Occasionally when I look around at Dh’s comrades when they are out together, I realize that for some of them, apart from the military they have nothing in common. It’s really true, for many of them there is an age difference, sometimes of 10 or more years. Differences in family situations, some married with kids, some divorced without, everything in between. They have diverse interests, everything from Warhammer and MMORPGs to hunting and camping for days without electronics. Different faiths, different choices, different opinions. Their personalities can occasionally clash pretty loudly. I mean, there’s even Toronto Maple Leaf fans mixed in with Bruins fans and no one understands the Roughrider fans. The truth is, for many of those relationships the only common factor is their time served together. That bond is even stronger when you throw in some time in a tent in Kabul, or a FOB in Kandahar. Or both. One of the most amazing things to me about the military is that those experiences together can be all that’s needed. Especially among combat troops, they overshadow the differences and cement relationships stronger than any other simply by the fact that they’ve experienced a time when they counted on each other for survival. Now that I think of it, that’s not simple at all. But it’s amazing to watch from the outside. It’s also, I think, why in the military community it’s more common to hear the word brother than friend. Brother implies family. You don’t choose your family, they are chosen for you. You might not even like you family, but you don’t always have to. You are still there for family, anytime they call…
Dh and I don’t really do Valentine’s Day. To be fair, we don’t do most holidays. Or anniversaries, really. I guess it comes from him not being home all that often, after a while the days stopped being that important. When we first got married we could barely afford milk so we never got much used to giving big gifts, even after we could afford things. I told him to forgo an engagement ring so we could buy a bed. When you get married as teenagers I think sometimes practicality overrules grand gestures. So this Valentine’s Day it never even occured to me to buy Dh a gift, I can’t remember the last time we did that. This week though, someone asked me what I could give him, if I could get him something Sunday. I said I’d probably give him a weekend home, since he’s away on course. But then they said something strange… They said I’m a storyteller, and they asked if I’d ever given Dh a story. I laughed at first, because let’s be honest. Dh puts up with my writing because he loves me and every time he meets someone new at work that looks at him funny before saying “hey… I’ve seen you on the internet…” or the Brigade Commander walks over to chat with him about my blog… lets just say while some guys who like attention might look at it like a perk, to Dh it’s more of a sacrifice of love. But after I thought about it for a few days I decided that this week, with love on everyone…
Many years ago I stood with a few other spouses and I watched the bus drive off with our husbands for a combat deployment. I wasn’t naive as they thought, I had heard the whispers and rumors. Dh and I were 20, married less than a year. I was pregnant. He had no idea when he was coming back. Combine this with the reality that I was married to a soldier and everyone knows military marriages never end well… no one thought we had a chance. And when he came home that time, more than half a year later, dusty, battle worn and a whole lot more grown up, if not much older, than he had been when he left, we did struggle. We hurt each other. We had a baby and new home and we tried for a while but then we stopped trying because it was hard and we thought it would be easy. Somewhere in there he brought up the idea of leaving for selection for another unit and I told him he was welcome to do it. Single. We struggled, but somehow and by the grace of God, by the next tour I was still there. But the hard truth is that when I was saying goodbye that second time, those other wives I had stood with before? They weren’t there anymore. Their loss was weirdly hard for me, like it represented a collective failure of our community, an omen, an eventuality. And now after more than 16 years and 4 deployments, I can almost count on one hand the spouses I knew then that are still around now. Dh and I, we have no magic in us. There’s plenty of couples who are the same…
