Dead BATTERIES And The Value Of Military Community
Our nanny couldn’t come to work today because the battery in her car died. At least, she thinks it is the battery. She sent me a video of trying to start the car, and everything on the dashboard was flashing while the locks kept locking and unlocking around her. It felt more like her car had been possessed to me, but I don’t know anything about cars.
It’s not a big deal because we are flexible, and she is flexible. I highly recommend finding ways to be flexible in military life, but that’s a topic for another day. Her car troubles got me thinking about the last time my car battery died, though.
I had just finished dinner with a friend around 10 pm at my favorite Mexican restaurant in Oklahoma City. Abuelo’s has the best blackberry mojito if you are ever in that city. We were among the last to leave the restaurant and headed into a dark parking lot. I got in my car, and it wouldn’t start.
This was my first encounter with a dead battery and, frankly, was bound to happen, given that the car was almost ten years old. Luckily, the friend I was with knew more about cars than I did and was prepared with jumper cables. We (and by we, I mean she) hooked our vehicles up and let them charge for a minute.
I tried to start it again with no success. We let it charge even longer, but nothing was happening. At this point, it was time to call in the big guns, and we called whatever AAA equivalent I had at the time. Side note: we’ve tried a bunch of different versions of this through the various car insurance companies we’ve had over the years, but nothing has been as reliable or accessible as AAA.
Thankfully, it only took the truck about 45 minutes to arrive, and he could jumpstart the car. I knew the battery would work as long as I kept the car on, meaning I needed to go straight to the mechanic and leave it there overnight for them to take care of the next day. Now, let me set the scene a little bit better. It’s almost 11 at night and a thirty-minute drive to the mechanic. So it’ll be almost midnight when I need a ride home from the shop. Our mechanic shop was only about 5 minutes from the house, so it wouldn’t be a big deal, except for the fact that my husband was deployed.
Uber was always an option, but they could be had to find that late at night in my area, and I really hate paying surcharges for such a short ride. So I called my next-door neighbor. He worked in a similar job to my husband at the squadron one floor above. He and his wife were my lifesavers during that deployment. There was no hesitation about coming to get me even though it was almost midnight on a work night and his wife was out of town.
That night could have been a lot worse. I had the resources to get me out of a pinch. It wasn’t like the alternative was sleeping in my car in the parking lot of a Mexican restaurant. However, there was a very likely scenario where I sat alone in my car waiting for AAA for 1.5 hours and then drove to a closed mechanic shop waiting for an Uber to arrive. That scenario would have had me in tears very quickly, cursing the military for putting me in the position where I had to figure everything out by myself.
Instead, I got to spend extra time with a friend and made it home safely without facing the scariness of a late-night Uber as a single female traveler. Life will always put us in a position to face and overcome new challenges. Murphy’s Law does its best to ensure those things happen during deployments. We’re going to go through things, and ultimately, we will figure out how to get to the other side.
But we do not have to go at it alone. We cannot be Lone Rangers and thrive in military life. Sure, we can survive by ourselves, but thriving comes from the support of a community. It took almost two years to find that in Oklahoma. It has taken two months in Georgia. COVID plays a decent role in the slow rate at which we built our community, but I also didn’t know what I was looking for or needed. Now, I do.
There’s a military spouse that I met at a mutual friend’s birthday party back in January. We texted a little bit, but otherwise, we haven’t reconnected. I found out that her husband was tasked with a last-minute deployment, though, and immediately reached back out. When she was ready, I offered to take her out to lunch or coffee or send her a door dash gift card if the deployment had her feeling like a homebody.
Everyone copes with the separations differently. Some people need more social activities, and some people need less. Some people need to be dragged out of their houses for their benefit. Having close connections with someone makes it easier to figure out the best way to support them, but ultimately, we can just be the friends we had or needed during difficult times.
It’s easy to think that someone is handling a deployment well just because they can say the words in public without breaking down. I used to think that. But we have no idea how well or poorly someone is coping unless we check-in. And even the people that are passing with flying colors could use some support. Just because someone can do it alone doesn’t mean they should ever have to. Military life is a different beast than anything else, and we must have a community to make it through. Don’t hesitate to ask for help, and more importantly, don’t hesitate to offer it no matter how put together someone looks.