Fighting Our Good Fight
When we were stationed at Tinker, there would be the opportunity to take photos in front of the AWACS (the plane my husband flew on) every few months. We never took advantage of this because my husband is not the biggest picture person, and honestly, we always found out so late that all the slots were booked up anyway. I know this is a pretty standard military practice, especially for those in the flying community.
And I also know that the rest of the world teases us for it a little bit. I've heard things like, "We would never take professional photos in front of the bank my husband works at." Which is honestly very reasonable. I wouldn't want bank photos either, nor would I hang them up on my walls. But military life is different.
These aren't universal experiences across the military, but I think each branch and each job has its own version of these "quirky" things. We aren't going to take family photos in front of the sim building at my husband's new job, but I'm sure there's something we'll do that the civilian world will think is wild.
It's an important aspect of surviving this life, especially for spouses married to service members with high-stress and top-secret jobs. My experience with this has been more minimal. When my husband deployed, I knew where he was. I could at least point to his location on the map and check the weather to see how crazy hot it was. We didn't experience periods where he couldn't communicate for more than 24 hours, except for that time when Meta crashed back in 2021.
Having a job in the military runs every aspect of our spouse's lives. It not only dictates where we live and what they wear. It also dictates what our spouses can and cannot tell us. There are only so many times that we can ask a question only to receive, "I can't tell you that" back.
We make military life the family business because we have to. We can't pretend that the job isn't the biggest part of our spouse's lives. It controls too much to be ignored. And a bad day in military life often looks like something much worse than a tiff with a coworker or a boss putting you on a tight deadline. Our service members bring their work home with them, and for many of us, we can't even know the details of that weight. For some of us, we are probably better off not knowing.
Obviously, this isn't a universal military experience. My father-in-law served over twenty years in the Air Force and never experienced a deployment, and only PCSd twice. My husband grew up as a very non-traditional military brat with a father who worked more or less a 9-5, and he did not move until the age of 12 (aside from when they moved when he was a one-year-old), which was after his father had been retired for a bit.
Our experience is by no means the hardest of military life. In five years of service, my husband has been deployed once and PCSd twice. Those numbers will definitely increase in the coming months and years, but we have started off on a less traditional path. A lot of that can probably be attributed to Covid since my husband arrived at his first assignment post-training just three months before the pandemic shut everything down.
I had a tough time accepting the label of a military spouse. There's a lot of baggage tied to it, and somehow, I thought that if I rejected the label, I could reject the military's influence on our lives. That wasn't true, though, and it often left me more frustrated trying to control things that would never be within my power (at least not for the next 15 years). I do think there are ways to take back our control, though. The military may decide when our spouse can be home at night and what city we lay our heads down in, but maybe they don't get to determine the quality of our lives anymore. Maybe we fight for what we deserve.
I haven't accepted the military's control over our lives. I don't think I ever will because, to me, accepting that means giving up the fight. I want to live my life to the fullest and pursue my dreams to their ultimate potential, which means I dictate where I am going. The military may decide that I'm getting there through Macon, Georgia, but they certainly don't get to decide my destination. I'm still figuring that piece out, and you probably are, too, but don't stop trying to solve it because the answer we find matters. And maybe, just maybe, if enough of us find those answers, we'll change the stigma on military spouses for good.