By Valen Welch, Executive Assistant, The COMMIT Foundation
Eighty-four boxes.
Eighty-four boxes filled with photos, room décor, keepsakes, and the occasional random fork or pillow that somehow always finds its way into the wrong box.
The house echoes with the memories of the last three years: uncertainty, laughter, growth, and the beautiful chaos of family life.
The only things left unwrapped are our luggage and three small stuffed animals. In our family, we call them comfort toys, one for each of our three little girls.
For years, PCS felt like just another duty station. Another move. Another address. Another chapter.
But then we had kids.
And somehow, I had misunderstood the depth of what a PCS, and transition, could mean for them.
As a military spouse and mom, I have always felt a deep sense of grief when it came time to move our children. Every goodbye felt like cutting the roots they had worked so hard to grow in
each place we called home.
Whenever I expressed that discomfort, I was often met with the same phrase:
“Kids are resilient.”
It was meant to comfort me, and for a while, I tried to let it. I repeated it to myself every time we packed up our lives and prepared for whatever came next.
But the comfort never really came.
Honestly, I hated that statement.
Because yes, my children seemed okay. They accepted their reality through tears, goodbyes, and brave little smiles. They even managed to look ahead with excitement. But something about reducing their experiences to “resilience” never sat right with me.
It felt too simple.
It felt as though we were saying children could be placed into any environment, endure any disruption, and simply adjust because they were young. As though their hearts did not need to be considered because they were flexible enough to mold themselves around whatever decisions were made for them.
But over time, I began to understand the phrase differently.
“Kids are resilient” was never meant to justify making reckless or painful decisions without considering how those choices would affect them. It was never supposed to imply that military
children do not grieve, struggle, or feel afraid.
It speaks of the extraordinary set of skills they develop because they are military children, skills whose fruit I did not fully recognize until now.
Move after move. Goodbye after goodbye. Heartbreak after heartbreak.
I have watched my children learn how to have meaningful conversations with people they have only just met.
I have watched them recognize when another child feels lonely or left out and instinctively make room for them.
They have developed a deep empathy for others walking through uncertainty because they understand what it feels like to be the new child, the child saying goodbye, or the child searching for a place to belong.
They are not afraid of people who look different from them, come from different cultures, or hold different beliefs. That is a skill I did not fully develop until my college years, yet my children began learning it before they were ten.
I have watched them think critically about the world around them. They do not merely enjoy life; they embrace it. They know how to enter a new place, find beauty within it, and make it their own.
But I have also watched them endure incredibly difficult goodbyes.
They have said goodbye to family members they may only see once a year because of distance. They have left friends they will most likely never see or speak to again. They have mourned what they lost and felt anxious each time life required them to step outside their comfort zones.
These skills did not form without pain.
Their resilience was not simply handed to them because they were military children. It was built through every unfamiliar classroom, every new neighborhood, every friendship formed, and every goodbye whispered through tears.
That is what I misunderstood.
Resilience does not mean the pain never comes. It does not mean anxiety will not appear or that every transition will be easy.
It means they have developed the ability to draw upon what life has taught them. They know how to adapt, pivot, connect, and keep moving forward, even when moving forward is hard.
And now, our family is entering a different kind of transition.
This time, we are not simply moving from one duty station to another. My husband is beginning his transition out of military service, and all five of us are walking through it beside him.
There is uncertainty in this transition, too. There are questions about identity, purpose, belonging, and what life will look like when the military is no longer the framework surrounding our family.
As I look at the eighty-four boxes and feel that familiar grief rising again, I think about our girls.
I think about every place they have called home, every person they have loved, and every difficult moment they have already overcome.
Then I gently remind myself:
Kids are resilient.
Not because change does not hurt them.
Not because they do not grieve what they leave behind.
But because, over the years, they have learned that home is not limited to one address. They have learned how to love people deeply, experience loss honestly, and still open their hearts to whatever comes next.
And as our family steps into this new season of transition, perhaps their resilience is not only something I need to recognize.
Perhaps it is something I can learn from, too.
