Mrs. Colonel

Today, a young Marine corporal showed me more kindness than the man I was married to for thirty years.

I called Parris Island’s Protocol Office after an unpleasant text exchange with my ex-husband over seating arrangements, specifically how I would be identified at our daughter’s Marine Corps boot camp graduation. He was angry that my military dependent ID still reflected his rank and wanted to make sure I did not “steal his valor.”

Embarrassed, I explained to the corporal that my ex-husband was the Colonel and wanted to be sure the service and rank were clearly understood to be his. I did not want to appear to be claiming something that did not belong to me.

The corporal listened patiently before simply saying:

“If you were married long enough to receive lifetime privileges, then you earned the right to sit there, too.”

Earned.

Not claimed.
Not stolen.
Not fabricated.

Earned.

And I unexpectedly found myself emotional over a word I had not realized I needed to hear.

Because someone who did not know me had recognized my sacrifice, my worth, more gently and instinctively than the man who once promised to love me for the rest of my life.

I was a military wife for thirty years.

I raised children through deployments and endless separations that left me holding the quiet weight of everything...teething, tantrums, teen angst, broken water heaters, broken hearts, nights alone in ERs, homework, soccer practices, and a dog with a penchant for eating carpet. Building a home, a family, a life.

And I did it willingly.

I loved him deeply. I believed in his service. I was proud of his valor long before he accused me of stealing it.

Somewhere beneath the ear-piercing reveilles and endless taps, a soft refrain echoed. A refrain that said I was in service too, but without a rank. I was giving, but I wasn’t earning.

Military culture has a way of celebrating visible sacrifice while quietly minimizing invisible duty. The medals are visible. The rank is visible. The uniforms are visible. They matter.

The women polishing the medals, ironing the uniforms, holding the scaffolding together rarely matter.

Or maybe it was just me. Maybe I am the only woman who did not matter.

We All Fall Down

My therapist recently told me I am experiencing “identity collapse.”

It is an extraordinarily accurate phrase.

I spent a lifetime as a military dependent, wife, mother, homemaker, cheerleader, cruise director, taker of the Family Christmas photos, emotional triage nurse, and keeper of the family narrative. I also had my writing career, independent travels, hobbies, friendships, and my own mind. I truly believed I successfully balanced dependency with autonomy.

But divorce has forced me to confront something deeply uncomfortable: perhaps I experienced our identity as shared while he experienced it as singular.

I thought he was the grand ship; I was the propeller, driving us forward. Now, I realize, in his mind, I was a barnacle. Something attached to his journey, a freeloader, rather than a synchronized force.

That realization has been crushing.

It is not really about military protocol or VIP seating. It is about what those things represented: how easily a shared life can be rewritten by the person who benefited from it most.

When he called my military privileges just a “perk,” it was not the possible loss of a name card that hurt. It was the weight of every sacrifice, every quiet night I held our life together. I did not fear losing the privileges themselves. I feared being erased from the story of us. Edited out. Dropped into the recycle bin.

The irony is that I never once claimed his rank. I would never do such a thing. I was enlisted myself. I understand exactly what service means. “Stolen valor” is not some abstract phrase to me; it is a moral violation.

There is a difference between earning rank and sharing sacrifice.

My ex-husband earned his rank through service, discipline, leadership, and risk. He wore the uniform. He put his life on the line for his country.

I shared the sacrifice by surrendering stability, autonomy, partnership, continuity, community, and often my own emotional needs to support the life his career demanded.

Both things can be true simultaneously.

And perhaps that is what hurt most of all: the realization that a young corporal instinctively understood this while the man I called home for thirty years did not.

Or perhaps could not.

What Was True

Our marriage was not always a battlefield.

For a long time, I believed we balanced each other. We shared similar values, laughed easily, and built a language of inside jokes over thirty years of marriage, including one where we promised not to “wait in the light” for the other if one of us died first and the surviving spouse remarried. Morbid? Maybe. But it made us laugh.

He had a rough bluntness; I brought the softness. When I got too deep into my feelings, he grounded me. Where I loved through big, dramatic declarations, he loved through acts of service.

