Long Times Apart

I've been forced to think about spending extended periods of time away from my chosen partner in life so much more than I thought I would in an ordinary, committed relationship.

As a military spouse, it's not just deployments we deal with. Sometimes it's weeks of twelve hour shifts, or spouses switched to odd shifts, other times it's trainings at far away bases for 2, 3, or 6 weeks.

Recently, a marine was upset that, just after a 7 month deployment away from his baby, he was going to have to "deploy" for 3 weeks to another base. I said, "you mean TDY?" He said, "what's a TDY?" If the different branches have different ideas about what their job descriptions are, how are we supposed to understand how to support each other? Do the various branches really want to support each other? I hear lip service to support in public, good natured ribbing of each other, and then I hear muted grumblings about each other under their breath. Perhaps we don't understand each other like I thought.

A Career on the Go

I am struggling with the budget. The family budget. The funny thing is that we have so much luxury, but I want more. I can't figure out if I'm being awful and selfish, or normal.

My cousin said she works so much because she's afraid to be broke. I'm not working because I want to stay home with my kids. That's not the whole story, though.

Part of my not working is that I'm being an elitist snob. I don't want to hand my kids over to be raised by someone else, so if I were going to work, it would have to be on my available time. I'm not willing to go down the street and work at McDonald's part-time or Wal-mart, so someone would have to practically drop a "career worthy" part-time job into my lap to get me out of the house.

I hope that writing can be a career for me, but actually earning anything is taking even longer than I thought. I thought I had earned enough to pay for Elaina's dance class by advertising on my blog, but Google has said that there were too many suspicious clicks and has denied me the use of their advertisers anymore. I have submitted myself to clinical trials, voluntary MRIs and medical studies to make some extra cash, but I thought I'd be able to buy new shoes with that cash. Now I'm going to be using it for dance and music and it doesn't even come close to covering gas.

I will take journalism classes in the future. I want to write. Writing is enjoyable and worthy, not to mention portable to travel with the military career of my husband. I'm just so scared that, in the effort to have it all the right way, I'm not using my own standards to measure my success anymore.

Option #3: Manipulate for Leave

When I met James in 2003 he had just returned from a deployment. He proposed in June and we began planning our wedding for the next June. I was just trying to be the pius and calendar sensitive bride in my planning. I didn't realize that this would be time for his next deployment.

In December of 2003 I began my annoying campaign. This can be a very sensitive route to choose. I spoke with the commander about how I needed my wedding and the reservations were set. My whining could have easily put James on the list to deploy right away, rather than kept him as an alternate, available to take leave for our wedding.

I was able to have my wedding, with my husband by my side, thankfully. Perhaps we should figure out the best way to manipulate leave to our advantage? Let's consider this question this week.

Option #2: Go Alone

You can avoid having to deal with leave issues by planning to attend things without your spouse. When I asked for and was granted days off from my civilian employers, those days weren't taken back. I always knew I could make plans for myself and they wouldn't fall through.

Going without your spouse poses its own dilemmas. Just today I met with an old high school friend and her family and it was just me. I felt the way I often do in these situations, like I had to somehow prove the existence of my happy marriage or my comfortable life. That was probably unnecessary. While struggling to catch up on our lives over the last 12 years and trying to corral toddlers and pre-schoolers, we didn't need to wast time justifying our family choices at all.

I am happy with my husband and hope that I can express that without him there. It's not easy to be alone. He may be having a tougher time missing celebrations than we have celebrating without him. I don't deign to speak for someone else.

Things to consider when going alone: will the expenditure for the solo trip affect your family's bottom line, can you cope with your kids for specified period without your partner, will your partner starve to death without you there. These are the important questions to answer, not "how do I show my happy marriage without my happy spouse."

Option #1: Don't Go

In Spring of 2005 my two best friends from college married each other in Belize. I booked a hotel room and a flight to be there. It was going to double as a honeymoon for James and I, since we hadn't had one right after our own wedding.

Shortly after making all of the arrangements, James got a promotion and was ordered to attend a school for that promotion. Congratulations, Elyssa and James, you'll get more monthly pay but you can't go on a long awaited trip with friends.

We were reimbursed for a portion of the money we paid and we received a voucher from the airlines for some of the airfare spent. We were never completely covered and we missed a milestone.

