Stress and Relaxation.

A few nights ago, a friend of mine came to me stressing about life and the pressure she was facing trying to figure out what she wanted to do with her life. After talking to her, I couldn't help but think about how the military lifestyle can be rather stressful. While I don't talk about it much, I am no exception to this. When I moved here almost a year ago, I had my expectations for life here. Now that I've been here for almost 9 months, I've seen that my expectations aren't always reality. I expected to have a job within the first few months...I'm still unemployed. I expected to have the huge network of friends like I had in college...I have a few close friends that are amazing, but not the large group I figured I'd have. I wanted my princess happily ever after...I married an amazing guy but it can still be difficult sometimes. I wanted some stability...I got a life that can be in a whole different state and very different in just 3 short years. So I can understand that this lifestyle can be very stressful and can be a challenge on people, marriages, everything. Although, listening to her, I felt blessed to have a husband who doesn't put pressure on me and who supports me whether I triumph or struggle with the Air Force lifestyle.


I also feel blessed that he and I have made a plan for having children. A lot of stress in our marriage has been financially and planning on when to start a family. Finances are still stressful as we're still paying off student loans and, with me not having a job, we're not bringing in the income we desire. However, F and I had a talk about planning a family and I am much more relaxed now that we have a plan. F has finally come to realize what I already knew, that we're never going to be completely ready, so he's agreed that we'll just go with the flow and not really try but not really not try either. Just whatever happens, happens. A baby will come when the time is right. I can't even begin to explain how relaxed this decision has made me. It's just one less thing we have to stress about in a lifestyle that already comes with a lot of stress.

An Airman's Wife

I found this poem online one evening when I was just being bored and I instantly fell in love with it. Especially with F being TDY, this poem really came at the perfect time. I just had to share it with you ladies!

“An Airman’s Wife”

I’m married to my hero,
I live a life some can not bare.
His job is not done safely on the ground,
But high up in the air.

I spend many nights alone,
Awake for hours at a time.
Longing for that man I love,
The one who‘s again left me behind.

I share him with this country,
To which he swore he’d be true.
And though I admire his integrity,
Sometimes I don’t want to see it through.

He’s promised to protect them,
Those who weren’t born free.
And when I explain it to our son,
“Sometimes that’s without you and me…”

And I know how much he’s missing him,
Because we feel the same…
We miss our hero, and our daddy…
We hate this silly game.

Our days are never promised,
And it seems so unfair…
But this is the life we’ve chosen,
To leave it now, we wouldn’t dare.

The day’s always drag,
Time never seems to fly!
But people enjoy their freedom,
Because our daddy protects the skies!

We fly the stars and stripes,
And our yellow ribbon’s too!
We’re proud of where we come from!
We love, the Red, White, and Blue!

We’ll support what he stands for…
Liberty, Freedom, and Life
Because I’ve taken a vow that I’ll never let down,
To be my Airman’s wife…

Giveaway!

One of my friends, and fellow Air Force wives, just PCSed from here and, now that she's settled in her new house, is having a giveaway! I highly recommend checking it out. And, while you're there, you should follow her..her blog is fantastic! :)

Giveaway!

Motivation

It’s amazing the impact one person can have on your life. 

A little over a year ago, F left for Officer Training School down at Maxwell AFB in Alabama. I took him to the airport and went with him to the gate. We sat there, waiting for him to board, and I clung to him in any way possible. My stomach flopped and I fought off nerves; I was terrified of him leaving because I had no idea what to expect. I still can clearly remember him standing in line to board the plane, tears streaming down both of our cheeks. And, just like that, he was gone for 3 months. It was our first separation and the beginning of our Air Force life. Since then a lot has changed but I still haven’t come to fully love the military lifestyle. If given the choice, I would still gladly pick going home over being here. Then I met this little old lady. She changed everything.

Thursday of last week, I had a bunch of errands to run on base. One errand was to swing by the pharmacy to get more eye drops for F, who had PRK eye surgery about a month ago. While I was waiting for the prescription to get filled, I sat down next to this little old lady and her middle-aged daughter. Somehow a conversation started up between us and, suddenly, I felt like I was talking to the future me. She told me about when her husband joined the Air Force and how she would cry all the time because she was very close to her mom and missed her a lot. Everything she said sounded exactly like how I feel. The more she talked, though, the clearer it became that, while she started out rough, she ended up growing to love the Air Force life. She told me that her husband stayed in for 27 years and, looking back, she wouldn’t have changed a thing. She was so pleasant and truly a strong military wife.

