Today I want to share updates with you on becoming a veteran family. Retirement was a date, but the rest is taking longer. The roof is new. The walls are still waiting on paint. This summer season was interesting. Yes, my husband is retired from the Navy, and we are a veteran family now. The military is finished with my husband, but our household is not finished adjusting.

In March, I wrote Florida, A State To Call Home? after we heard from the property manager about our Florida house. We are working on this one, painting, getting the roof replaced, and what a forever home might mean after more than two decades of going where the Navy sent us.

I used to think the hard part would be the last 90 days in uniform. Those days came and went. What followed was quieter and less ceremonial: vision and dental coverage finally coming through, still waiting to be added as a dependent in the VA system, Nathan in a job search, and a business that does not pause because the household is mid-project. None of that is a crisis. It is just the part nobody puts on the retirement flyer or is discussed in the Transition Assistance Program classes.

Military life trains you to pack, report, and start over on a timeline someone else wrote. This season asks you to stay long enough to finish the paint and still not know exactly where you are staying. That work looks like paperwork. It looks like waiting. It looks like walking through houses and trying to imagine a life that is not temporary.

I am grateful for the coverage we did get. I am impatient about the VA dependent status that has not come through yet. I am proud of Nathan and I know a job search was a part of the adjustment. It is part of how this household finds its next chapter. I am also still running a business inside all of it.

Earlier this month I wrote about building something while life already has other people’s schedules in it. That was not theory. This week the schedule includes paint samples, benefit portals, and conversations about where we want to live when we are choosing.

If you have not been through this, the last day can look complete. If you have, you know the last day is the easy thing to mark. The work in the months after, when the systems around the family are still catching up and the people in it are trying to build a living anyway.

I am not writing this as a warning, and I am not writing it as a pitch. I am writing it because this is the season or chapter we are actually in. The roof is done. The walls are not. The benefits are partly here. The job search is open. Home is a question we are allowed to ask now, which is new, and also a lot.

If you are in some version of the same in-between, waiting on a system, still standing in a room that is not finished, building a living while the household is mid-shift, I would like to hear what part of your in-between is still in progress.

Originally published on LinkedIn on September 30, 2026. [Read it here]