I'll try to keep my rant shortish.

I can speak from serving in the military and as a military spouse, and can without any hesitation, state that being a military spouse is more challenging than being an active-duty military member in the long-run. I came from a fatherless, disadvantaged household, dropped out of high school, and the military provided opportunities I would not have had access to otherwise.

While in the military, I met my civilian wife, who later on joined the military herself and I exited service to finish university with the intent to apply to medical school. This seemed reasonable to a young idealist at the time. Everything was lining up, then she was stationed in a remote area with a less than stellar university. The university I transferred to not only did not have chemical engineering but did not accept around 2 years' worth of mathematics and science courses; so, I was forced to change majors if I wanted to graduate before she changed stations. I didn't care too much about the ramifications from a career perspective, because medical school was my end game.

A couple of semesters before graduating, she was promoted early, and we were scheduled to move. I would not graduate on time.

We moved to an even remoter area with a worse university. Basically, it was a community college with university credentials. Was forced to repeat some courses, again, and was forced to take this university's required general credits, again. It was at this juncture, I decided to give up on pursuing medical school. We could not afford the application process from where we were stationed to fly around to medical school interviews (each would be 7+ hour flights) and the situation difficulty was compounded with having a child. Even if I were accepted, I would not see my child or wife regularly for 4-5 years.

The whole fiasco drained and wasted what are largely considered to be prime productive years and left me feeling like I was caught in a hamster wheel with no meaningful career trajectories in sight--too much work and effort with for no foreseeable benefit. Plus, most spouse programs target women and preferential hiring practices are for low-impact positions without meaningful promotability. There is an additional degree of isolation for male spouses, when most of your potential spouse community are women.

I decided to quit traditional career aspirations and there was a fairly deep depression period, but I climbed out of it by focusing on ensuring that my child would have access to education and economic opportunities that I would've never dreamed about during my childhood. By the time I finally graduated with my bachelors, I had over 200 credits due to all courses I was required to take between the several universities I attended and had tutored people in math and chemistry as a university side job. When the local schools available to our child were poor, I used my overeducation and tutoring skills to home school. We pinched pennies to purchase fixer upper homes and I learned to remodel homes in between moves to earn an "income" that provided enough flexibility to wholly support our child's extracurricular activities in both money and time.

The self-sacrifice paid off. Our child is graduating high school 2023-24, scored a 1580 SAT, and will be competitively applying to the best schools in the country. She will escape all the worries I faced at her age, so mission success on that front. My wife has a very fruitful career trajectory in her respective military service. Post-child life for me will be making up for lost time. I'm not worried, because I've made decent money from flipping houses and have not lost or diminished my competitiveness or desire to learn. If anything, those characteristics have increased due feeling slighted by my lack of traditional opportunities across time. Looking forward to the future as I transition back to focusing on myself.