What I Learned Being One Of “Those” Wives…

– I can put on all the make-up I want, make my hair up nice and wear a pretty dress, without DH I am still missing the part that makes me look my best.  

– I am a grown woman and I am actually capable of dressing fancy and acting relatively classy for a night, even on my own. 

– The fact that as a grown woman I borrowed my formal dress from the teenage girl who babysat for me can be our little secret.

– The allure of dressing up is mostly lost after you make the Kraft Dinner for the kids and get out the boots and the brush to scrape the snow and ice off the mini-van.

– Any sense of formality that might have been left is gone once you get out at the gas-station and hike up your dress to fill the air of your &*^%#& leaky tire that you haven’t fixed yet.

– A good entrance is always important, especially when you’re aready nervous, so I don’t regret my decision to walk across the snowy parking lot in my 4 inch heels so that I wasn’t wearing my boots when I walked in.  I also don’t regret how long it took my toes to defrost afterwards.

– Some women might be offended by tradition that holds that no woman should walk around un-escorted.  I am not one of those women.  I made me feel just a little bit important.

– I felt slightly less important when I had to announce my need to use the bathroom to the unfortunate guy who was assigned as my ‘escort’ for the evening, who then had to walk me there and wait for me.  It’s one thing that my husband have to wait outside a bathroom door for me, it is a whole other thing for someone else to have to. 

– Looking around the table and across the hall and realizing your are having dinner with a room full of brave men and incredibly strong women is humbling sometimes.  Every once and a while I remember how blessed I am to be a small part of that.

– I am not classy enough to wear a pair of earrings for a whole night without getting annoyed and putting them in my purse.

– There are things I can be embarrassed about.  How loud I talk when I get excited, the stupid things I say when I am nervous or the fact that when my escort asked for my keys to start my van and I told him he could grab them from my jacket pocket,  I didn’t realize until I got home the only other thing in that jacket pocket was a tampon.  Thankfully he’s married and this was hopefully not his first time encountering one.  Either way, he said nothing.

– I don’t need to be embarrassed about the fact that I’m ‘that wife’, the one likes those kinds of events and is willing to go even when DH is gone.  I know it seems like I’m supposed to pretend that things like Mess Dinners are a chore, or something I would avoid doing if I didn’t have to, but I’m not going to. I like them.
I’m already ‘that wife’ who is involved with Family Support and brings cookies when I go for meetings at the Regiment.  And  DH is a big enough guy that he knew how loud and obnoxious and overly involved I like to be with everything and he has yet to act as though he’s embarassed of me.  There’s no one else’s opinion of me that should matter enough.

So I’m going to keep being who I am and doing the things I feel called to do.  I may be loud and I may get involved and do things that take me a little outside of the box… I may be one of ‘those wives’…

“You know me inside and out,
      you know every bone in my body;
   You know exactly how I was made, bit by bit,
      how I was sculpted from nothing into something.”
Psalm 139:14ish

I’m getting too old to be embarrassed about who I am.  I do enough embarrassing things without worrying about that.

Besides, I was told the other day that I didn’t ‘look’ like one of ‘those’ wives, what with all the tattoos. 

Last month,  I got a new one.

It’s from A Midsummer’s Night Dream

“And though she be but little, she is fierce”

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