What do you think military spouses knew when they got married?

My response to the egregious comments by Americans about military spouses on NPR's site. See the original article and comments here.

There is a pervasive attitude that I "knew what I signed up for" when I married my husband.
News flash, you don't get a manual that says, "So you are thinking about marrying someone in the military, here's what to expect."
I didn't know that my career would be jeopardized by frequent moves and dislocations.
I didn't know that even when he was "home", he'd really be gone almost all the time. Home is more a reference to the lack of being deployed. It means training (away), yards periods (away), duty (away), etc, etc.
I didn't know that holidays would be nonexistent or that in 7 years of marriage I'd be able to spend just over ~365 days with my spouse.
I didn't know employers would assume I was 1) dumb, 2) deluded, 3) naive, 4) unreliable because I happened to marry someone in the military.
I didn't know that I would be this stressed out all the time.

These are all things I learned after I was married and as anyone who knew me 7 yrs ago can attest to, as I figured them out, I went into crisis. I felt like the walls were closing in. I felt like I was losing myself. I sunk into a deep depression. I lashed out at friends who tried to help.

And then I came to a cold realization. There was only one way to maintain my sense of self: to walk away from as much of this life as I could get away with. I didn't and don't have kids, so I didn't have to worry about taking them away from whatever little time they might get with their Dad. My husband and I were both grown-ups. We'd either make it work or we wouldn't, but what we were doing was unsustainable...for me.

I packed my bags, enrolled in graduate school and told myself I would try to live a life that was as "normal" as possible while my husband carried on serving his country. I wasn't going to accept low wages and lost jobs. I was going to build some sense of stability. This is what Americans seem to think was the right decision for military spouses, i.e. either accept that this is what you signed up for and shut up or leave and shut up.

News flash, America: This is ridiculously hard. No one told me in making this decision that I would lose whatever meager sense of security I had from being able to see my husband's face when he was home. No one told me how much more it would hurt when the Navy ripped the rug out from under us time and time again and I was powerless to provide any solace to my spouse. No one told me how much guilt I would feel because I chose my career over him. No one could have prepared me for how utterly cold and soulless most civilians are when I haven't been strong enough to bear all the ache and the worry for him alone. No one could have prepared me for the depression I feel now that is in some ways worse than the depression of unemployment and undervaluement by the American people when I did have some little moment in the Universe for him and I to be together.

It's easy in tough times to simply throw up your hands and say everyone has problems and you chose these problems. I didn't choose to love a sailor. In fact, as a feminist I tried desperately to avoid the military. I did everything in my power to push Senior Jefe as far away as possible. But he proved himself to be the most doggedly honest and loyal person I had ever encountered and at some point I realized to not choose him would be to throw away the most honorable person I have ever met (to this day) because of hatred of his job. I could not, in good conscience, make that choice.

In being married to him, I found that not everything I had been told about the military and military families was true. I found that military families resembled *shockingly* what American families looked like. There was good and bad in them. I found out all kinds of things about myself and my ability to be resilient that I wouldn't have otherwise known. I also found a severe distrust of authority generated as much by people outside the military community making ignorant comments as people inside who made similar comments about civilians.

I walk a line between two worlds in a way that many military families don't. This both gives me insight I wouldn't otherwise have and gives me great pain because I realize how alone I often am in the world. And while it has given me great patience with civilians general assumptions about the military, because they were assumptions I once carried, I find my patience is wearing thin. Far too many Americans have some delusional ideas about what I should have known when I got married. At first I believed these comments were made in ignorance, but as I hear them even from well educated people, I have come to believe they are generated more out of dismissiveness. If you can intellectually claim that it is every single person in a military family who is at fault for not knowing what none of us were informed of before we got married, then you don't have to take responsibility for creating and or contributing to the situation military families find themselves in.

Most military families prepare themselves for the obvious things. I ran through in my mind many times before I got married what I would do if Senior Jefe were killed, captured or injured. It never dawned on me that I would face the day when Americans would once again turn on the military just as they did during Vietnam. And even if I could have anticipated that animosity, there is no way I could have ever anticipated the day when Americans would no longer be sated by simply turning on the military, but that they would also come after military families and jeopardize military pay, argue that it's their fault that they married someone in the military and it affected their careers, basically argue that they knew what they were getting into. I simply assumed that families would be off limits. I suppose if you wish to call me naive, that was the one thing about which I was naive.