PCS Moves Are Not Vacations

It is no honeymoon!

By Sarah Smiley

I was lying on the living room floor when I saw it: a faint flash of green. It was subtle at first — a wily little fellow — so I had hardly noticed it lurking.

     Then I crawled closer, ducking my head beneath the coffee table, and my heart slammed against my back. There was no more denying it. There, in front of my eyes, it stared at me, heckling me, making a mockery of my life.

     So I had no other choice but to flip the coffee table on its back, grab a knife and start scraping the wood. I was on my knees frantically chipping away at the soft pine, as bits of balled, gummy paper flew into the air and landed around me like sawdust.

     I picked and scraped until all that was left was a rectangular spot of fresh yellow wood, garishly apparent amidst the table’s red paint, like a little window to its soul.

     Don’t get me wrong; I’m not this maniacal about every moving sticker — just the green ones. The green ones are from the year 2000, when I drove across country seven-months pregnant with my first child.

     Back then, my husband Dustin convinced me the four-day road trip would be a “vacation.” (Or did he say “second honeymoon”?)

     Oh, I know; I know. I can hear it already. You want to say, “Your husband didn’t plan it that way,” and “There was no other choice.” But I’ve heard it all before. In fact, “What else could I do?” was Dustin’s defense all the way from Death Valley to the panhandle of Florida.

     Our first stop that trip was in Gila Bend, Ariz., at a Space Lodge motel, which was (fittingly) decorated to look like a stay on the moon. So there I was, waddling to the motel room with my suitcase in tow, expecting a “second honeymoon,” or at least a “vacation,” and when I opened the door, our room was decorated with aliens and planets and what looked like moon rocks. 

     I went straight to the green and yellow bathroom and got sick.

     And I made a decision then to never believe a PCS will be a substitute for a “vacation” or “honeymoon.”

     For all the sacrifices we military families make every day, we at least deserve a vacation when we don’t have to say, “I wonder if the movers will break our china?” or “I’d like to go see the Grand Canyon, but if we want to make this move in 4 days ...”

Because only then can we look at all the stickers affixed to our furniture and see them for what they are: memories of a PCS move instead of a second honeymoon in a hotel that has green carpet.