(What it means) To Persevere

A couple weeks ago I went on a date with my dh and we watched Battle:LA.  On it, they have a war-cry: Retreat, Hell.  They yell it back and forth to motivate each other.  And it’s pretty frickin  motivating, I gotta say.

Even I wanted to fight the aliens by the end.

My dh’s regiment also has a motto.

Perseverance.

So it’s no Retreat, HELL.  But it’s still….

okay, so I am sure it has a very impressive battle story.

Or maybe if you have tanks you don’t really need a fancy motto?

Now, I can’t say that my dh’s Regimental Motto comes to mind all that often, or ever, but this week, it sorta did.

I have been spending a lot of time thinking about what it means to be a good wife to my dh in his chosen field.  Loving a combat soldier is hard.
To be honest, I think love is hard. And all relationships have challenges. But this is the one I have, and some days it seems like it can be entirely uphill. So for motivation, I started taking a look at the women I saw around me.

And that’s where Perseverance  took on a new meaning for me. 
Because it’s definition has come to describe for me the virtue that I see most in the strong women I have met.

It’s B. who has moved 9 times in her marriage and endured 5 tours.  Who has taken time to home school her kids despite the pressure and stress of running the house alone.

It’s C. who has a handful of deployments under her belt and still stands willing to face another.  Who follows her dh where he leads, even as children reach adulthood and another move could mean allowing them to stay where they are and move without them.

It’s M. who has postponed her wedding date umpteen times to accommodate the military schedule.  With what seems like a million pets.  Oh, and a couple kids, too.

It’s K. who went above and beyond when her dh was the OC on his last tour, who on top of the challenge of running her own home during deployment invited scared women over when they suffered casualties and stood quietly in support at the soldier’s funeral.

It’s H. who’s hubby has to leave, sometime with a few hours notice, without her being able to know where he’s going or how long he’ll be gone.  And then she finds a way to explain that to her kids.

It’s L. who moved from one end of the country to another more than once even after her dh got out, because he decided to give it another go.  Each place meaning a new job hunt, and new daycare and a new beginning.

It’s K. who has moving all over Canada and Europe down to a science and still manages to make every house look like home for her kids.  I’ve never seen a woman who handles 14 hour road trips so gracefully.

It’s B. who manages even with her own disability to still occasionally be the only caregiver to her daughter.  Who struggles with worry for her desperately ill mom who she left thousands of miles away last posting, but is still her dh’s fiercest supporter.

And it can be more than just moves and deployments.  More than attending kids graduations alone and more than acting as ‘Dad’ on Father’s day.  Even more than giving birth with your dh on speakerphone.  

Perseverance takes on a new meaning for other wives.

It’s S. who stood strong while her dh came home an empty shell.  Who held her ground through his anger, his depression, his betrayal and his pain.  And who holds her home and her kids together until he can see the end of the tunnel.

It’s J. who holds her dh’s hand through the night, lying awake to the sound of his nightmares, praying without ceasing that he can have a peaceful sleep.

It’s F. who welcomed home her dh who didn’t make it in one piece, who learned to change catheters and dressings, who found a way to modify the house for his wheelchair and who makes her first priority ensuring that her dh knows her love is unconditional.

It’s L, who in a more dignified way than I could ever imagine in her position, held a folded flag and accepted the challenge of discovering what it meant to be a soldiers widow.

And I have learned that though it breaks my heart, sometimes it’s M.  who hid with her 4 kids and a restraining order while she prays her dh finds peace from the demons that haunt him and have cost him his family.

It’s also women like my mother in law and the others from a time when 7-9 month deployments weren’t eased with email and Skype, who endured it all with only the occasional timed phone call.  Women who rolled change to buy milk, back when military pay seemed to coincide with the poverty line. And before them, generations in both world wars that had nothing but paper letters and the fear of a telegram. I can’t even imagine.

I am privileged to call so many of these strong women friends.  For every one I have met, there are hundreds I don’t know who are managing to make it day by day in their own lives, as loving wives to their amazing soldiers. So of them, doing it while they themselves are soldiers as well. 

There are plenty of awesome perks.  It’s not all hardships and long suffering by a long shot. The fact that super-hero spouses are sexy is one. Mess kits. Family Days. Travel and leave passes and dogs tags with their tans…… I digress…
But every career has the challenges we need to meet head on and choice to face or walk away.

Sure, there are lists of what it is like to be a military wife.  Things like managing finances, sleeping with your cellphone, remembering a million acronyms and memorizing service numbers.  But none of those lists really describe the women that I have met or what it must be like to walk in their shoes.

They Persevere.

Who would have thought that motto could be so motivating?  Bring on the aliens!

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