Watching the Snow

Scientists say there are no two snowflakes that are exactly the same. Perfectly symmetrical they’re unique.

Delicate until they’re pressed into use as a fort or a snowball. They gather strength from pressure and from each other.

Military spouses are like that. Each one of us is unique. We all miss our husbands/wives, we all struggle through the deployment and alone we feel fragile, like one more thing, one more emergency, one more stress, could shatter us from the inside out.

Together, however, we gain strength.

Just after Christmas I made a point of looking for the positives. Things that were good despite the separation from my spouse. Despite the heart wrenching loneliness, the empty days and the emptier nights I sought things that I could look forward to and gain strength from.

I found some of those positives in my fellow military spouses.

We meet on Tuesdays for Coffee Break at the Military Family Resource Centre (MFRC) and although we talk about our husbands nothing is focused on the tour.

Mostly it’s a time where we choose to laugh at things that have been done or said. A time where no one calls us “mom can I?” and although we’ll always be Mrs Reid or Mrs Jenkins or Mrs Howell or Mrs Peters or Mrs Forrest we can separate from that at least for a little while.

No one ever forgets where our husbands are. We know exactly where they are – it sings through our blood like a Gregorian chant. But for those two hours we get to be “the girls”.

We laugh; poke fun at each other and our husbands. We ooh and aah over pictures and cute stories, we talk about plans when the “boys” come home. It’s a time that is precious to all of us. Because in those two hours we’re protected. We’ve formed a snowball and gather strength from each other.

Being together doesn’t make us miss our husbands less. It doesn’t make the tour go faster. It doesn’t remove the stress or lessen the burden left to us.

What it does is reinforce the fact that we are not alone. The boys have their unit, their crew, their groups – they are not alone. We have small children, and each other.

The home unit has done little, if anything, to make us feel like part of something bigger. They’ve continually dropped the ball, ignored us, and failed to check on us. I’m sure they told the guys that they would be there to support their families. In reality, we’ve gotten an invitation to a Christmas party and a card wishing us happy holidays.
If it weren’t for “the girls” and the MFRC, I, for one would feel isolated and alone instead of included and protected.

We’re all in this together. We’ve been in it together since our husbands came home and told us that they were going overseas. The girls were mostly strangers to me before the Afghanistan crucible made us sisters. And I wanted to take the time to thank them for their strength.

Day 160