The Next Posting…

The night before:

You know that feeling when you’re waiting for a virtual stranger to tell you where you and your family are going to be living for the next few years?  If the answer is yes, I’m going to guess you’re part of a military family!

So, tomorrow Hubby has a phonecall scheduled with his career manager and he should find out some information about where the next posting will be.  It won’t (hopefully) be for a while because we are not due to leave here for another 11 months but, as it stands, we don’t have any idea where we are going to be going. Now, I know there will be people reading this who are shouting ’11months? I was lucky if we got a month’s notice that we were moving!’ and that sucks, it really does.  It doesn’t take away from the fact that the waiting and the not knowing is driving me slightly demented…

We have really loved living in the USA and I will be incredibly sad to leave when the time comes but I also really want to know what is coming next. I am a planner by nature and I am itching to get a spreadsheet started to begin organising our todo list for the move! Don’t worry, I am fully aware of how sad that is.  I don’t care.  I love a spreadsheet. 

When we moved here we had over a year’s notice so had plenty of time to plan.  It might have been slightly easier if Hubby hadn’t been on an op tour in Dubai while we were in Scotland.  That did make the planning more tricky that’s for sure.  At least this time we should be living under the same roof when we organise the move.

There is obviously a good chance that we will be moving back across the Atlantic to the UK and that does take a good bit of advance planning.  The admin…oh the admin! This time around we will have the added complication of finding schools for the kids because they will both be of school age when we go back.  That is also connected to finding the right place to live.  Unless we are posted back to Scotland (pretty unlikely we think), we will probably be living in Married Quarters so will be limited in how much choice we have. 

Now, there’s another thing – Married Quarters worry me a bit!  We’ve never lived in one but all I see on social media fills me with dread if I’m honest… anyway, let’s cross that magnolia bridge when we come to it!

In the Royal Navy, Hubby is asked to submit some preferences for locations/jobs that he would be interested in.  That all sounds rosy but, quite rightly, what it actually comes down to is where he is needed.  If that aligns with his/our preferences that is all well and good but that is mostly down to good old-fashioned luck.  We might end up with another dream posting, like coming here, or we might end up with something massively inconvenient that we have to work with.

So for now, I’m just waiting and stressing about what tomorrow will bring.  There are just so many possibilities that it is overwhelming to think about where we might be this time next year. 

My Little Troopers

I also wonder how the kids will deal with the news about where we go next.  As they get older, they have both started to make their own friends and are both very settled in their school/preschools.  They both know that we are only here for one more year but it is very hard to know how to answer when they ask where we are going next.  Hopefully we will have some answers tomorrow and then we can work out how to sell it to the kids…

The Next Day:

Well. That was an anti-climax.  I really should have known better than to expect definite answers. 

So basically, we still don’t know very much.  There are too many factors at this stage so it is virtually impossible to say with any certainty where we are going.  At the moment, it seems to be most likely that we will be in the South of England but that’s really as much as we know.  We may (or may not!) know more detail by the end of this year but it could also be as late as March/April before we really know for sure.

I totally understand the reasons why we can’t get answers right now but to say that I am frustrated would be a massive understatement.  It is a major thing to move overseas – we know, we’ve done it once already – and I wanted to start preparing myself mentally for the move and setting up in a new location.

Och aye the coo

Then there’s the kids.  They sometimes talk about ‘when we move back to Scotland’ and although we usually say that we don’t know where we are moving to and it might not be Scotland, it is hard to explain to a child why we don’t know where we will be living next year.  I had hoped that, if we knew where we would be based, we could start to sell it to the kids.  We could tell them about the fun things there are to do and how easily they could visit family again, etc.  Instead, we are still in limbo for a bit longer.

As with most things in military life, we don’t have much choice but to suck it up and get on with it until we know more, so I guess that’s what we’ll do.  I had thought about whether to share this blog once I realised there were no real answers.  If you think it was frustrating reading about it without any sort of closure, you should take a walk in my shoes…

~

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