My husband has three monitors.
I'm not sure when that happened exactly — somewhere between the therapy practice taking off and the man deciding that one screen was for amateurs — but it's become a kind of shorthand for our whole dynamic. He's over there managing sessions, notes, scheduling, whatever therapists do on three screens. I'm over here managing everything else.
That's not a complaint. It's just the layout.
I'm Holly. I'm not the therapist. I'm the military spouse who moved houses more times than I care to count, raised kids through deployments, kept things running when running things wasn't optional, and somewhere in the middle of all of that, ended up married to a man who now professionally helps other people do the hard stuff we were just figuring out in real time.
We have four kids — three girls (two teenagers and one who hasn't gotten the memo that she isn't one yet) and a nine-year-old boy who is somehow thriving in a house that is, at any given moment, at least 40% chaos. Two dogs. One therapy practice. Twenty-two years of marriage that have been, depending on the season, beautiful and hard and funny and exhausting and worth every single bit of it.
I grew up religious. Then I didn't. He didn't, then did, then didn't again. We've been messy in that way too.
This blog lives on a therapy website, which means somewhere nearby there is clinical language and actual expertise and a person with a graduate degree. That's his lane.
This is mine.
I'm not here to tell you what healthy looks like. I'm here because I think a lot of people are carrying more than they let on, living lives that don't fit the clean version of the advice they keep getting handed, and occasionally just need someone to say yeah, same without a framework attached.
I write about marriage, parenting, military life, the weird specific thing it is to support someone who supports everyone else, and whatever else is sitting on the counter that week demanding to be dealt with.
It's honest. It's grounded. It's sometimes funny and sometimes a little too real.
Welcome to life behind the screens.
—
Holly
