We Must Try

You can be anything you want to be they say, but can you actually be anything you want to be? I’ve had this idea of sharing my personal experience as a military spouse a long time ago and did you ask what has held me back? A lot; the uncertainties of whether or not it would resonate with people out there, is it even allowable for a military wife to be talking about her experience? No one had felt the need to go out with her experience, why should I? with my current schedule, would I have the time to develop content to post as regularly as is required of this type of writing? While I entertained this thoughts, doubts and concerns, my personal experience particularly the most difficult of them endured and I hated not having to tell this tales with the hope of helping a new, naïve and helpless military wife.

I’ve had senior officer’s wives struggle with remembering exact details of their experiences and I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be much easier to have written all of these up somewhere? Realistically I know the answer but I couldn’t stop asking the same questions in my mind whenever I had such conversations. Truth is, I would hate to not remember clearly some of the things I consider spectacularly impactful in this journey. I consider the opportunity to put my thoughts, experience and aspirations out there a rare privilege.

I have often heard military wives say ‘In my next life I won’t marry a soldier’. First of all, I am not sure if they really mean this or if it is a way of venting out their frustrations in those moments. Secondly, most of the women I’ve heard say these words are truly in love with their husbands, so I am certain it is a momentary thing. However, because different women in different locations and at different times have said this, maybe it is true that if there is a second life where marriage would be a thing, they actually would not marry a soldier.

Becoming anything, you hope to be as a military wife is hard for obvious reasons; you are mostly a solo parent with all the incidences and obligations that come with the territory- school runs, hospital, church, market stops, everything is squarely on you. There are hardly any breaks from this and you think to yourself when would I live and do some of the things I once aspired to? This is when you realize your friends have gone ahead to achieve great things for themselves, even though they may not be so great after all. You may feel like an absolute failure or at least this is how I felt for a long time. But I realized at some point that, family is the most important thing, I was and continue to do an awesome job of raising mine regardless of the fact that after over five years of becoming a barrister, I was mummy Shidoon and not barrister.

Truthfully, you can be anything you want to be; however, as a military wife, it is a painfully slow process.  Kids as you find in every other family setting, come first and it is important that you understand this, then your frustrations at the delayed aspirations and achievements would be easier to deal with. Most importantly, you would know the whys of your sacrifices and appreciate each step of your journey bearing in mind that things in fact get better as the days roll by.