I think I may be able to help provide you with a different angle on your situation.
I'm roughly the same age as you, started BMQ at the same time, on the same base, and am married.
I spend most of last year in Borden and Meaford many hours away from Ottawa and my wife... being 6 hours away is fine except that doesn't account for traffic on the friday afternoon when I headed back to Ottawa. Sometimes I'd not get home until pushing 1 am and I spent many weeks being exhausted from a lack of recovery time. As a result I was terribly unhappy and constantly on the ragged edge of my breaking point. I missed her an unbelievable amount, and I lost a lot of motivation.
During basic I excelled, by all accounts I was an excellent soldier. I headed off to SQ with no break to go back and visit my wife... I excelled until the final two weeks of the course and then I started running on empty. My section commander told me I was smart, capable and that he would be proud to serve alongside me, over in the Sandbox. I was the only "student" to conduct section attacks, and I was the go to guy when the section commander and 2 i/c weren't around.
By the start of my DP1 I had lost nearly 40lbs... I'm 6'4" and I was less than 170lbs. And I was eating like a horse.
There was no break of even a couple minutes between my SQ and DP1... we graduated SQ to the yelling of our DP1 instructors.... at one point there was 16 directing staff on the floor at once... I couldn't see and end to it. The light at the end of the tunnel wasn't there.
I'd been writing memos since Basic to change trades to MP or Engineer or Vehicle tech... constantly being told that I would have to wait until my next level of training. I thought "YES! DP1... now's my chance!!" I wrote another memo.
I was told that if I wanted occupational transfer then I would have to finish my training and wait until I hit Battalion. I was starting to see a pattern here.
Word from CFRG came down a couple days later that if you finished a certain level of DP1 training then you were locked into your trade and you were ineligible for transfer or release. My hopes of doing something else other than infantry were dashed and I got down to the business of being an infanteer.
Now throughout the last 6 months I had been able to see my wife only a handful of single-day weekends. She was upset, stressed out and having trouble coping. She started bleeding constantly... and she went to the doctor to be told that she had the preliminary markers of uterine cancer. As soon as I found that out I wrote another memo. I requested a Release to be with her and to ensure that I could be with her in the event the final diagnosis was bad. The fact that it got me out of the infantry was a bonus that was a distant second place. And it didn't get me into a different trade.
I sat on Holding Platoon for 3 1/2 months... but I eventually got out. My relationship was hurting from 9 months of absence, my wife was scared about maybe having cancer, and I had been learning that the military bureaucracy was a behemoth that can complicate even the smallest and simplest of matters. While in Holding, I tried transferring to a regular combat engineer unit, which was a failure, even though it was a trade suffering from a manpower shortfall. I tried releasing to the primary reserve... but somehow no one in my CoC had any clue how to do that, or it wasn't worth the time. And I ended up being released with a folder of good course reports and a spot on the Supplementary Reserve. I've since been trying to get back in, in a Primary Reserve capacity, because I'm not allowed to re-apply to the reg force until march 9... I figured I'd be into the reserves inside of 6 months... but as usual the bureaucracy is doing it's thing, just like it does to everybody.
My wife is doing better, but if we're going to have kids we have to do it soon. I tried getting civilian police jobs and was told in no uncertain terms that because I don't speak french, am not a visible minority, or a woman, that I'm SOL. And believe me, I have every other qualification. Including my Police Foundations college diploma.
I'm now waiting on the good graces of my VFS which should have only taken a week... but is now stretching into month 4...
What does all this mean to you? Possibly nothing, but it might be what you end up doing if you decide to chuck your military career. I wasn't given an opportunity to choose another trade, even after dozens of memos, I wasn't able to get a civilian police job despite being a smart individual... I wasn't able to get back to my wife until after 3 months after my release from training.. And I'm having a hell of a time getting BACK in....
EX-RCAC_011 is giving you good advice when he tells you to step back and breath and think. You have an opportunity here, don't throw it away until you've looked at all the angles and have talked it over with your wife.
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