The Things We Married: Challenges of Military Spouse Life and How We Overcame them with Literature

Dear reader, we married them.

Suddenly, we were moving to Germany. Or we were headed back home to live with our parents while our new husbands trained or deployed for weeks or months. We drove to states we’d never been to, calling them home before we’d set foot in them.

We moved our secondhand furniture, our unfinished dissertations, our boxes of old writing. We brought family heirlooms, and we brought cribs meant for babies buried a thousand miles away from where we’d make our new homes.

We maxed out our moving allowances with bookshelves and books: picture books, text books, homeschooling books. We moved books we’d bought for book clubs: souvenirs of conversations we’d had with friends we’d been immeasurably close to for short but intense seasons.

We moved our babies, born while our husbands watched on Skype a half world away, and toddlers, who had already known three homes. We brought artsy tweens and athletic teens. The roots of these children were not deep and strong like oak trees but shallow and wide and resilient like creeping vines, transplanted frequently and fertilized by our growing family traditions, our new Church families (unlike the ones we’d left behind but, somehow, exactly the same), and the fast intimacy of friendships made with urgency because someone is always bound to leave soon and you need a name and phone number for your kids’ emergency forms by tomorrow.

We ended up in Louisiana. We asked to go there because it was close to our families, or we’d willingly gone because it was, apparently, good for our husbands’ careers. Or we’d gone pouting because it was so hot and so far from home, but sometimes God’s plan, irritatingly enough, is better than our own.

We worshipped together. We joined a Catholic women’s group available at nearly all military bases because we’d been to the group before at other locations, or because we sought connection in the lonely trenches of toddlerdom. Together we prayed rosaries for priests and studied the Bible. We comforted each other through the wet-eyed delivery of difficult news about parents or nieces. Some of us met weekly, midday, in the shade of a small pavilion at a playground, to discuss classic literature while our children ran together. Some of us met monthly, in the evening, when our children could attend chapel events or, if they were home, stay with their fathers.

We had never heard of Well Read Mom, or we had heard of it but thought it too much to add to our loaded schedules. Or we’d been independent members for years. Whatever our experience, we found that more and more of the books that we chose to read together were on that or previous years’ reading lists. Reading sustained us: how much easier was it to put our challenges into perspective knowing that we were not, at least literally, being drained of our life blood by a vampire or traversing the country aided by alcoholic lawmen (although some long days with toddlers might share some similarities).

We spent the summer moving pets, toddlers, and teens into new houses, or moving in with inlaws while our husbands went ahead to secure housing. Or we prayed we’d be able to make it through ten weeks of hotel living with four kids without giving up. We prepared for the mountain of administrative tasks required to move a family overseas, or we loaded up the pets and kids into an RV and headed west.

Although we’d initially been underwhelmed by the Year of the Father theme and the list of unfamiliar books, we warmed to it as we began to work through the reading. We brought Peace Like a River on hurricane evacuations, and we read the Aeneid in the car waiting on play practice to finish. We logged into a video chat from the car of a family ski trip, and we talked about St. Francis on his mountain while we watched snowboarders stumble head over board down theirs. Our group chat became an eclectic collection of prayer requests, meatless meal ideas, book recommendations, and discussion about how we could practice poverty in our own lives. We reported that we’d been delighted to discover that old friends or sisters-in-law were Well-Read Mom members, and our rich conversations extended beyond the bounds of our little group.

The year’s theme became more relevant than we had expected as we reflected on our roles in our vocations as mothers who supported men with a unique duality to their fatherhood. In our homes, they fathered our children, but when they were away they became another kind of father to young soldiers in their care. In many cases, it was the young soldiers that needed more guidance, more support, and more care. Our husbands mentored them. They walked airfields during midnight jumps, and they stayed with twenty one year old soldiers, their pregnant wives and toddlers at home, while they waited with the pain of broken spines and crushed career dreams to be medically evacuated. Our husbands took under their wings young soldiers they met at church, and they prayed with us for them and their new wives.