I hear Nunavut is very pretty in the summer…

My husband grew up a military brat in the PMQ’s all over Canada.  From Calgary to Kingston to Bordon to Petawawa and then Germany before landing back in Calgary where his dad retired, he saw a lot of army life.

And he saw a lot of army wives.

So when we married, he had an image in his head.  Either we lived off base and pretended that he had ‘just another job’ and I never involved myself in any way with military life, or I became one of ‘those wives’.

And apparently, ‘those’ wives sit their front porch of their PMQ gossiping and smoking, wearing their hubby’s PT gear and yelling in a raspy voice to their 6 kids that they let run around dirty in the neighborhood before drinking the night away with other men while their husbands are away.

In dh’s eyes, there was no middle ground between those two extremes. It’s funny, my mother in law was nothing like this, and we know plenty of really fabulous military wives, but he just didn’t shake this one misconception.

So after a year of living in the PMQ’s (base housing), we moved as quick as we could afford it to a town off base.  He had his life at work and very rarely did we make any effort to be a part of that life as a family.

Slowly, all that has changed.

I realized this once when we were laying together on the couch talking after he had got home from work.  He had taken off his uniform and thrown some jeans on, but he had left on the green t-shirt from work.  And while we talked, my eyes rested on something.

On the shirt, front and back, in black Sharpie, was written “O Pos”.  

So while he was talking (I was totally listening at the same time) my brain came to a realization.

This is why he doesn’t just have ‘any other job’.  He has this job.  And one of the ways that job makes us different than the average family – I had become totally accustomed to the fact that he had his blood type on his t-shirt in case, you know, someone needed to know it.  Quickly.

And that one thought made me remember a time when I had a friend in the house when dh called from pre-deployment training with a question.  Would I want to take the kids to Germany if he was wounded overseas?  That question brought up an entire discussion on how wounded he would have to be for that to happen, whether or not he was conscious, and whether he was expected to make it home.

When I hung up the phone, the other person in the room was just staring at me like I had 2 heads.

Because this is not just another job.

So this week when I swallowed back the nervousness that threatened to make me throw up and went to a meeting with the leadership of dh’s unit to discuss ways to improve Family Support, I know I crossed a line.

I became one of ‘those’ wives.

 I’d like to think I am a slightly better version than dh had in his head 10 years ago when he married me.  I don’t smoke, I only have 3 kids and I rarely sit on the front porch.  My kids may regularly be slightly dirty, but all in all, I don’t think I fit the mold of ‘that’ wife.

I don’t think I fit a mold. 

What I do have is a distant remembrance of what it felt like to be a 20 year old Troopers wife with no connections and no friends trying to figure all this out.  As long as I keep reminding myself about that, I have found the courage I need to do things like walk into the Regiment building by myself, go upstairs and present a list of suggestions to the people my hubby needs to call Sir.

So far, we have not been posted to Nunavut.

Resolute Bay.  Picture credit Wikipedia

But there are numerous parts of this that make me nervous.

For one, just by nature of my (fabulous?) personality, I am usually talking.  When I am nervous, I talk more.  I don’t know if I should be encouraged to talk more than I need to.  I don’t need any help being a pain in the ass to the people around me.

This is just an opportunity to be a very small part of making some positive changes.  But I am more than a little worried I am not professional enough to say or do the right things.  I spend the majority of the day talking to children and doing things like folding laundry (ha!  like anyone believes I spend a lot of time being that domestic… but still).  I am vastly under qualified to volunteer with gown-up things.

Thirdly (and I don’t even know if that is a word)  I frequently and with emphasis doubt what business I have even thinking that I should be doing this.  I am just a soldier’s wife with a little experience and a vague idea of things I think can be accomplished.  It makes me nervous just thinking that people care about my opinion.

And finally, becoming one of ‘those wives’ has made me realize how good I look in dh’s PT gear.  Black is totally my colour. 

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