Last year a couple months before Christmas, Dh left on one of those last minute gotta-run-babe-not-sure-when-I’ll-be-back-love-you deployments. As Christmas came, we had settled into a routine. And while I had made some purposeful plans for the kids so we wouldn’t sit on our butt and feel sorry for ourselves (volunteering for Santa’s Anonymous, Food Bank drives, etc), as the day approached none of us were in the mood. Then on the 23rd my 12 year old crawled into bed with me in the early morning and said “I don’t feel like having a Christmas where we pretend it’s okay Dad isn’t here.” I thought about that a long time. This wasn’t the kid’s first deployment by a long shot, they knew how it worked. I couldn’t make Dad appear, the hard truth he was a world away and we could pray our hearts out but there would be no Christmas surprises with him under the tree. He wouldn’t be there. But did that mean we had to have a crappy Christmas? Were we obligated to have less of a day because he wasn’t there? It was then I realized that we had options. In fact, there were things that we could do BECAUSE Dh wasn’t with us. Not just what we could do ‘still’ but what we could do INSTEAD. Dh isn’t a fan of big cities or crowds, so while I’d always wanted to go to NYC, he wasn’t so keen. New York City also terrifies me. So there’s that. I mean…
So there’s an event coming and you’re looking forward to it! Awesome! I love having something on the horizon that makes me happy. But wait? Is your spouse in the military? Then lets back it up there a second. This is going to take some planning. I am 100% convinced that when Dh has a course or exercise coming up, the powers that be look at the roster of soldiers on it and say ‘find out their spouse’s birthdays/anniversaries/vacations and see how many you can cram into the time we have to plan for.’ Dh assures me no one has the time and/or real desire to pull this off. I disagree. But that’s not the point. The point is, if you have an event coming up that you’d like to enjoy, you may need to make a few plans so you can really be sure it turns out. Plan to be alone for it. Dh absolutely hates the fact that I plan literally every aspect of our lives as though he’s not home. But you know what? Then if he is home, I’m super thrilled, and if he’s not home, I’m far less homicidal (please note I said less). So it’s win/win. 2. Plan and 2nd, 3rd and 4th date. Say it’s date night. Or a romantic weekend. Or say, your honeymoon. Those are things you have to plan his being home for, I understand. So go ahead and have a backup plan. Or 5. You think I’m kidding? I know people on their 4th wedding date. 3. Learn to love the last minute getaway. I loath advance planning…
Today I went to a kid’s Remembrance Day service the day before the stat holiday tomorrow here in Alberta. Dh came, in uniform. This is something he does the odd year he’s in town because it makes my kids unbelievably happy and he’s a good dad. Even though he looks about as comfortable as a very polite bull in a very loud china shop. And they did all the things we do at Remembrance Services. They read “In Flanders Fields.” They sang a song. We sang O Canada listened to the Last Post and we had a moment of silence. Then the kids laid wreaths. And during it all, it was loud. The school goes from preschool age all the way to grade 8. The young kids are just that; young. They whispered until the whispers grew louder. They fidgeted. They fussed. And teachers, they tried diligently to teach them to stop. To make them be quiet and respectful. It only sometimes worked. I remembered then those days when I had very small ones. And I would stand, on my own usually, in the back of a crowded gym on Remembrance Day at 11am. And I’d bounce and I’d feed and I’d beg and I’d do literally everything physically possible to keep my babies quiet. I usually failed. One time I got up with a fussing baby, and I went to leave, not wanting his muted wailing to interrupt the ceremony. Just outside the door an older Veteran grabbed my arm and he said ‘let him cry. We’re still glad you’re here.’ And then, with Dh a world away,I cried too. Today my youngest son and…
“Our small group is going paintballing” he tells me. “I saw that” I reply, hoping to end the conversation with my disinterest. “I signed us up.” “I hope” I sigh, “that by us, you mean you.” “You’re coming!” He laughs “it’s fun, you’re going to love it.” We’ve been married almost 15 years. He’s spent well over 2 of those years at war, as a combat soldier. We were just 20 the first time he left. The first 3 deployments happened almost like clockwork, 2 years apart. He just returned from his 4th this spring. He is pulling out clothes in the morning “we can both wear a pair of my combats.” I stare at him “uh… you realize you have 50lbs on me.” “It’s not a fashion show.” He’s holding them up to me. “They cinch. Paint washes off them well.” “I didn’t sign up for this” I huff while I pull them on. I feel like those first deployments happened quickly and I didn’t have a lot of time to process. Dh doesn’t talk about his time away much. I was overwhelmed at home with the kids while he was gone each time. By the middle of the third, it was sinking in harder. The casualties were close to home. I spent the last day of Dh’s 3rd deployment at a funeral for a member of his squadron. It hadn’t been the first. I don’t know why the fear hadn’t caught me before as…
