Nicole B Gebhardt

“Home, to me, is no longer a place; it’s a feeling. It’s the people we carry, the love we hold on to, and the strength we build in the spaces in between.”

Nicole B. Gebhardt didn’t arrive at this understanding lightly. It’s been shaped over time, through military life, through loss, and through perseverance. 

In 2009, Nicole lost her nine-week-old son Samuel to SIDS, adding to years of compounding grief—multiple miscarriages, spousal abuse, and an addiction that she describes as nearly destroying her. For a long time, the idea of "home" was elusive. How do you build something safe and steady when everything inside you is falling apart?

Now, home lives in the communities she builds wherever the military sends her family. It’s the coffee meetups, the support groups, and the safe spaces she intentionally creates the moment she arrives somewhere new. But it also holds a different meaning. 

“Home also lives in the invisible,” she says. “In the babies I carry in my heart, in the grief I’ve learned to walk beside, and in the purpose that was born from that pain.”

That purpose has an impact. As a National Guard spouse who’s PCSed nine times, four-time best selling author, and speaker, Nicole has made it her practice to build what she once needed immediately and intentionally, wherever she lands. This looks like support groups for women navigating pregnancy and infant loss, spaces where grief doesn’t have to hide behind strength, and community with intentionality. 

“I don’t wait for home to find me,” she says. “I create it.” 

Military life, she adds, has a way of redefining home by force. The walls and zip codes change. The school, grocery store, neighbors–all of it is new, sometimes every two years. For Nicole, that constant motion not only reshaped where she lived, but sharpened what she noticed, revealing gaps in military community networks. 

She saw spouses arriving at new duty stations in the middle of grief with no support system in place and no time to build one before the next move. Women navigating pregnancy loss in silence because the community around them didn’t have the language or space for it. 

This is where Nicole’s mission lives. “I’ve made it my purpose to create spaces of belonging, support, and understanding,” she shares. “Because even when everything else changes, every spouse deserves a place that feels like home in the middle of uncertainty.”

What she wants more people to understand is this: for military families, home is often a place built under pressure and in silence. It’s both strong and fragile. There’s deployments and constant change. That builds resilience, but it also means showing up for others while quietly carrying your own heartache.

She states, “Resilience doesn’t mean we don’t need support. It doesn’t mean we aren’t hurting.”

Home, in her experience, isn’t picture-perfect. Instead, it’s real, raw, and constantly being rebuilt. That’s why she invests in community, raises awareness, and advocates for causes that matter so deeply. She’s learned that it’s all about bringing people together–especially women. As she says, “When you create a space where women feel seen, heard, and supported—that’s when a place truly becomes home.”

Her advice to any spouse heading into their next PCS, deployment, or challenging season is simple, and it comes from someone who has lived every word of it: give yourself permission to feel everything. Find your people. Find your voice. And if you can’t find the support you need, create it. 

Nicole leaves us with this word of encouragement: 

“You are stronger than you realize, but you were never meant to do this alone. There is power in community, healing in connection, and purpose in your story. No matter where you go, you have the ability to build something meaningful and to help other women feel at home too.”

Learn more about Nicole’s work here.