When we finally parted ways I found myself walking back to my car feeling a lot more confident in this lifestyle. Maybe it’s not exactly how I envisioned my future but, here I am, a military wife and, that day, I became determined to make the most out of it so that, someday, I can be that little old lady in the pharmacy telling a new military wife that it’s going to be okay. I will probably never see that little old lady again but I am convinced she was my angel, put there on purpose to help me see that, truly, everything is going to be okay.

TDYs and "the big D"

In our house “the big D”, or deployment, is never really brought up. We understand that it’s a part of military life but F (as we will call my husband from now on) is not eligible to deploy yet so we figure it’s something to worry about when the time is closer. However, a deployment came up at work for 1st Lieutenants and Captains. F will be eligible next year after he makes 1st and is highly interested in this voluntary deployment. I can all but guarantee that, when he makes 1st, he will apply for this deployment. I know it’s still a year away but, just hearing him talk about it made me all nervous and scared. I really don’t want him to go away for 6 months, let alone to a dangerous area. Granted part of this voluntary deployment is spent somewhere stateside, it’s still 6 months of him being gone. We were apart for 3 months when he did OTS (Officer Training School) and that was hard enough…and we talked everyday! It makes me so nervous already.

Not to mention TDYs. I would say 75% of last year was spent separated from my then fiance because of various TDYs. This year we joked that maybe we could actually spend all the holidays and other important dates together because we definitely didn’t last year. Now here we are, just a few days into 2011, and F already has dates for a TDY. I know I’ve gotten used to them, and they’re never really long anymore, but I still don’t like them. If there’s one thing that makes a military marriage so painful, it’s the huge amount of time spent apart. No matter what people say, it never gets easier.

The beginning.

October 30, 2010. That was the day that I got “promoted” to military wife status. That was the day I married a 2nd Lieutenant in the United States Air Force. It was the best day of my life and the day that I thought I should start a blog on the military life. So here it is.

Military life began for me in January of 2010 when my then fiance left for Officer Training at Maxwell AFB in Alabama. I’ve always respected military and their families because I’ve always imagined that it’s a rather hard life to live. I can now say firsthand that I was right. I always pictured my future as graduating college, getting married, starting a family, all of that in my home state of Michigan. I never had any intention of leaving the 15 mile radius around my hometown. Then I met this boy and everything changed. Suddenly my future became full of a lot of moving and a lot of separation. 2010 was very trying for me. The first three months of the year were spent being hundreds of miles apart from my fiance, something that was new to our relationship. Then, upon his return from training, we had two weeks to enjoy Michigan before we were packing up everything we own and moving to Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio. Five days after moving here, my fiance left again for more training, leaving me in an area where I knew no one. I was incredibly homesick and I wanted so badly to be done with the Air Force and back in Michigan with all my family and friends.

It has now been eight months since we moved here and I am still rather unsure of the Air Force lifestyle. I’ve met some great people, have made our house feel more homey, and have returned to Michigan fairly regularly but I’m still not a huge fan of this. I’m not good with goodbyes so it’s hard to make some great friends only knowing in the back of your mind that you’ll be going your separate ways in just a few years. It’s also hard to feel like a place is really “home” when you’re never in the same place for more than a few years. Also, the military life isn’t very luxurious. We live paycheck by paycheck, barely able to afford much in the way of going out and having fun, because we don’t have the money for it. So the days are spent sitting home with nothing to do and no money to do anything, a routine that gets very boring very fast. Finding a job is a challenge because our address shows up as a military address when it’s put in the computer at most companies and no one wants to hire someone who isn’t going to stay. To say this lifestyle is frustrating is an understatement. And I haven’t even gotten to deployments yet!

Little by little, though, I’m learning how to be a better military wife and I’m slowly learning to just make the most of this life, even if it isn’t ideal. I’ve learned to enjoy the people I meet because, yes, we will have to go our separate ways someday but, until then, just enjoy the company. I try not to let the boredom and lack of money get to me and I try not to vent too much to my husband who felt bad from day one about taking me out of Michigan. I truly miss Michigan more than I even thought I would and I’m already looking forward to the day my husband retires and I can go back to the home where I left my heart. Until then, here’s my adventure in the Air Force.