Military spouses - No special recipe

The other day, as the girls and I were playing out front of our house waiting for Thomas' bus to arrive home, one of my friends came by with her little ones and we began to catch up with how one another was doing.  As the kids played together in the snow, we chatted & laughed.  Somehow or another, we stumbled onto the topic of how military wives are “strong”. There are so many platitudes and sayings and bumper stickers about this it can make your head spin. There’s one about the recipe for an Air Force  or Army wife (patience, courage, tolerance, adventure!), little poems talking about how we’re a special breed of woman, quotes about how we’re strong and special because our husbands are in the military. My friend and I both agreed: those sayings are completely full of it.

There is this notion, and I’m not entirely sure if it’s pushed by civilians with romantic notions or wives who want to make themselves feel good, that being a military wife somehow means that you are special. You are patient, independent, strong, and loyal. You love adventure and can handle change. It takes a special woman to be a military wife because most women couldn’t handle it. To which I inwardly laugh.

First, the idea that all wives are strong and together all the time? Please. Some of us are strong, independent women who can handle deployments and constant changes. I consider myself to be one of these women, and most of my friends are as well. We don’t cry ourselves to sleep every night because our husbands are gone, we don’t fall to pieces because he isn’t here, or need a family member to stay with us to keep us company and the stresses of this life do not cause us to endlessly curse about how we hate the military. And I don’t think this makes me, or anyone else, special or differently or uniquely strong.

Why are we able to handle the things we do... and by ourselves I might add? It’s simple, really: because we have no choice. You may choose who you marry, but you don’t choose who you fall in love with. I fell in love with my husband, who happened to be in the United States Air Force. Marrying him meant marrying the Air Force. This didn’t bother me in the slightest, and I was well aware of what I was getting myself into (afterall, I was a military brat myself). You marry a service member, you make the choice to have this life. And making that choice means that when the Air Force gives you a hard time — as it often does — you have to shrug your shoulders and deal with it. There’s nothing unique or special about it.

Every family will handle it differently, but it is those spouses and those families that do it alone that I have the utmost respect for. Those spouses who go at it daily by themselves, with a career or as a stay-at-home-mom, for 3, 6, 9 or 12+ months, with 1 child or 4 children... they do it all and then some each and every day. 

When my husband left for his most recent deployment, for example, I dropped him off at his scheduled report time.  It was in the middle of the night, the kids were sleeping in the car and we only sat in the car for a short amount of time before it was time to go.  There was silence between us, kissing and hugging, holding one another's hands, and "I love yous" said.  There were tears in the final moments as I clock watched.  But the time came for him to get out of the car, hoist his bags on his back and walk away from his family who loves him.  As he walked away into the night toward his bus, it was over, and it was time to take a deep breath, go home, and get on with life. A lot of us that day cried — you can’t help it — but at the same time, you don’t see a lot of hysterical weeping or sobbing when they deploy. We have a husband we want to put on a brave face for, because leaving a sobbing wife behind does not make it any easier to deploy, and many of us have children. And children do not give you the luxury of having emotional breakdowns. We aren’t robots, but you do the best you can in a difficult situation.

People, both in the military and civilian world, have to deal with stresses and adversity all the time. You handle it because you have to. Being a military wife is the same thing. You can choose to accept that this is how it is and deal with it, or you can fall to pieces or call in tons of help because you can't do it yourself.

And let me tell you, wives do fall to pieces. This happens all the time, which is another reason why I have to laugh a little at this idea that military wives are extraordinarily strong. I hear from plenty of wives how they hate the Air Force (or Army, Navy, Marines, or Coast Guard) and can’t wait until their husbands get out. Other wives spend entire deployments miserable and depressed and constantly crying because they’re not strong or independent. They wrap their entire lives up in their service member, so when he inevitably leaves, they crumble. And saying this? It almost feels like breaking some sort of unspoken code, because remember, military wives are supposed to be strong and special. But it’s true that there are plenty of wives who just don’t handle it very well. They aren’t understanding when their husband hasn’t called for a week while deployed. They throw temper tantrums when they have to change their plans because their husband suddenly has duty, or has to go in the field, or has to work until 9:00 at night. They whine and complain about everything, and whenever something goes wrong, it’s always the fault of the military.  These wives exist, and no, they’re not rare. They’re actually quite common.

I’m not pointing all of this out to put military wives down. Rather, it’s to dispel the notion that we are special just by virtue of our husbands’ service in the military. I know it’s very glamorous and romantic to idealize the role of a military wife, but the truth is, we are just normal people. We’re just like everyone else. Some wives do well coping with this life, and others have a harder time. There isn’t a mold to churn out a perfect little military wife. There’s no recipe to cook up a perfect spouse. Being a military wife, it doesn’t mean that we are somehow inherently special and uniquely strong. The little secret that no one seems to really want to admit to is that we’re just regular women, women who love someone in the military. We’re not stronger than anyone else… even if a million bumper stickers say otherwise.