this ol' thing?

Should have done this ages ago.  Should have bothered to take the time to do this while in Hawaii.  There are memories there that will remain trapped by time and distance.

So excuse the cough of dirt as I dust this ol' thing off. It feels good to remember the remembering.

Why Rapunzel couldn't be a military wife.

Three weeks. Three measly weeks. Not 18 months. Not even the 8 months of the last one. He's been gone three teensy weeks. And this one has my hair falling out... literally.

I've racked my brain trying to understand what has me so frazzled that every shampoo leaves me panicked. Since we've been married, he's been deployed to Iraq twice, the first time my two sons were 19 months and 8 weeks old respectively. He's been to Afghanistan twice, the first time he left the very next day after we arrived in California to a home full of boxes and no school for the kids. Small stuff, No Problem.

This training exercise is less than five hours away, in the same state, and for a little over three weeks. And I'm counting the strands in my brush. Please, no more today.

The contrast is all it takes for me to see that the current strain of my military life cannot be viewed through the gargantuan lenses of war and deployment alone. Our military families are strained by what can barely be seen under the microscope. The uncertainty of which damned, accumulated stressor will the one that cracks open the hairline fissure revealing the nut inside. It's about believing we should steady ourselves for the big stuff, not sweating the small stuff, and finding ourselves knocked down anyway by no more than minutia.

I've climbed mountains unscathed, and just tripped over a pebble.

Maybe I should have noticed something was wrong when he was getting his gear ready and I felt nothing. Maybe I should have worried that leaving had become so ordinary it didn't even register. Maybe then I would have seen what I perilously mistook as my strength to handle separations was exactly the opposite. I was not immune to the pain, I am numb to it.

Sitting on the ground, I'd like to take a breather for a while. But I'm a military wife, I don't have time to stay down for long. In two months, we move overseas.

I crack a few achy joints standing up, dust off the dirt of self-pity, move on to pick up the spilled contents of my 'pack'. One by one, I pick up boxes, trinkets and tokens of experience. Each labeled: New Schools, New Housing, New Friends, Old Friends, New Church, Move Company, Fix Car, Fix House, Fix Kids. Fix me. (Wait, the last one is still missing.) Each item, no bigger than my hand, weighs a ton.

I desperately want to believe that military families are indeed much the same as our civilian counterparts. It's one glaring difference that gnaws at me. The density of our experiences are incomparable. What is someone else's 'once in a lifetime' event is easily my thrice. At some point, I lose track. I cannot, however, escape each iteration adding to the load.

And the weight is compounding.

I'll make it through this month of him gone. I'll make it through the next three weeks of him home before he leaves again for another 5 weeks of class. I'll make it through the move. I'll make sure the kids make it through the move. I'll wake up tomorrow, and the next. And I'll keep waking up.... until I make it through.

But please God, I'm too vain for this one. Please, please, God, let me make it through with a few locks left.

Military Math

At some point in time, we will all experience the feeling that things don’t always add up the way they should, I like to call it “military math”. My first experience came when my husband signed up, the resulting formula was:

Current salary ÷ 3 = live on remainder.

I lived, but it wasn’t pretty.

Then came battalion. Wasn’t it 6 months out, 6 months in? Then it was 6 months out, 10 months in. But when I did the math, between month-long field exercises and ancillary trainings, it ended up:

6 months out + 6 months in = 2 months of him actually home.

Now the formula is 6 months out, 12 months in. According to my current calculations, that will probably work out to about 43.6 days of being home. I start to measure it in hours (1038 to be exact) just to make myself feel better.

Trying to figure out how much space you need to live in your next duty station? Take the square footage then allow for the following storage deductions:
- furniture that belonged to your great-grandmother that doesn't fit (and your family will disown you if you get rid of it but heck if they have the space to keep it)
- curtains and rods for the windows that will miraculously disappear at one duty station (and magically reappear at the next).
- the guest bedroom (really? What were you thinking?)
- cold weather gear as you move from Great Lakes to Yuma, AZ. (Get rid of it and you are destined to be sent to Maine.)

Sqft of house - sqft storage of ‘just in case’ items = 600 sq ft of usable living space.

