Let’s say you’re at the end of your rope. The dryer died and you have no clean clothes and the baby just threw up all over what you have on, your daughter came home from school with lice and the dog has some kind of gastric distress. You write a quick email to your spouse, who is currently across the world somewhere, casually mentioning that you are hiring someone to fix the dryer and possibly going to also move to Tahiti. Alone. You delete that part and send it off. Later, in the ill-fitting clothes from the late 90s that you found buried at the bottom of a drawer, you are sitting at a mom’s group and you unload on the women sitting around you. The response? “You should feel lucky, when my husband was deployed we didn’t have email.” “Email? We only had SAT phones and my entire family ended up with the bubonic plague and I sanitized the entire place myself while deathly ill.” “I had 5 kids on my husband’s first deployment and we didn’t even own a washer and dryer, I cleaned all our clothes by hand in the tub while nursing our 16 foster puppies and we only communicated via carrier pigeon.” ….sigh. When did we turn life into a competition over who has it worse? I mean, this problem is not unique to the military community. Just ask a table of moms about childbirth. Eventually the stories will one-up each other until there’s at least one mom who gave birth on the side of the road to a 13lb baby while at the same time knitting their onesie and breastfeeding their…