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 #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.