I had just put my car in reverse when a license plate frame caught my attention. It was covered in the American flag and read “God Bless America.” The image forced my car back into park. I sat in the lot trying to understand the power those three words held over me.

I’ve always had a complicated relationship with God, but this felt different. This wasn’t about religion and my beliefs, or lack thereof; it felt more personal.

In that moment, thinking about the state of this country and the headlines in the news, I couldn’t fathom what would make anyone proud to be an American. Fear, frustration, and confusion bundled into one big ball of resentment and quickly enveloped my thoughts, because not only am I an American citizen, I’m also a military spouse.

While I tried to unravel why my relationship with the red, white, and blue felt so fragile, conditional, and tumultuous, the word “patriotism” crept in, coating every thought like an oil spill. Once, patriotism was a simple concept, but now it felt layered with uncertainty.

I had been talking with my husband, a second lieutenant in the Air Force, about the ICE shooting of Renée Good. What began as a conversation quickly turned into a debate. He asked me if I thought the ICE agent was wrong, and without hesitation, I said yes.

He looked at me and said, “I don’t.”

That stopped me cold.

He saw a lawful order being executed, a mission being carried out. He saw an agent trained to separate emotion from action, adhering to his training and authority. There is a clean, defined line between right and wrong inside that framework. Rule of law. Security first. Duty over emotion. Mission clarity over moral ambiguity.

There were no questions about the mission because my husband was taught not to ask why, but when and where. He was trained to follow orders and fight the common enemy.

I saw something different: a human life cut short, a community afraid, and questions unanswered.

Thirteen years of enlisted service has shaped my husband. The framework drilled into his mind is vastly different from my own.

My frame of reference, perhaps as a mother, is compassion before compliance, connection before correction, context before command. The moral gray space we, as humans, reside in. A lived-in humanity over procedural order.

While my husband is defending the country that made him who he is today, I’m at home raising the three tiny humans we created, trying to build empathy with a whole lot of patience, kindness, and explanations as to why we can’t hit someone who just hit us.

This was the first time my husband and I didn’t agree on current events. It felt heavy.

For half of my husband’s career, we were posted in Japan and England.

He deployed many times from each location, from temporary assignments to month-long stints. He dutifully followed every order on behalf of the U.S. government, and while I was aware of the wars and civic unrest unfolding in neighboring countries, it never truly felt like those issues belonged to us.

Life overseas had its own rhythm, and the daily mundane kept me busy. I was raising babies, doing runs to school and gymnastics practice, building a village of friends and support, participating in squadron events, and clapping politely during the occasional change-of-command ceremony.

Deployments obviously affected our home life, but broader geopolitical issues were happening far beyond the base gates.

I was blissfully ignorant and so far removed from my own country that the political and moral stakes felt abstract.

Now that we’re back in America, what was once background noise lives in my own backyard. It shows up in headlines, daily conversations, and social media: troops at the border, debates about the military’s role in domestic crises, and political leaders urging service members to do the “right” thing while the country argues about what we stand for.

It lands differently when my husband’s flight suit hangs in our closet and his boots sit by the door. Decisions made far away in government offices suddenly feel closer—and harder to ignore.

The weight of it all feels personal, and I sit wedged uncomfortably between trust and doubt.

For me, what used to be a shared moral compass, the kind that only needed tragedy to point us in the same direction, now feels broken, the needle left spinning. The country seems lost, like we’ve forgotten that we grew up on the same street in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

Yet, as a military spouse, I have no choice but to trust my country’s government to take care of my family. Even when my husband is in training, safe from current deployments and orders to fight and defend, the weight of what will inevitably come next lingers.

Once training wraps up, he will deploy again. It is hard to unquestioningly trust the government’s intention when fear and doubt are already in the room.

I am supposed to be proud: proud to be an American, proud to be a military spouse. But every time I think about what our future might demand—time spent apart, moves, deployments, missed holidays and birthdays, and helping my kids make sense of it all—uncertainty overshadows pride.

As military spouses, we are painstakingly aware of what we signed up for. However, I don’t feel like we signed up for this. I don’t understand what he’s sacrificing for anymore.

This uncertainty exists because my husband has sworn an oath to serve this country, and that oath binds our family to whatever direction the military chooses. He isn’t making policy, but he is part of the institution that carries it out.

When your family is tied to that oath, decisions become personal. The stakes aren’t theoretical; they live in our home, in our future, and in the go bag waiting by the door.

And yet despite the uncertainty, despite the questions, I kept trying to understand, trying to feel that pride again.

Then I watched the Super Bowl.

When the cameras cut to soldiers standing at attention in the Middle East, the flyover thundering overhead, and the national anthem sung, something in me swelled. The sight of those incredible military members, and knowing my husband stands among them, filled me with pride so strong that it caught me off guard.

Pride. Real, wholesome pride. Proud of him. Proud to play my part, in my own little way, as a military spouse.

And that’s what makes this relationship with the United States so intricate and complicated. That pride was real, but it came tangled with questions I still carry about what it truly means to love and serve this country.

That feeling I got watching the segment during the Super Bowl was how I used to think about patriotism: flag-waving, fireworks, goosebumps from a C-130J flyover. The swell that follows 5 p.m. taps, the complete silence and stillness that washes over bases around the world.

But maybe patriotism was never meant to live in ceremonies alone.

Those three words on the truck in the parking lot, “God Bless America,” no longer fill me with the same resentment I had in that first moment. I feel something more complex.

I don’t know how to bless a country I’m still trying to understand. I only know I love the man who serves it. Maybe patriotism isn’t blind pride or unwavering certainty. Maybe it’s staying with it, wrestling with it. Choosing commitment even when clarity feels out of reach.

Commitment to the man who serves. Commitment to the children we are raising. And commitment to keep trying to understand the country that holds us all.

This War Horse Reflection was edited by Kim Vo, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mollie Turnbull. Kim Vo wrote the headlines.