Day 273: Can You be Your Spouse's Biggest Cheerleader When You Don't Like the Game He Plays?

Work can be great. Work parties can be great. Then again, you could be in the military and cordially “invited” to mandatory “parties” that take time away from your family and personal life when you’re already working fifteen-hour days. Welcome to my husband’s life and the one I share with him. I’m sure many people have the same type of problem at their office, I’ve had to deal with it myself, the difference is that we’re talking one or two a year, not nonstop. I don’t want to complain, but we only see one another Friday-Sunday nights, so when he ends up having to stay at Fort Bragg for a weekend shindig it means we don’t get to have our time together. We don’t fight, but we frequently bruise one another when it comes to his career. It makes me wonder how you can be your spouse’s biggest cheerleader if you don’t like the game he plays?

The military owns you 24 hours a day so you don’t get to decide that you would prefer to go to your kid’s soccer game, or church, or in our case see your wife. He’s gone to eight or more of these forced social gatherings in the last six weeks and more than half are on days that he should be here with me. I want to be supportive of him, but we have major differences in how we view his career. This is the only thing he’s ever done. It’s paid for both his undergrad and grad degrees and pays our bills currently, so I cannot say I’m 100% ungrateful. The problem is that I don’t like to be told what to do, and in this situation I am being forced to follow orders and I’m not the one in the Army.

Jeff is not a fan of every aspect of his job – who is—but he has been in long enough to understand the political side of it and the extreme time commitment military service requires. I find it difficult to express my displeasure about the infringement on our life without judging the military itself. What if your spouse was a criminal defense attorney and helped legitimately guilty violent criminals go free? You still love your wife or husband, but you can hate that part of their job, can’t you? The sheer time commitment Jeff has devoted to the Army is commendable. This is not a 9-5 job or part time passion. He’s a career officer and for the most part he loves his job. I want and need him to know I am proud of him. I tell him, probably not enough, but I do tell him. What I don’t do is show him by shutting the hell up.

I’m not the typical Army wife and to an extent I do not want to be involved in his job. I treat it like any other career and maintain my distance the way we all do in the civilian workforce. The military is not a traditional office and while my head gets it, my emotional rationality does not. Each social engagement he is forced to go to we also have to pay for. If you’re going out with buddies and having a great time you don’t think twice about paying for your food or drink of course. If you don’t want to go, don’t like or want the food, and are not drinking your weight in Budweiser it seems ridiculous that you’d have to pay for it. Then again, I’m thinking like a civilian. Jeff never complains, I guess I do enough of that for the both of us.

Bottom line, we all want our partners to be proud of us and supportive. I’m not sure what it says about me that I am having trouble with this. There is so much bureaucracy in the military lifestyle and my natural tendency is to push back, but I think at some point you have to swallow your medicine and pretend you like it. I can always tell my boss to shove it, doing that in the military can get you more than fired. I will endeavor to be more supportive and keep my comments to myself. It will likely give me headaches, nausea, and acid reflux, but I’m going to try. I may not be a good Army wife, but the least I can do is to try to just be a good wife, period.