MilSpouse

First things first. To my cousins who read this blog: I guess it's pretty obvious that I keep referring to J as my husband. Some of you already know that J and I got married at the county clerk's office in Colorado last summer before he deployed to Afghanistan. For those of you who didn't know, J and I thought it was something we should do before he left and it was also something we wanted to do for ourselves. My parents and other family members don't know (though J's parents and siblings do), which is why I'm asking, please please PLEASE do not tell your parents. I don't want it to get around (and somehow get back to my parents) that I went off and got hitched. For all intents and purposes, the "real" wedding is later this year.

Okay. Now that I've gotten that off my chest, on to the subject of military spouses or MilSpouses for short. I am one, which is still a strange concept to me. I don't feel like a MilSpouse, in part because I don't live near a base and therefore am not involved with the military community. But even if I did live near Buckley, the Air Force base closest to Denver, it's not like J is stationed there. Our "home" base is in Germany and that's where my support structure would be, if I chose to rely on it. I do receive occasional updates from the Ramstein deployed family listserv, but it's strange to get emails about upcoming events for deployed spouses seeing as I can't attend because said events are happening on the other side of the ocean. It'd be nice to be part of a community of women who automatically understand the ups and downs of deployment and military life...

...but the other reason I don't feel like a MilSpouse is that I don't really identify with the other MilSpouses that I've met. I don't fit the mold of the typical MilSpouse, for one thing. When I've attended work functions with J or have gone to dinner with his colleagues and their wives, I've been a bit of an oddity given my career and education choices. Last summer, I had several conversations with wives who couldn't seem to understand why I was still working in DC and hadn't moved to Germany to be with J. It was slightly awkward.

I recently checked out a few MilSpouse blogs and while I enjoyed reading them, they also don't resonate with me. Most of these blogs have titles like "A Soldier's Wife" or "Me and My Army Man," and are written either by women in their early twenties who married enlisted guys straight out of high school/college or by women who blog about raising multiple kids and life on the homefront while their husbands are deployed; most live in the suburbs or in base housing. I don't fit into any of those situations. My situation is also different from that of these bloggers because their husbands will return home to them after deployment whereas mine will go back to Germany. I'm on my own for at least another eight months--not until August will J and I be able to begin our lives together.

All that said, while I don't feel like a MilSpouse, I'm not immune from the constraints imposed by my husband's military career. I need to figure out at some point what my next steps will be if J does decide to stay in, and it's not easy to plan when everything is up in the air. Who's to say that I won't end up moving with J to one base after another? But we probably won't find out about his next assignment until March...until then, I'm just taking things one day at a time.