fbpx

I hear Nunavut is very pretty in the summer…

My husband grew up a military brat in the PMQ’s all over Canada.  From Calgary to Kingston to Bordon to Petawawa and then Germany before landing back in Calgary where his dad retired, he saw a lot of army life. And he saw a lot of army wives. So when we married, he had an image in his head.  Either we lived off base and pretended that he had ‘just another job’ and I never involved myself in any way with military life, or I became one of ‘those wives’. And apparently, ‘those’ wives sit their front porch of their PMQ gossiping and smoking, wearing their hubby’s PT gear and yelling in a raspy voice to their 6 kids that they let run around dirty in the neighborhood before drinking the night away with other men while their husbands are away. In dh’s eyes, there was no middle ground between those two extremes. It’s funny, my mother in law was nothing like this, and we know plenty of really fabulous military wives, but he just didn’t shake this one misconception. So after a year of living in the PMQ’s (base housing), we moved as quick as we could afford it to a town off base.  He had his life at work and very rarely did we make any effort to be a part of that life as a family. Slowly, all that has changed. I realized this once when we were laying together on the couch talking after he had got home from work.  He had taken off his uniform and thrown some jeans on, but he had left on the green t-shirt from work.  And…