Where military math really begins to get fun is in the moving out process. As the days tick down, my desperate need to maximize usage of all items purchased increases exponentially. The formulations begin to get so complicated I’m not sure even a class in differential equations would begin to suffice.

Take my soap and shampoo. Apparently, in an attempt to not throw anything out (and thereby mess with my current income calculations) I must shower a minimum of 4.517 times a day. I smell peachy.

The cleaning products under every sink beckon me. Funny how I was able to silence them for so long but now their din is overwhelming. Fine. In order to use up all the various sprays and cleansers, I will need to mop, sweep, dust and wash windows 6.832 times an hour. It’s just not happening.

The computations continue as I move to my pantry. Is it wrong of me to serve ribs, roasted potatoes, frozen pizza, canned asparagus, frozen pineapple, and waffles for... breakfast? I’m eyeballing the Costco sized ketchup bottles and wondering if I can turn them into spaghetti sauce….there must be a way, there must be a way. I’m pretty sure I’ve heard of pickle relish soup somewhere. Oh right, like you hadn’t thought of that already.

By the time the movers come and the last box is on the truck, I will have done enough mental mathematical manipulations to make Stephen Hawking proud. But really, there’s only one formula that truly matters to me:

Military husband + me = one heck of an adventure

Hello? Is anybody in there?

Talk about viral, it was all in the title "If government shuts down, so would troop pay", Rick Maze's Air Force Times article sent shivers down every military family's spine and prompted quick fingers with the forward button (mine included). After a deep breath to push away the anxiety, I tried to rationalize how anyone in the Department of Defense could actually defend the notion of freezing troop pay. Surely this was a joke. Are we seriously at the point where this is a plausible thought?

If we are to believe that this time it will be different, this time, not everyone in the military will be deemed 'essential' personnel, then one is left to debate the ability of the Powers That Be to safely distinguish 'non-exempt' from 'exempt'. I'd like to think that troops in Afghanistan would continue to receive their pay, but then again, I'd like to think that anyone who has volunteered to serve their country knowing they have also signed on to the 'I can't quit and find another job whenever I want' clause, would be exempt from any of the pettiness of Washington D.C. politics. I'd like to think.

I'm concerned that the opportunity to stamp a few MOSs with the 'non-exempt' stamp will prove too tempting. Way to go chaps, let's scare the paycheck to paycheck E-2 wife into apoplexy. Can I start telling her where to get her foodbox now? Oh, that's right, she already qualifies for it, even with her military husband's paycheck.

In the end, I can only hope that Mr. Maze's article was a preemptive strike, a bomb drop of words that would shake up a nation enough to demand that her leaders stop playing this game of chicken at the expense our economy's health and more importantly of our military families.

The other woman

Among the many hats I wore while in D.C., one was the President of the Navy Civil Engineer Corps Officers' Spouses Club. Not much was required of me, except for that dreaded once a month President's letter that often left me at a loss for words. From time to time, in one of my more inspired moments, I articulated something worth sharing....and so here is one of my favs.

The Other Woman...

Sometimes I think there must be a parallel universe, one with another military wife rushing about getting the day done, wondering about her next duty station and worrying about the kids fitting in. She weaves back and forth seamlessly between her civilian friends, her children’s school and her husband’s military obligations. Then in one irrevocable instant our universes collide as the man of my dreams becomes the one of her nightmare.

You see, my dear military engineer husband is also a CACO— Casualty Assistance Calls Officer. In my world, he’s the man who along with the Chaplain, knocks on your door and changes your life forever. I’ve imagined the face of this officer many times in the past, imagined every detail of the car he would drive, what words he would choose, and how I would respond. I never imagined he would sit across the dinner table from me every night. But he does, and I am ever grateful, because I know that when the phone call comes in, the knock isn’t at my door. When the call comes in, my husband quietly leaves our family to take care of hers. And I am grateful.

I have come to learn through this experience that it is the Chaplain who can be the comforting one and the CACO must be procedural, professional and at all times objective. But in that professionalism can he also be tender with her? Can he be gentle in his guidance through the maze of paperwork and complicated procedures that she must understand through her grief? Across the table, I see my husband smiling as he suffers through my cooking, and know that he can.

