This is Chapter 2 in the Transition Memoir. Catch up here.
If your mom asks you in the hospital room after delivering birth how you are feeling and you refer back to the fact you survived your deployment to Afghanistan and being a mom shouldn’t be a problem, your identity might be wrapped up in your military service. I was weeks away from leaving the military, decision made, path laid, but I was still clinging to my identity of military service.
I was just a few months out from leaving the military when my first son was born. I left the military before he was four months old. I expected the transition to being a mom to be easy. I expected leaving the military for this new role to be easy.
I was wrong on both counts.
Not only did becoming a mom turn out to be harder than I ever expected, leaving the military caused me to lose my identity and question who I was and what was next. The monumental change left me spiraling and questioning if I had made the right choice. It also left me wondering if it was my fault for feeling the way I did.
Maybe it was because I didn’t transition out and get a job like so many of my peers did.
Maybe I wasn’t cut out to be a mom and that is why it was so hard.
The doubt. The fear. The constant feeling I was failing in everything and not measuring to an unattainable standard almost crushed me.
I ended up lost, alone and confused. How did I get here, I wondered? But hindsight is always 20/20. When I reflect on my transition, it is easy to see cracks forming long before I ever said goodbye to military service and hello to my new role as a mom.
To start, I was proud of my military service, to the point I had blinders on regularly. Military service and the future was my primary focus and then it wasn’t. I vividly remember standing at my college graduation surrounded by friends and family celebrating the accomplishment of graduating college. Instead of being proud of what I had accomplished after five years of hard work to earn my degree, I was focused on what came next: Commissioning as a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force, something that would be happening at the end of the week. I was so focused on the next thing I missed out on the joys of the present.
I also found that when people learned about my military experience they were both surprised and awed. Over the years, as I added accolades, I would slowly draw out the story of what it was like to be an officer in the U.S. Air Force, sharing about my work as a Civil Engineer and my deployment to Afghanistan. I loved the admiration that came from my service and I reveled in it.
Next, although I found the military challenging at times, the general work required to continue to gain rank and stand out came fairly easy to me. When I came to a challenge or new skill required I would work at it and then master it. There were a set of rules to follow and tasks to complete. I thought everything in life would be so easy.
Adding to that playbook, even though the military had a lot of unexpected twists and turns they were not things I had to dictate in my life. Move there, go on this deployment, work on this job. The military dictated my life in so many ways and while I thought I had the freedom to make choices almost every large choice I had to make in my life was made by the military, not me.
Then, I chose to become a mom and leave the military behind. I didn’t know that these choices would change everything about my life. I had no idea what I would lose when I stopped being Captain Amanda Huffman and became Amanda Huffman, wife and mom.
I lost my identity, my focus, my drive, my pride, my story, and I had no idea what was next. It felt as if everything I had done in my life no longer mattered and the road forward looked bleak and without opportunity.
I was doing something I had always wanted to do: be a mom. But I had no idea that it would require me to let go of something that had been ingrained into who I was as a person. I would be scrambling with what came next.