So I was feeding my habit today, when I tooled over to Military Spouse Magazine's discussion about the influence a military spouse has on the service member. This, ought to be interesting I thought. It was, but for all the wrong reasons. The discussion was originally supposed to be focused around an OpEd in the NY Times about how a spouse influenced one soldier to leave the military and then all the other ways he felt military spouses influence the other aspects of military life. In many respects it was a positive puff piece about how the American public needs to support military spouses more for all the sacrifices they make.
You wouldn't know that from the discussion comments on MilSpouse Magazine's facebook page, which included the usual trash the spouse in question and claim she was just weak, with a side of family readiness groups (FRGs) are awesome and anyone who says otherwise is eeevvviiiillll.
I have a problem with this. Not only is it well known that there are both good and bad FRGs on the planet, just like there are good and bad people, but there is a whole spectrum of military spouses and people in general. I find it atrocious that as military spouses we so often turn on each other and are our own worst enemies. One FRG leader in the discussion says she basically tells women to "Grow a pair". I don't see how, if you are hurting, depressed, and lonely, this comment is going to do you any good at all. I am not trying to call this woman out, but I think she articulates a pretty common viewpoint and when you look at the other comments that becomes quite clear. I am not going to go into my FRG horror story, because it is old hat and I have tried to forgive the women involved in the incident for how I felt I was treated. What I will say is that military life, however much people want to believe you KNOW what you are getting into before you get married, is a shock to the system. My life before I married my husband was so different than my life now that it is hard sometimes to think back to that part of my life and feel like I know that person (e.g. single Smurfette).
I went through a major identity crisis when I got married. Here I was at one of the best research institutions in the country and for all intents and purposes my life as a single Smurfette was going to be made. I could have grasped the grass crown by 28 and then, poof, it was gone. It was partly due to my difficulty in adapting to the stress of being newly married and facing my spouses' training and deployment schedule. Marriage for us was not what I thought marriage was going to be like based on what my civilian friends had. And on top of it, the academic community seriously shunned me for selling out to the man, which I have alluded to before. I felt adrift in a maelstrom without a lighthouse or anchor. It was crushing. Having fellow military spouses turn on me as much as my "friends" in academia did nearly did me. I was pushed out of my doctoral program and suddenly everything I thought I was going to be was washed from my fingers. I have never been so depressed and so alone in my life. After that, I worked my way back to the surface and made a very few friends online who were supportive of me and I swore that I would write a check for whatever the FRG wanted, but I would not allow the people who hurt me that close to me again.
I often wonder if things would have turned out differently for me at Ivory Tower #1 if I had had any sort of support from the military spouses around me, rather than being looked at like fresh chum. I don't know for sure it would have made a difference, but I think it might have. And even now, when I see spouses ripping each other apart, it makes me heart sick. There are so many people out there who are willing to do that for us. like the people in Ivory Tower #1 who were supposed to be my friends and weren't, why do we do it to each other?
I know I am going to sound life a religious freak in this next bit, which is going to be funny since I haven't been to church in 6 yrs, but bear with me because I don't know how else to express myself. FRGs tout their contributions to charity in their justification of maltreatment of other spouses (see the facebook comments if you doubt me), but I think this is due to a misunderstanding of charity.
So I am going to share my favorite scripture with people (no I am not proselyting for Christianity) and please pardon the links they are from the original site:
1 Cor. 13: 1-9
I would suggest that all the fundraising in the world is not charity in its truest sense. Charity, in its truest sense is about reaching out to the people around you and lifting up the hands that hang down. It's about seeing past the person as they are today and seeing them for the good steps they are making, however slow, to becoming the stronger, better person of tomorrow and supporting them on that journey. It is an exceptionally rare quality in society today and it is one that military spouses should own as part of their life motto. And it shouldn't matter if the man or woman we are talking to will be a military spouse for one day or 20+ years, we should always love them as the brother/sister they are to us and support them in their goals, dreams and desires because together we will succeed and divided we will fail....And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing.
Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.
Not all of us are socialites, or doctors, or nurses, or fundraisers, or moms/dads or a million other things and the time for trying to force all military spouses to be the same has to end. We can't all be the same, nor should be want to be. If everyone was a brick layer, but no one knew how to make mortar, we'd all be screwed. We need to appreciate each other's talents and help each other develop our talents so we can build a City on a Hill. On 9 January 1961, President-Elect John F. Kennedy returned the phrase to prominence during an address delivered to the General Court of Massachusetts:
In 2010, we as a military community need to be a City on a Hill and realize that we can dramatically shape the public's image of the military and of ourselves. We can stand by and bicker among ourselves and tear each other down and moan about how unfairly we are treated, or we can band together and love and accept each other within the bonds of true charity and decency and build something beautiful that people will speak of for centuries to come. The day and age of the True Woman model of a military spouse is over and should be dispensed with. It doesn't work. We don't sit home waiting on the widow's walk for news our husbands/wives are dead. We are multitalented women who can have anything and do anything if we can put our pettiness behind us and rise like cream to the top....I have been guided by the standard John Winthrop set before his shipmates on the flagship Arbella three hundred and thirty-one years ago, as they, too, faced the task of building a new government on a perilous frontier. "We must always consider," he said, "that we shall be as a city upon a hill—the eyes of all people are upon us." Today the eyes of all people are truly upon us—and our governments, in every branch, at every level, national, state and local, must be as a city upon a hill — constructed and inhabited by men aware of their great trust and their great responsibilities. For we are setting out upon a voyage in 1961 no less hazardous than that undertaken by the Arabella in 1630. We are committing ourselves to tasks of statecraft no less awesome than that of governing the Massachusetts Bay Colony, beset as it was then by terror without and disorder within. History will not judge our endeavors—and a government cannot be selected—merely on the basis of color or creed or even party affiliation. Neither will competence and loyalty and stature, while essential to the utmost, suffice in times such as these. For of those to whom much is given, much is required.
Let us shake off the shackles that bind us and lift up one another and bring about a new age of the military spouse that defines us not by our spouses' jobs, but by our personal strength and individual and mutual contributions to society and each other. Let us look deeply and honestly at the spouses around us and accept them for who they are and support them and love them so that they can grow in our light and let us never again accept leaving even one spouse behind. By embracing the true meaning of charity for ourselves and our fellow spouses, we shall suceed against any odds.
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