Three times the call has come in, three times my universe merged with another’s as my husband drove away. I always imagine the worst. I’m hit with the pang of guilt that is married to the thought of ‘thank God it’s not me’.

The phone rings.

This time, I’m reminded of just how important the CACO duty is and why amid my dread and dreary delusions, it is arguably one of the most important and honored of military duties. This is where we take care of our own. No matter how many runways get built in Iraq, no matter how many bridges are reinforced in Afghanistan, when one of our sailors falls, or even stumbles and trips, the CACO is there for the family. My CACO is there. It is his sincere dedication to her family that makes it easy for me to let him go.

My wish is that the only CACO you ever know is the one you break bread with. We nestle into the cocoon of our lives when our spouses are home. Even though we are ‘military’, the war is ‘out there’ and only when our spouse is ‘over there’ do we take stock of what is the danger in our midst. But the truth is that our ability to be comfortable in the unknown should not remove us from what is the reality for so many of us, ‘us’ being our larger military family as a whole; the reality that our spouses have chosen a career that is inherently risky.

Wars end, my husband’s duty to protect does not. I know that at any moment, the very DNA of our lives may twist; ‘she’ and I will connect by a tiny strand. I know that at any moment, it could be the face across from her table that knocks on my door. But not tonight. Tonight it’s late and he collapses on the bed, asleep in minutes. As I watch him breathe, I pray for her, and thank God that he is still here. He is still here. And I am grateful.

Dear Diary

I've never been any good at this diary thing. My first diary (ages 9-11) was purchased simply because it had a cute key that went to a tiny lock that supposedly would protect my deepest, brightest thoughts. Five pages in I came to the realization that, in truth, all I wanted was for my little sister to steal the key and peek (then run and tell my Mom). Maybe then I would be understood. And I made it easy. The key was never more than three feet away from the diary and that little book was always placed in a 'pleeease open me' location, on my bed, on top of the nightstand, on my sister's bed (I was beginning to get desperate).

Whether or not anyone looked through the window of my 10 year old soul, I don't know, but the confrontation that would allow me to express my dramatic self never materialized and that was the end of diary #1.

The flowery padding that covered diary #2 (ages 15-17) got me back on track. I couldn't help it. Every time I picked it up it was soft and squooshed in my hand. A textural thing. High school years demand the recording of teenage angst. It was less of a diary and more a listing of what I thought were fantastic quotes and poems, some original and some that I thought were original but not having been of the world enough to know that they had been around a long time. Still, I loved my quotes.

AP English taught me two things, 1. how to dissect poems 2. I'm not a writer. A review of squooshy diary #2 is case in point. I keep that diary just to prove to my sons that you are stupid at 16 no matter how smart you think you are.

But it's not the writing that made me persevere. It's that 'pleeeease sneak a peak so that I can show you who I am without having to come right out and tell you'. Enter diary #3 (age 19). I guess technically diary #2 but really, after dropping it for two years, I was starting again. No surprise, not too successful at keeping it up. Apparently, I only went scribbling when I was seriously moody. Some of the jottings are so embarrassing I've often contemplated throwing it out. I keep it for one reason only. At one point, I was upset that I was fat. 117lbs. Yup, it's a keeper. I can prove that at one point in my 'adult' life, I weighed 117lbs.

#4 came almost 10 years later after an obsessive search for a beautiful leather bound journal. I was on the Oprah gratitude journal kick. What a novel idea. If gratitude wasn't natural to my inherently whiny nature, then by God I was going to force feed it to myself until I changed. Finding five things to be grateful for was a lot harder than it seemed. Several days I was grateful for the air, food, my husband, a job, and, and, one more thing, can't even remember.

I must have been a little more than, uh, grateful, for my husband. Enter two boys. And the end of sticking to any journaling, diary, etc. I wasn't even all that great at recording things in their baby books. Yet for some reason, here I am again, unable to shake this obsessive need to jot down life's little moments, no doubt more as fodder for a good laugh in later years.

Blogs can be many things, but to me, they look an awful lot like a little diary with the cute lock and a world sneaky enough to take a peek.