After a few months that just seems to grip a choke-hold on the military community that Dh is a part of, I was feeling a little lost and didn’t seem to have anything useful to write. What I did see, all around me, were soldiers and veterans from Dh’s Regiment banding together. Message groups, phone calls, texts, drop ins. They seemed to track down everyone and touch base with honest messages that may have all said something different but meant the same thing: “Talk to me. We just can’t go through this again.” So when Ariel over at PMQ For 2 offered to write something for me while I got my #### together, I loved the memory that the post that she sent invoked. In 2001, Dh and I were teenagers getting married. We had an offer for a tiny little PMQ right before the wedding and we needed to move all our stuff there. But I had never lived in Edmonton and Dh had only arrived at the unit less than a year before. We were driving in the U-Haul and moving it all ourselves on a weekday afternoon. I was dreading trying to help Dh carry our meager hand me down furniture into our new home. When we pulled up, there were soldiers there from Dh’s unit, in uniform, sitting on the front step waiting for us. “Took you long enough! I was starting to think I shouldn’t have bothered getting them all a short day today!” said the Master Corporal of Dh’s troop. And the group of them sauntered over to the back of the truck with hardly a word, waiting to help unload. Dh hadn’t wanted…
When I got engaged, I was 18 years old. I lived with my parents and I was in my first year of college. My fiance and I already shared a bank account and the tiny wage he received as a new recruit in the Canadian Forces was deposited there. I used it to pay my parents for the outrageous phone bill we racked up with collect calls in a world before cell phones. A year later I was married and I went from being my parent’s dependent to being my husband’s. The internet is full of articles that tell me why I should be more than a ‘dependent’. Why being a dependent is bad, disenfranchising and demeaning. I am told that I should be more, that I AM more. And I am. I’m a wife. I’m a parent, and a special needs parent. A friend. An advocate. I’m a writer. An employee. A student. But I’m also a soldier’s dependent. This week, that soldier marks 16 years in the military. Back when the phrase “if the army wanted you to have a wife, they would have issued you one” was far more common, and our community was much quieter. Now we have a voice, but the sentiment is the same. ‘Dependent’ is a bad word, used as an insult or a joke. But I feel maybe that’s because we don’t consider what being a dependent means. Being his ‘dependent’ has taught me more about independence than I could have possibly learned on my own. Being a dependent has meant that I moved away from my family and friends as soon as I got…
The following is a loose transcript of the 2nd half of my key note speech at this year’s Military Family Services conference. I’m so grateful for the opportunity I had to share at the conference and hope that it was even a little successful in what I set out to do, which was only share a story in the hopes it would get people thinking. I’m just one family and have only my own voice. Thanks so much for letting it be heard. After sharing my story, I think it’s important that we first understand that I am coming from just one family. We are not special; there are thousands just like us out there. But we all come from slightly different perspectives. The Canadian Forces has many different trades, jobs and postings that will all lend itself to very different experiences. Each military unit has its own unique culture. And each family within it, their own story. Blended families. Dual services families. Same sex partnerships, families with or without children. We can run the gamut of religious, political and social diversity. Looking at us all, what then is our goal? Are we looking for temporary fixes or long term resiliency? Are we giving tools or band aids? If we are, in fact, trying to teach families resiliency, how do we do that? Well, I can say that in our story, I know what didn’t work. There were times that I received more services than others. One deployment, I even received help from the Regiment by the way of a driver to take me to appointments that I was unable to drive to for medical reasons. Which was amazing, and needed at the time as we were new and I…