So, if you don't go to family and friends gatherings you protect yourself. You can make the financial excuse, tell others you can't get leave or just say it's not possible. If you make this decision, you distance yourselves from your loved ones, but you also protect yourself from emotional, financial and leave-time losses.

This is just option #1.

Family Time

I was absent from the blog this weekend to spend time at an impromptu family reunion and a trip to a cultural festival with extended family.

Over the weekend I was confronted with the reality that I would miss another important wedding because of our family's military service. My favorite author on military spouses, Jacey Eckhart, says that we should make every effort to attend every extended family event. We have missed both of our best friends' weddings, and 5 cousins' weddings in the last 4 years. I have attended numerous events alone or with our daughter and felt like people weren't ever going to know my relationship with my husband,or my husband for that matter.

This week I plan on exploring the options enlisted families have for these family events.

My Application for Sainthood

Tomorrow I'm going to tell everyone how I find my Zen after feeling awful.

Today I'm going to tell you how I don't.

I probably went over my cell phone minutes by about an hour the day that my neighbor said she didn't want to hang around me because she felt like I was competing with her. I walked about 15 miles and talked to my mother on my cell phone for a lot of that time.

Later, I cried and yelled at my husband. I blamed him for putting me where I was and trapping me with these awful women on base. I blamed him for not making more money and for not finding us more happy couples and families to be friends with.

After all that unhealthy behavior (well, the walking might have been healthy), I started to deal with things a better way....

In The Real World

Last year, on an impromptu trip to Illinois, I bumped into an old classmate. She said several things that stuck with me. One of them was, "make sure your husband knows what he wants to do in the real world, when he gets out of the Air Force."

Mind you, her perception of the military is something you do when you're 18 and "don't have anything better to do". When you're done with an enlistment, you should get out and get on with a so-called normal life. This is a preposterous assumption.

First, in order for our military to function properly, we need people who stay active for twenty years or more. Second, not everyone who enlists does so fresh out of high school. Third, I don't know if she even knew if my husband was enlisted or officer, but that fact remains irrelevant.

It seems antiquated to me to assume that people who are enlisted must be less educated or less worthy. The disparity in pay between senior NCOs and officers should be diminishing. The perception of class based assumptions just perpetuates all those old stereotypes of the enlisted, white trash contingent of the military family.

Not Just White Trash

In reading a couple of books targeted at military wives, I noticed a stark contrast in perceptions. One author, my favorite, made it clear that all types of women are military wives. Some are young brides and others are average, while still others are older, re-married, or widowed. Many of the wives around the military have education levels as high as post-graduate work, while others may not have even finished high school. There are military families that were started by teenagers and others who began having children after a decade or more of adult marriage.

Isn't this how people are in the wider world? Diverse people is just how the Earth continues a balance. We need custodians and computer technicians, cooks and chemists. Mothers and wives also need to come from diverse backgrounds. If I didn't read about scientific research and listen to women who learned from experience, I would only get part of the whole story.

I don't always recognize this when I feel down and alone. My advice for each person attached to the military is to remember how many people are around and chose to surround yourself with ones that can bring peace to your life. We cannot always avoid our gossipy neighbor (nor do we always want to) or maintain a gossip proof life. The impact of the negative can be kept to a minimum.

More About Gossip

I think some of you may be interested to hear of my experiences with on base living.
I'm going to tell you all exactly why my family moved off base after James got orders last year, even knowing that we'd only live there for six months.
Barksdale was in the process of transitioning to privatized housing and we were hearing a lot of promises and rumors. I was already feeling bad for agreeing to move into the house we lived in for a year and a half. I asked if we would be allowed to move to newer housing in the near future and the community liaison told me that new houses would be more than a year away. We were being asked to sign a year long lease on a house that was driving me up the wall already.
After my conversation with the housing man, I spoke with other women who I assumed were my friends as well as neighbors. One is always supportive of me. One is sort of cagey. The third, who I thought was a friend, tore me down emotionally to a point where I can barely think of her without tearing up. It was this, feeling like I didn't have the friend I thought I had, that made me decide I couldn't stay in the hostile atmosphere of base housing.
I already dealt with a neighbor who told vicious lies about myself and my relationship with my husband. My husband negotiated working with someone hostile because of lies told by an unfriendly neighbor. I was not going to live right there with someone who, under the guise of friendship, could not understand my good intentions and positive attitude for it's face value.

