By SARAH SMILEY

Girl Power: Leadership With Or Without Pants

My grandmother, Doris, once a Navy wife, told me that when it comes to husbands, “You need them to lay the keel but not to launch the ship.”

She was talking about giving birth while your husband is deployed, but she was also teaching me about girl power. I know this because Doris has never worn pants a day in her life.

In other words, the woman who always wore a dress or skirt taught me all about “wearing the pants.”

When I was a little girl, I would sit at the blue formica bar in Doris’s kitchen and listen to her talk about the disappointing aspects of men. She often used words and expressions such as “stupid,” “good for nothing” and “those old birds.” She would tell me never to wait on a man, to have my own life and career, and most of all to take care of myself, “because Lord knows a man isn’t gonna do it for you.”

Doris told me these things while she stirred her husband Jack’s eggs and flipped his bacon.

I didn’t know it then, but Doris, my dress-wearing grandmother who definitely wore the pants, was giving me a rich lesson in being a military wife, a role that involves an enormous amount of irony.

The stereotypical military man is full of testosterone and wants to be the carving-knife-on-Thanksgiving wielding “man of the house.” He wants to wear the pants.

In the beginning, he attracts a woman who wants another stereotype in a different sort of garb: her knight in shining armor. Together, they become the picture of the 1950s. And then the man leaves for his first deployment. Now the woman is the de facto head of the house and, as it turns out, she rather likes it!

So what happens when the man returns home from duty? He and his wife fight 10 rounds to determine who will wear the pants. Eventually, the woman puts on her prettiest “dress” and assumes her original position, quietly confident in the knowledge that without her, her husband would be one sorry guy.

They will play the traditional roles of “husband” and “wife,” but both – yes, even him – will be fully aware that, in fact, it isn’t the pants that make the leader.

Some military couples spend their whole marriage trying to balance these shifting roles. The juxtaposition of dependency-when-he-is-home and strong-military-wife-when-he-is-gone is a common reason military couples fight post-deployment and eventually divorce. Peace and a happy marriage come when the woman realizes that all throughout humanity, no matter the generation, females have been in command, despite their apparel.

Doris might have flipped bacon and scrambled eggs, but that was only because my grandfather didn’t even know how to open a can of soup without her help. Big Jack, as I called him, had all the appearances of the “man of the house,” but he knew the truth. He would have starved to death without Doris.

In this way, maybe Doris was teaching less about pants versus skirts than she was about real strength and love. She was teaching me about marriage. Later, she taught me about regrets – for on the night Big Jack died, Doris didn’t see it coming. He was in the hospital for congestive heart failure, but he seemed to be doing better.

Sometime after midnight, he reached out from the covers of his hospital bed and took Doris’s hand.

“Do you know that I’ve always loved you?” he asked.

Doris nodded in the dark. “Yes,” she said.

When the doctors came in the next morning, she knew something was wrong by the worried look on their faces and the way they kept feeling Big Jack’s wrist for a pulse.

“Mrs. Thompson,” the doctor said, “When was the last time you spoke to your husband?”

“It was after midnight,” she said. She was still holding his hand.

The doctor pressed his palms together. “Mrs. Thomspon, your husband has died.”

Doris released Big Jack’s hand, stood up and told the doctors, “Get me my umbrella, I’m going home.” And when she got there, she slept for a very long time.

Her knight in shining armor had died holding her hand for strength, until she had nothing left. Ironic, isn’t it?

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Sarah Smiley is the wife of a Navy pilot and daughter of a retired Navy pilot. She is the author of “Going Overboard: The Misadventures of a Military Wife” (Penguin/NAL), and her syndicated column “Shore Duty” appears weekly in military and civilian newspapers across the country. Read more about Sarah at her website, www.sarahsmiley.com.

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