What the "Army Wives" don't tell you.

I was reading a fellow military blogger's post from this morning. She was talking about a person that told her she knew "how military wives felt or what we go through after watching the show army wives." This fellow blogger was "speechless." (As was I after reading about it!) Now I was not there for their conversation & I am sure that this person meant well but comments like that leave military spouses all over the world feeling more lonely and irritated than ever. Being a military spouse is like nothing else that I have ever experienced.

Now it is not my intent to complain about "Army Wives" because I watch & enjoy the show myself or to belittle civilian wives. (Marriage is a hard job no matter whether it is military or civilian.) The show is entertaining and does show the public some of what we go through as military spouses. However, unless you have lived, ate, and breathed military life, there is really no way to describe it in words, a television show, or think that you "know how we feel."

This fellow blogger posed the question

What have you done, felt, learned as a military wife that you don't think you quite get from Army Wives?

So here are a few of mine in no particular order.....

how to prepare to have your firstborn baby by yourself with your husband in Iraq.

how to build a house for the two of you without your spouses input and opinions.

how to keep your husband in the loop of your children's lives through pictures and videos of their first steps, birthdays, words, and other activities.

how to hear your husband cry for the first time ever and not be able to reach out to hold him because he is at war

how to pull on base & not cry when you see someone else's welcome home banners and yellow ribbons when you know you have 7 more months to go

how to comfort your children when they cry for their daddy, look at you with tear filled eyes & say "I miss my daddy," or explain that daddy really doesn't live in the computer or phone

how to plan a vacation around deployments, training exercises, and the squadron's schedule

how to roll over at night and not sigh wishing that your husband was lying there next to you

why you carry your cell phone with you ALL the time even to the bathroom for fear of missing a precious call. Crying when you indeed MISSED one of those calls or crying just to hear his voice. Having so much to say and not having anything to say at all but not wanting to waste a single second

mourning family members passing alone because your husband cannot be returned home during a time of war

Murphy's law of the military that everything CAN and WILL go wrong when your spouse is not there to lean on

And mostly, hugging and kissing your husband (possibly for the last time) to watch him turn & leave to go to war.......OVER and Over again.