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By SARAH SMILEY
Short-Timer Military Wives Have Nothing To Lose
A curious thing happens to a military wife when she knows her family will relocate soon. I liken it to the last glass of wine, the one that makes you go from the woman who would never sing “An impending move causes military wives to do things they might regret later, but it doesn’t matter since they will already be gone by then.
Before we get to that, however, let’s back up a bit and define “soon.” Experienced military wives probably read the first sentence of this column and chuckled. “Aren’t we all moving ‘soon’? Don’t we live in a constant state of ‘moving soon’?”
While it’s true that most military wives suffer from a lingering sense of temporariness no matter the duration of a loved one’s orders, something changes once moving seems imminent.
My mom, a military wife of more than 30 years, lived in the same city for the last 25 years of my dad’s career. It was an anomaly understood only by my dad’s various detailers. Even so, just by the fact that Mom was a “military wife,” she lived in constant fear of the next move, which actually never came.
So it’s probably fair to say that military wives are always “moving soon,” even when they don’t move for several years. But once the servicemember has orders in hand and the date and location of the next move is, in theory, final, the military wife officially becomes a “short-timer.”
I had forgotten about this phenomenon of military life, perhaps because we’ve been at our current duty station for going on five years now). Then I embarrassed myself at my son’s tee-ball game by confronting the opposing coach for yelling insults at the children.
“I’m so embarrassed,” I said more than once the next day.
“Ah, don’t worry about it,” my friend Beth, a military wife, said. “You’re a short-timer now, aren’t you? Heck, I only have eight weeks left here. I’m liable to cause all kinds of trouble before then.”
Short-timer military wives have been known to do many things in the weeks leading up to their moves. Chewing out a tee-ball coach is probably the least of them. Shore-timers have dramatically quit jobs, sunbathed in the driveway (even when they should not wear a bikini in public), yelled at principals and told their neighbors what they really think about the pink flamingoes in their yard.
When my husband and I were leaving our last duty station, I finally got up the nerve to confront the teenagers one house away who threw wild parties when their father was out of town. Out into the driveway I went in my flannel pajamas, traipsed across the wet yard, and told the teens standing in their father’s driveway smoking and drinking, “If you don’t all disappear in 15 minutes, I’m calling the cops!”
“Go home, lady,” one of them yelled back and kicked an empty beer can at me.
Lady? It sounded so old, so matronly. Sure, I was standing in the grass in pajamas that looked like they belonged to my grandfather, but I was only 25 years old at the time.
Embarrassed and more than a little deflated, I went back inside to my husband who was asleep and didn’t care. I was mad that I didn’t stick up for myself, and even more mad that I didn’t actually call the cops. But mostly, I was mad that the teenagers had always made me feel that way.
About a week later, after my husband had obtained his official orders to change duty stations, I was pulling weeds in the yard when the teenagers drove by in a beat-up truck. They yelled out their window and called me a name that can’t be printed in the newspaper.
At least it wasn’t “Lady.”
I stood up, waved my shovel in the air and yelled, “A !@#$%^&, huh? Now that’s more like it!”
The next night the teenagers threw another wild party. I called the police.
It is both liberating and anxiety-provoking to leave a place that has become familiar. Emotions run high, and sometimes inhibitions take a back seat.
If you want to know what a military wife really thinks, wait until her husband has orders to move. Or give her another glass of wine.
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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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