He could be stiff, a little too at attention, while I brought the goofy, the playful, the lightness. But in those moments when the military rigidity dissolved and he would finally relax, laugh with me, and move in lockstep beside me instead of marching ahead, it felt like we had found our rhythm again.

In the beginning, he encouraged my writing and seemed to genuinely delight in the parts of me that were imaginative, emotional, and a little over the top. I was a French pastry; he was a Twinkie. No, seriously. After years of making elaborate birthday cakes for the family, one year he admitted what he really wanted was a giant Twinkie cake. So I made him a giant Twinkie.

He called me Leah Bonita and said my hair looked like rays of sunshine. I called him my Sky King and always told him, “Blue skies, happy landings, and pack a tight chute.”

That was the version of us I believed in. The version I began mourning long before the marriage officially ended.

I still admire his dedication to flying, his intellect, his commitment to service, and his endless desire to keep learning. I do not believe human beings become monsters simply because marriages fail.

But somewhere along the way, I stopped feeling like a partner and started feeling like support staff. To be commanded. Fall into line, snap to attention, salute the rank, hold it, drop it, about face, and march away, further from your needs, desires, and hopes.

He selected assignments that benefited his career while disregarding the serious toll they took on our family. Over time, he withdrew emotionally and physically into exhaustion, work, and isolation. Eventually, I withdrew, too, in my own ways. In the end, we both contributed to the erosion of the marriage.

The disintegration of a marriage is a bit like war. Eventually, it no longer matters who fired the first shot if neither side is willing to enter into peace talks.

Still, I held onto hope that friendship might survive the divorce.

Because after our divorce, when we looked into each other’s eyes, cried, and promised we would always be family, I meant it. I still do. But what do you do when you discover the promise was sacred to you and symbolic to him? What do you do with a gift someone never truly opened?

I think part of grief is standing there too long with the offering still in your hands, believing that if you wait long enough, the other person will finally recognize its value. But some people cannot receive certain kinds of love. Not because the love lacked worth, but because accepting it would require vulnerability and tenderness, things they may spend their lives avoiding.

There is a particular heartbreak in realizing you were mourning a shared covenant while the other person had already reduced it to a sentimental moment that passed. But sincerity is not foolishness. The love was real. The loyalty was real. The tragedy is simply that it was not held with the same reverence on the other side.

Maybe healing is not waiting forever beside the unopened gift. Maybe it is finally setting it down gently and saying: I offered something beautiful. He simply did not know how to hold it.

Calling Cadence for the Paralyzed

And now, years later, our daughter’s Marine Corps boot camp graduation has somehow forced us back into the emotional terrain of the marriage.

It feels strangely fated, almost mythic in its repetition.

He still seems determined to devalue and dismiss me, and I still find myself slipping back into the old posture: standing beneath the pedestal of his heroic image, looking upward with tears in my eyes, wishing he had loved me with even a fraction of the devotion I carried for him.

That may be the deepest wound of all.

Not the divorce itself.

But finally understanding that the love story I believed we were living may not have existed.

And yet, despite everything, I do not regret loving deeply.

I do not regret building homes, nurturing children, creating stability, or carrying emotional weight.

What I mourn now is the version of myself that existed inside that life.

I was very good at being a wife.
Very good at being a mother.
Very good at nurturing people.

For decades, my love had somewhere to go.

And now, sometimes, it feels as though I am standing in the middle of a quiet room, still holding an armful of care with nowhere to place it.

That is a different kind of grief.

Perhaps healing now means reconstructing an identity outside the shadow of someone else’s service and learning that I was never merely adjacent to the story.  I was integral to it.

I was living it too—just not as the pilot, not as the Colonel, not as the decorated officer, but as the woman holding together the invisible architecture beneath the uniform. 

And maybe, after all these years, that quiet strength deserves to be saluted.

Postscript: This story is not about rank or protocol; it’s about the young woman who stood at the threshold of her own future—Private First Class Mikayla Faith Brown.  I am so proud of you, my girl.

*This is my personal reflection and experience. Names and some details have been used with care, but this represents my truth as I remember and feel it.