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Sudden Death Matches and When She Is Fierce Speaks

Last week I walked around in a little bit of a haze. The whole working 30 hours a week plus keeping a house that was used to having mom home is starting to wear thin. Dh left for a week as a pre-course to his upcoming 6 week training this spring. I planned and booked my flights next month for a necessary work trip.  Which means, for the first time ever I will be leaving Dh with the kids overnight.  For a week. Then I learned that my trip meant I will be away for the National Day of Honour for Afghanistan, and it started to weigh heavy that I won’t be around.  I’ve always been available, all the time, anytime, for my husband.  But this time I won’t be. And he doesn’t care.  He doesn’t see things like ‘Days of Honour’ as being for anyone other than those who are gone. And he isn’t at all concerned that I won’t be around for one. I care. I so care. School is wrapping up soon. Drama is in Running Club which means, well, so am I. Freckles is starting every day to remind me more and more that he is almost a teenager. Monster had just barely transitioned to being used to Dh away when Dh came home. So that I can then go away.  And then Dh will leave again. The whole time I thought: This week.  I got this week. I could do this week with my hands tied behind my back. About part way through the week I was a puddle.  I was a stress case with 3 jobs and too many…

New Series: The Pink Elephant at Jiu Jitsu

About 3 months ago, I was going to start a series on what it’s like to be a woman starting to take martial arts classes. I was going to write a short piece here and then send in the rest to the Wives of Faith website I write for, since I said I would write on fitness.  It was supposed to be my fierce explanation bout how I confidently overcame my misgivings and walked into a room of men and learned martial arts with them.  Because this is 2014 and women can do these things and so can I.  I’ve watched the UFC, those girls are strong and impressive and I am never going to be a mixed martial arts fighter of any kind, but I can learn sports.  I like learning sports.  Bring it on! The fact that the series should already be finished by now is an indication of how well that is going…. It’s been a long journey just to get here. About year ago I started attending a gym that offered fitness classes, as well as various classes in several different martial arts, for both kids and adults. My kids take Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) and Mixed Martial Arts (MMA), Dh and I take the fitness classes like kettle bells and fitness kickboxing and TRX. We should almost move in, there are days I feel bad for them every time we show up in this big loud family group. There was a comfort level required with the people who work there that I needed before I could try any of the martial arts.  It took a long time for me to trust them enough to think I could walk into their class having…

The Sound Of A Silent Doorbell

12 years ago, the phone call came after I had gone to sleep for the night. I didn’t watch much news, with Dh deployed I had been overwhelmed with the reports that had come from the first combat deployment since Korea.  And so I’d blocked it out, avoiding the reality of it all. My friend just wanted to know if Dh was OK.  She had assumed I had heard, but I hadn’t.  She felt terrible, it wasn’t her fault.  So I turned on the TV and stared as the talking head told me there were reports of Canadian casualties. Almost 5 months pregnant, I had no friends or family in the area, so desperate as I was I called the Regiment. I was 21 and new to everything, I didn’t know how it was supposed to work. This was new ground. War casualties. It’s like the concept caught us off guard. The family support officer took the phone and and all he could say was ‘We can confirm there are casualties but we can’t confirm who they are, because the families haven’t been notified yet.’ They brought me to the Regiment to wait for a bit, I apparently sounded a little hysterical. I’m not proud of how badly I handled the news. I came home to my empty house in the middle of the night, all I could do was wait to see if my doorbell would ring. When morning came and it hadn’t, I received a phone call confirming that Dh was OK. What I felt then was almost harder than what I had experienced the entire sleepless night. It was the guilt that follows that moment…

Canadian Military Kids in April

April is the month of the Military Child. I mean, there’s a month for everything, right?  So why not one for them? It’s actually not even a thing in Canada as far as I know, but we’re going to go ahead and steal it from the USofA for the purpose of this blog post.  I don’t think they will mind, the Americans I know are actually much nicer than we tend to give them credit for. Let me start off by saying that kids in any circumstance, are special. Farmer’s kids are amazingly resiliant at sleeping in combine’s come harvest time. First Responder’s kids spend nights worrying about dad every time they hear a siren. Pastor’s kids get dragged to every single church potluck and hugged by strangers. And kids who’s parent’s work in banks, in fertilizer plants, in prisons and in offices, they have all learned very special ways to adapt to their own life. But I have Military Kids. So that’s what this is about. When April comes around, I see quite a few posts going around the Social Media World. And they started like this: ‘Your average military brat…..’. And I think… Is there an average military child? Some kids, like my husband, will move 5 or 6 times in their life. Accross the country and across the world, they will watch the trucks pack up their life and they will make new friends and learn what TV shows are cool in which crowds.  They will adapt to different playgrounds and different teachers.  Sometimes they will even adapt to a different language. And other military kids, they…