Famous Last Words

Welcome to Military Move Phase Five: At this point, ANYTHING can happen. Don’t jinx it.

"You did it!" your well-meaning civilian friends text as the moving truck pulls away from your old house.

Bless their hearts.

Because they think the hard part is over.

Veteran milspos know that watching the truck disappear is merely halftime. There will be no end-zone dancing until you are asleep in your own bed with functioning Wi-Fi buzzing through the air of your new house.

After the truck leaves your old house, you spend the next several days (or weeks) chasing your own belongings across the country, living out of suitcases in a local hotel or Temporary Lodging Facility, refreshing your AirTag location often enough that Apple starts wondering if you're okay.

"When will your stuff arrive?" people ask.

The paperwork answer is Tuesday.

The moving company’s answer is Tuesday-hopefully.

The wise military spouse’s answer is, "I'll believe Tuesday when my coffee table is physically inside my house.”

By your fifth PCS, "hopefully" no longer sounds optimistic. It sounds like a threat.

Military moves are like horror movies. The moment someone says, "Honestly, this has gone pretty smoothly," every seasoned military spouse starts yelling, "DON'T SAY THAT!" at the screen.

Because until the boxes are actually inside your house, flattened, unpacked, and the last mountain of packing paper has been hauled to the curb, literally anything can happen.

And I mean anything.

A family I met this week had what everyone dreams of: packed on Friday, delivering Monday just a few states away.

Easy. Door-to-door. Perfect.

The driver even told them, "I'm just going to swing by my house for my birthday this weekend, then I'll see you Monday."

How nice.

How wholesome.

How catastrophically optimistic.

This lovely family drove to Colorado, signed for their new house, got the keys...and waited.

And waited.

The truck never came.

The driver never answered his phone.

Eventually they learned he'd apparently had such a spectacular birthday that somewhere between the cake and the ice cream he called his boss and quit his job, leaving the truck—and literally everything they owned—parked at his house.

You cannot make this stuff up.

Our own driver, James, was fantastic. We tracked him across several hundred miles, and on delivery day he pulled that eighteen-wheeler into our neighborhood like the absolute professional he is. "Wow," my husband said to me, "This move has gone so smoothly!”

Reader, those were foolish, foolish words to say out loud.

The problem wasn't James.

The problem was the four men who were supposed to help him unload.

Two showed up at the gate with no identification whatsoever and were turned away for obvious reasons - which continues to amaze military families everywhere because getting onto a military installation has required an ID since approximately the Civil War.

The other two decided to leave with the first two in a show of solidarity. 

So there stood James.

One man.

One dolly.

One truck containing craft supplies from every hobby I’ve had since 2004.

Because earlier in the day, we made the fatal mistake: we’d said those Famous Last Words.

Thinking we'd be efficient, earlier in the day my husband had sent me to Taco Bell to grab food for the unloading crew before the lunch rush at the PX food court.

Twenty-four bean-and-cheese burritos.

Twenty-four.

By noon there was still no crew, but there was a collection of cold burritos quietly hardening on my kitchen counter like some kind of edible monument to false hope.

Honestly, those burritos perfectly captured my emotional state.

James kept unloading by himself at what I can only describe as glacial speed. By two o'clock we'd called the emergency PCS hotline, left several messages no one returned, and started wondering whether James was simply going to sleep on our floor that night.

Then, around three o'clock, salvation arrived.

Two college football players who'd finished another job nearby walked through the door.

I don't know what those boys' mothers fed them growing up, but may God richly bless every casserole, protein shake, and Costco rotisserie chicken involved.

Apparently college football players can move an entire household in roughly the time it takes me to locate scissors.

We thanked them the best way we could - by making each of them eat approximately eleven bean burritos apiece.

While all this was happening, I was unstacking boxes and playing my favorite PCS game:

"What on earth were the packers thinking?”

Because this is when you discover how good your packers really were.

You'll unwrap one plastic fork nestled lovingly in seventeen layers of paper, swaddled like Baby Moses.

Then you'll open another box and discover your grandmother's crystal bowl sitting underneath an iron, fifteen college textbooks, and a nine-pound hand weight.

And there is always at least one box that makes you stop and say out loud,

"What...in the world?"

My personal favorite this move was opening one of our giant rolling duffel bags—the kind you use for ski trips and scuba gear—to discover a dresser mirror and a glass lamp simply tossed inside.

No paper.

No cardboard.

No explanation.

Just faith.

And apparently the patron saint of military moves because miraculously, neither one had broken.

As boxes keep rolling in, you recruit your children into the family business.

"Take this to your room."

"Open that box."

"Carry this somewhere Future Mom can deal with it."

At this point every family member with functioning hands gets issued a box cutter, because OSHA has no jurisdiction over military move day. Frankly, neither does common sense.

Eventually, some time after dinner, the truck is empty and pulls away, headed on to the next job.

Your back hurts so badly that if you drop something…congratulations. It lives there now.

Packing tape is stuck to your sock and the floor is filthy.

Everything you own is technically inside your house, yet somehow you still can't find the one thing you desperately need.

For many families it's the infamous Parts Box.

Lose that and congratulations—you are screwed (pun intended). You now own six beautiful pieces of furniture that you will never be able to reassemble.

No bed bolts.

No shelf brackets.

No TV remotes.

Just mattresses on the floor and your own anxious thoughts for entertainment.

For me this time, it was my bag of extension cords, needed for plugging in everything from my TV to the cat litter robot (which remains one of the best purchases I've ever made).

I searched for three hours before discovering them inside a box labeled "Closet" that contained what can only be described as a Golden Corral buffet sampler of every downstairs room of our previous home.

A flashlight.

Bathroom scrub brush.

A cookbook.

Cat food.

Random picture frame.

Half a package of birthday candles…and my bag of assorted extension cords.

My treasure hunt complete, I could finally plug in the TV and hook up my computer. Of course, none of this matters if your internet doesn't work.

Ours was supposed to transfer as easily as unplugging the modem from one house and plugging it into a new one.

That's adorable.

Customer service representatives make moving sound astonishingly simple for people who've clearly never moved.  An hour-long text chat with an agent named Phil eventually got us online, and I'm not saying my mental health is directly tied to the strength of my Wi-Fi, but the evidence continues to mount.

By bedtime, your body is completely finished.

Your brain, unfortunately, is just getting started.

It's rearranging furniture.

It’s planning tomorrow's unpacking strategy.

It’s wondering why the school registrar hasn't called back.

It’s trying to remember where you put the coffee filters.

It’s making broad generalizations about your new neighbors based entirely on the type of car in their driveway and the number of toys scattered on their front lawn.

You start figuring out which Walmart is closest because every you know you’ll end up there multiple times a day for the next several weeks.

You miss the people you just left.

You wonder who your people will be here.

Your household goods may have arrived, but your soul is still in limbo, somewhere between your old address and your new one.

Starting over is always both adventure and loss.

It's exciting and exhausting, hopeful and heartbreaking.

Over the course of the next few weeks, you'll laugh. You’ll groan.

You'll probably cry in the shower at least once.

You'll slowly build another life, another community, another version of home.

And just about the time you've finally organized the garage so you can actually pull your car all the way in…

...it'll probably be time to move again.