“My husband is in the Marine Corps. We met in high school, and have been married 4 years. He joined the Marine Corps fresh out of high school. I have stayed in the states for most of his military career while he is overseas.
“I can definitely say that being a military wife is my career, because I have to hold down the family and all of the responsibilities when he is overseas. I take it as my job to support him and to keep my family going.
“How long he stays away from his family all depends on where he has been deployed to. He has been gone for up to a full year on deployment.
Anthony here will be 3 on March 19th. He has only seen his father about a year out the three years he has been alive.
“His last deployment was in Iraq, and we did not see him for seven months. It was very stressful for me when he was there because he was in such a dangerous area, and I didn’t have any contact with him at all. There were no phone calls, no letters, nothing, because we were not allowed to know where his actual location was. I just knew he was in Iraq, and that was about it.
“Seeing him for the first time when he gets back is wonderful, and yet kind of strange. When he comes back, he is not the same person he was when he left. It takes a lot of therapy for him to get back to normal in civilization and his life. We have gone through that multiple times with him now, but I do this for my love for him and my family, because him being out there is him taking care of us.
“I just want people to appreciate military families and respect them. It is hard. You deal with the battles of worrying about him and the anxiety, but you learn to deal with them. You never really fully cope, but you have to keep moving on. There definitely been times I have had meltdowns in public. My hope is that if maybe somebody is going through a hard time in public, don’t judge them, because you never really know what they are going through.”
~ Toms River
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