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 there was no ambiguity, no room for him to misinterpret or minimize what had happened. The younger generation in our family doesn’t know the full story.
They know there was an incident at a barbecue years ago—something about sparring that went wrong—but the details have faded into family lore.
That’s fine with me. I’m not interested in relitigating it or explaining myself to people who weren’t there. Tyler and I have moved on.
And the people who matter—the ones who were actually there and saw what happened—understand. Some of them understood immediately.
Some took years. A few probably still think I overreacted.
I’ve made peace with that.
You can’t control how people interpret your actions, especially when those actions challenge their assumptions about who you’re supposed to be. I’ve trained hundreds of Airmen over the years—young men and women who come into the Air Force with all kinds of backgrounds, all kinds of motivations. Some are there for college money.
Some are there because they didn’t know what else to do.
Some are there because they genuinely want to serve. I try to teach them the same things Colonel Reeves taught me.
Discipline isn’t about being rigid. It’s about being consistent.
Leadership isn’t about being the toughest person in the room.
It’s about being the most reliable. Respect isn’t something you demand. It’s something you earn through your actions, day after day, in ways that no one might notice until it matters.
I tell them about mistakes I’ve made, decisions I regret, moments where I let my ego get in the way of doing the right thing.
I don’t tell them about Tyler. That story is too personal, too specific.
But the lessons from it show up in everything I teach. Marcus asked me last month what the hardest thing I’ve ever done was.
We were driving home from his soccer practice, stuck in traffic, and he was in one of those moods where he asks big questions out of nowhere.
I thought about it for a while. Deployments were hard. Losing friends in training accidents was hard.
The divorce was hard.
But the hardest thing? “Setting a boundary with someone I loved,” I said.
He looked at me, confused. “What’s a boundary?”
I tried to explain it in terms a seven-year-old would understand.
“It’s when you tell someone what’s okay and what’s not okay,” I said.
“And you stick to it, even when it’s uncomfortable.”
He thought about that. “Like when I tell Jack he can’t borrow my toys without asking?”
I smiled. “Exactly like that.”
He nodded, satisfied, and went back to looking out the window.
I wondered if he’d remember that conversation when he was older, if it would mean something to him then that it couldn’t mean now.
Tyler’s daughter, Emma, is all energy and curiosity and fearlessness. She reminds me of Tyler at that age—always moving, always testing limits.
I wonder what kind of person she’ll become. Whether she’ll inherit her father’s competitiveness or her mother’s patience or some combination of both.
Whether she’ll join the military like her dad and her aunt, or reject it entirely and choose something completely different.
I hope, whatever she chooses, that Tyler and his wife raise her with the tools to handle failure, to admit when she’s wrong, to ask for help when she needs it. Those are the things Tyler didn’t have at nineteen. Those are the things that made everything so much harder than it needed to be.
I’ve been thinking about retirement lately.
Not immediately. I’ve got at least six more years before I hit twenty, and I want to see if the O-6 promotion comes through.
But eventually—what comes after? I’ve spent my entire adult life in the Air Force.
It’s given me structure, purpose, identity.
It’s also taken a lot—time with family, stability in relationships, the ability to put down roots anywhere. I don’t regret it. I chose this life knowing what it would cost.
But I’m starting to think about what the next chapter looks like.
Maybe teaching at a military academy. Maybe consulting for defense contractors.
Maybe something completely unrelated to the military—something I haven’t even considered yet. The future feels open in a way it hasn’t in years.
Tyler and I had a conversation last Christmas that stayed with me.
We were outside, away from the noise of the house, standing in Uncle James’s backyard while snow fell quietly around us. Emma was inside with Aunt Marissa. Marcus was playing video games with Tyler’s younger stepbrother, and we’d both needed a break from the chaos.
“You ever regret how things went down?” Tyler asked, his breath visible in the cold air.
I knew what he meant. “No,” I said.
“Do you?”
He thought about it. “I regret how I acted.
I don’t regret what happened after.
