• life

    Wife Out of Context

    Without the Army, I don’t know who I am or what I’m supposed to be doing; it’s like the week between Christmas and New Year’s, but without the glee. I’ve lost track of how old my toothbrush is. When did I last change my contacts? I’m lost in time and space. I don’t know where to put things. I don’t know what’s for dinner. One day my husband said the baby needed to stop coming into the bed with us in the mornings. I said one of us would have to get up with him then. He suggested that would be me since it always used to be, but that…

  • life,  Uncategorized

    What I Learned in My Fourth Year of Marriage That Changed My Life

    My fourth anniversary was on Thanksgiving this year. I hadn’t known that was possible because I thought Thanksgiving was always the last Thursday of the month, and my anniversary, November 22nd, is more than seven days from the end of the month. We All Have Problems Last year on Thanksgiving I decided I would ignore all my marriage problems for the next year to see if they went away because maybe they were in my head. My husband had been deployed to Afghanistan when his dad died at the end of November. He came home on the first of December. At the end of the trip to lay his father…

  • #wifelife,  life

    New Mom, New Me

    I have a terrible haircut right now thanks to postpartum breakage. My baby is 7 months old and I still can’t fit into any of my old, regular-sized clothes. I quit my job, but my house isn’t always clean, dinner isn’t always done. Who am I right now? Racked with anxiety and reclusive tendencies, I can clearly see I am not the same person. I used to be so shiny and ambitious. I used to be mad at my husband because he wasn’t as eager to please me as I was him. Now going above and beyond on anything doesn’t cross my mind. Instead, I exist in the relentless cycle…

  • life

    Marriage: Year 3

    It occurred to me that each year I’ve written some sort of year end review about my marriage for my anniversary. Today is my third anniversary. Without looking back at my other essays on it, I know I’m not as happy and not as profuse as I was one year in. I don’t want to shy away from the realities of marriage and the Army, but I do understand how sensitive of a matter being honest actually is. I am not as happy as I was two years ago because stress exists, namely the fact my husband has been on a different continent for the last 5 months and I…

  • life

    The Boys Are Deployed

    I don’t want my husband to deploy. I want my husband to deploy. My husband is about to deploy. His battalion has been gone for a while now and he will be joining them soon. Am I sad? Not on the outside- or the inside really. In my brain, it’s a sad situation; in my mind, there is no use in crying about it. I have been trying to articulate my feelings on this for weeks because they are complex. Feelings about being away from my spouse are the simplest. Feelings of not wanting him to stay are hardest to express. When my husband leaves, it will just be me,…

  • life

    #WifeGoals

    I had a marriage epiphany a couple weeks ago. As I was presenting to my husband my quarterly list of grievances about him, and argued about what qualifies as “effort,” it occurred to me that I could put more “effort” in myself. Last month I heard myself refer to a previous version of myself as “when I was a full time wife” in conversation. Even though my husband never complains, I figured I could try to be the girl I know he would like. As I do, I made a list of goals for the week: Keep the house clean. Consume and discuss politics. Have meals ready when Spencer is home…

  • #wifelife

    7 Ways to Be a Good Spouse (At Bad Times)

    In November Spencer and I celebrated our two-year anniversary, and the retrospective portion of that was a lot different than the year prior. They can have 2016, it was rough for us. I had sat down then and tried to write a reflective post, but it just was not coming together. It was hard to sort through everything and make it interesting and upbeat. Right now I’m in a unicorn phase where I am obsessed with my husband and what he’s doing and wearing and he can’t get in a fight with me, so I wouldn’t want to convey otherwise. I decided that better than describing what BS we went…

  • girl looking forlorn at a beach
    #wifelife

    Married Men

    “We’re both married,” I said to you. You blinked in recognition and said “Yeah,” as if I had said “We’re both over 5 feet tall.” Obviously you did not feel that being married was any sort of contingency piece to inhibit you from letting me know you want to be more than friends. I blinked back in confusion and astonishment because you were the second person to come to me with this. I’m not going to act like you never piqued my interest. I’m human. I like attention. Many of us wives aren’t getting enough of it thanks to deployments, *TDY, and schools; not to mention the fact that you…