I hated the politics, but I learned how decisions get made at the highest levels.
I deployed twice more—once to the Middle East and once to the Pacific theater—both times in advisory roles that required more diplomacy than combat readiness. I’ve briefed generals, testified before congressional subcommittees, and represented the Air Force at joint-service conferences. None of it was glamorous.
Most of it was exhausting.
But all of it mattered. I’m being considered for full colonel now—O-6—and if that promotion comes through, I’ll be one step away from the senior leadership I never imagined reaching when I was a second lieutenant fresh out of ROTC.
Tyler is thirty-one now. He’s a staff sergeant in the Marines, E-6, which means he’s climbed steadily through the enlisted ranks.
He’s married, has a two-year-old daughter named Emma, and from what I can tell through our occasional conversations and the photos Aunt Marissa shares, he’s built a good life.
He’s stationed at Camp Pendleton now, working as an instructor for new Marines going through combat training. He tells me he likes the teaching aspect—that it feels meaningful in ways his earlier assignments didn’t. He’s grown into someone I respect, not just tolerate.
The arrogance that defined him at nineteen is gone, replaced by something quieter and more solid.
He’s learned what I knew at twenty-three: that real strength doesn’t announce itself. It just shows up when it’s needed.
We see each other maybe twice a year now—family gatherings mostly. Thanksgiving at Uncle James’s house.
Christmas at Aunt Marissa’s.
The interactions are comfortable, easy in a way they weren’t for a long time after everything that happened. We talk about our kids. I have a seven-year-old son named Marcus from a marriage that ended three years ago.
And we talk about working in the broad, vague way that military people do when they can’t discuss specifics.
We laugh about things our kids do, compare notes on how exhausting parenthood is, and avoid the past unless it comes up naturally. And when it does come up, it’s not with tension or resentment.
It’s just history—something that happened, something we both learned from, something that shaped who we became. Last Thanksgiving, Tyler and I ended up in the kitchen together, away from the noise of the living room where kids were running around and adults were arguing about football.
He was washing dishes and I was drying them, an easy rhythm we’d fallen into without discussing it.
“You know,” he said, not looking at me, his hands submerged in soapy water. “I think about that day a lot.”
I didn’t have to ask which day. “Yeah,” I said, drying a plate and setting it on the counter.
He nodded.
“I was such an idiot.”
“I didn’t disagree. “You were nineteen,” I said.
“Nineteen-year-olds are idiots.”
He laughed—a short, self-deprecating sound. “I was worse than most,” he said.
He pulled a pot out of the water and scrubbed it harder than necessary.
“I wanted to be you. That’s what it was. I wanted the respect you had, the authority, the way people listened when you talked.
And I didn’t know how to earn it, so I tried to tear you down instead.”
I set the towel down and looked at him.
“You could have just asked me how I got there,” I said. He glanced at me, then back at the pot.
“I know. But that would have required me admitting I didn’t already know everything.”
He rinsed the pot and handed it to me.
“I tell my Marines now—the young ones who come in thinking they’re invincible—that confidence without competence is just arrogance.
And that arrogance will get you hurt. Or worse, get someone else hurt.”
I dried the pot slowly, considering his words. “That’s a good lesson,” I said.
“I learned it from you. The hard way.”
We finished the dishes in silence, and when we walked back into the living room, something felt settled between us.
Not resolved, because it had been resolved years ago. Just settled, like we’d both finally let go of the last bit of weight we’d been carrying.
My son Marcus asks about Uncle Tyler sometimes.
He’s at the age where he’s fascinated by the military, by the idea of being tough and brave and strong. He sees Tyler’s uniform when he visits and asks if Uncle Tyler has ever been in a fight. I tell him that being in the military isn’t about fighting.
It’s about discipline, service, and doing your job even when it’s hard.
Marcus doesn’t quite understand that yet. But he will.
Tyler is good with him—patient in a way I wouldn’t have expected from the nineteen-year-old version of him. He lets Marcus try on his cover, shows him how to stand at attention, explains the different ribbons on his dress uniform.
And when Marcus asks if Uncle Tyler could beat me in a fight, Tyler laughs and says, “Your mom would have me on the ground before I knew what hit me.”
Marcus thinks that’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard.
The divorce from Marcus’s father was hard, but necessary. David was a good man, a civilian contractor I met during my time at the Pentagon. But we wanted different things.
He wanted stability, routine, a partner who was home for dinner every night.
I wanted a career that mattered, deployments that challenged me, a life that didn’t fit into a predictable pattern. We tried for three years to make it work.
Went to counseling. Had long conversations about compromise and sacrifice.
But in the end, we both realized we were compromising too much of who we were.
The divorce was amicable. We co-parent well. Marcus spends half the week with me and half with David, and we make it work because we both love our son more than we resent each other.
It’s not the life I imagined when I was younger.
But it’s a good life—honest, real, built on choices I made consciously rather than defaulting to what I thought I was supposed to want. Aunt Marissa is sixty now, still the family’s emotional center.
She retired from teaching two years ago and spends most of her time with Tyler’s daughter, Emma, whom she adores. She’s softer now than she was twelve years ago—less anxious, more accepting of the way things turned out.
She told me once, about a year after Tyler and I started rebuilding our relationship, that she’d been wrong to ask me to let things go.
“You knew what he needed,” she said. “I was just trying to protect him from being hurt. But you were protecting him from something worse—from never growing up.”
It took courage for her to say it—to admit she’d misread the situation.
Uncle James is sixty-two, semi-retired from his contracting business, still the family patriarch in all the ways that matter. He hosts the gatherings, mediates the disputes, and keeps everyone connected.
He’s proud of both Tyler and me in different ways. He tells people his niece is a lieutenant colonel and his nephew is a staff sergeant.
And you can hear the pride in his voice when he says it.
Lydia is a lieutenant colonel now, too, stationed in Colorado Springs, working at NORTHCOM. We don’t see each other as often as we used to, but we talk every few weeks—long phone calls where we catch up on work and life and everything in between. She got married four years ago to another officer, a woman named Rachel, who works in intelligence.
They’re happy, stable, building the kind of partnership I tried to build with David but couldn’t quite manage.
I’m happy for her. She deserves it.
She’s still one of the smartest, most capable officers I know. And I’ve told her more than once that she’s going to make general before she retires.
She laughs when I say it, but I mean it.
She has the vision, the leadership skills, and the political savvy that senior leadership requires. I have some of those things, but not all of them. I’m better in operational roles, in the field, leading people directly rather than managing from a distance.
I think about the barbecue sometimes.
Not often, but when I do, it’s with a strange mix of emotions. Regret that it happened the way it did.
Gratitude for what came after. The incident itself was brief—maybe thirty seconds from Tyler lunging to him tapping out.
But the aftermath stretched for years—the silence, the boundaries, the slow, painful work of rebuilding.
If I could go back, I don’t know what I’d change. Maybe I would have walked away instead of engaging. Maybe I would have pulled Tyler aside before things escalated and had a hard conversation in private.
But maybe not.
Maybe it needed to happen exactly the way it did. Maybe Tyler needed to be humbled publicly because private conversations hadn’t worked.
Maybe I needed to draw that line so clearly that