Gossip on Base

I could speak to the obvious, but I'll just say that I probably won't live on base ever again. That said, I'm not talking about malicious personal gossip.
Often, when working, living and socializing with the same people, rumors start. They are not all bad. Some are filled with hope, like "the new base housing will be ready in six months," or "they're going to let all children, even those on Tricare Prime, see off base pediatricians." There are the bad ones, such as "the base is closing and our airmen will have to retrain or separate." All of these rumors have bad consequences. They make people scramble or set up unreasonable expectations.
Unfortunately, I've had to learn that I'll believe things when I see them. There is information that the military just isn't going to disclose with the civilians attached. The reasons for the closed mouths are reasonable and I've accepted that. More people are going to need to for tranquility on base to take hold. Do you think we can have peace on one little corner of the military world like base housing?

A New Direction

I haven't gotten a lot of feedback. Admittedly, I haven't posted nearly what I need to be successful. I would appreciate any feedback telling me what my readers are interested in knowing. I was going to just give bullet points and step by step instructions on the PCS, but I'm finding people aren't nearly as interested in the subject as I am.

I'm really going to try to post every day this week.

The Command Giveth and The Command Taketh Away

The first time in my military marriage that we were given orders was a pivotal point in my life. I had, that very day, accepted a promotion at the public library. It took me 9 months to find this job. The job I felt fit me.
My husband called with the "guess what" good news, I told my new boss that I guess I would be formally turning down the position in print the next day and I went home to celebrate the fact that our orders were to a base we had requested.
That night we ate dinner at one of our favorite places and celebrated.
The next morning, earlier than we would usually receive phone calls, we heard from my brother-in-law. I knew when the phone rang that it was bad news. My mother-in-law had passed away.
Her illness was the reason we requested the move in the first place. Now our move was canceled.
I went to my new boss, hat-in-hand, and asked if the position was still mine for the taking. Thankfully, she said yes. I held that job for two good years and I was happy.
I use this story to illustrate the transience of those elusive orders. It is a true story. In one 24 hour period I thought I had the perfect job, had lost the perfect job, but had the perfect move, then lost the perfect mother-in-law and the move, but had my job back.
Good luck!

The Day You Have Orders

The day your spouse tells you he or she has orders your brain goes ten directions at once, or you freeze dead in your tracks. Where to begin the planning and moving? The answer is long and varied, but the Airman and Family Support Center is where I began. They didn't have all the answers. They pointed me to a few books, apologized that they weren't currently running any sort of relocation seminars and wished me good luck. I left with the pamphlet sized books and a web address in my hand. I headed from there to Finance to find out some specifics about the money involved in our move.
I have heard rumors of people manipulating the system and making money, others manipulating the system and getting caught, while still others play it by whatever is on the books at the time of their PCS. The rules change regularly. If you don't want to worry about getting into trouble, ask to see the written regulation.
I found out that no matter where we went between our current duty station and the coming one, we received the current duty station's housing allowance until we checked into the new place. That was interesting to me only because I had heard fairytales of living with family, collecting higher housing rates, and reuniting with your spouse with a full bank account. From what I read in print, these stories can only be urban myths. The government hasn't left many loopholes for us to accumulate extra money.
Now, everyone should know that until the physical orders are in the military member's hands, there isn't much anyone can do to plan the move. Thus, despite the fact that you may know you're moving in 8 months, until they cut those orders, you're at your current base. Keep both feet planted there until you know your leaving. Things change without much reason sometimes.

The PCS

Many books are out there to help families with the move, the permanent change of station, PCS. I read them. They don't always help with the reality of that day, time, period when your family is trying to deal with the move. We all struggle. Communicating with our spouse is difficult enough because we don't happen to share a brain, but to communicate with our spouse, the old command, the new command, movers, packers, children and friends and family can drive one to a nervous breakdown. Over the next few days I will post different tips for saving our sanity while acknowledging the great resources that the world has given us. Some you may decide to throw away today, others may become your roadmap to the military world.