Disappointment No. 5, but at least I was prepared.

Back in the early 1990s, there wasn’t much to brag about in Oklahoma City. But we bought our first house and found great friends. Life was good — for a while.

Around the three-year point into that assignment, our friends started getting new duty stations. My spouse and I began mapping out where we would like to go and how our lives would look at each new base. He would hear of new assignments and we would start dreaming.

“Saudi Arabia is available.  What do you think?”

“It’s not my first choice, but it could be fun.”

“They need someone in Hawaii.”

“Duh. You don’t need to ask, just put in for it.”

“How about Alaska?”

“It’s so cold there but I guess I could do two to three years. It would be different.”

You get the picture.

And here come Disappointments Nos. 6 to 25. 

Each time he would talk about a change of scenery and it didn’t happen, I was crushed. More disappointments came as our friends would go to new bases and we remained in Oklahoma.

After five and a half years, we moved to Georgia. I was beginning to think that I could surrender to the Air Force gods and go with the flow. But I would be sucked back in whenever my husband would pull out that carrot called the dream sheet and I would get my hopes up once again.

The final straw for me came when a higher-ranking officer told us that my husband was getting a remote so she could assign him to teach at Weapons School in Las Vegas.While I looked forward to Vegas, I dreaded the remote. It was that confirmation that we are pawns in the game of Air Force chess that I finally surrendered.

Afterward, I no longer took stock in the dream sheet or my spouse’s charts that plotted what would happen if we got assignment X or Y. I gave myself permission to ride the wave without stress. My spouse would try to drag me back in but I couldn’t do it. And let me tell you, I was much happier this way. I never say that I “gave up;” I say that I retained my sanity.

So now as a seasoned spouse, I try to pass my knowledge off to others.

We can’t control much but we can abandon the hold that “what if” has on our lives.

For some people, that concession may never come. But for others, the release of that one area of our lives can be so freeing that everything else seems easier. It is a sweet surrender.