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By SARAH SMILEY
Looking Back At Life's Enlightening Experiences
It occurred to me that I had failed to tell the student spouses the previous night the most interesting aspect of military life: the extensive travel that allows you to acquire a delightfully eclectic set of friends. That’s an education all its own!This week I was back in
For the first event on my schedule, I met with student-pilot wives at NAS Whiting Field in
This is a time when your student-pilot husband has very little control over his life. He doesn't know his schedule for the next day until midnight, and he calls a disproportionately large amount of people "Sir." He is also likely to be obsessed with his own health, because flight doctors, the first gatekeepers of military aviation, have the power to change the career path of an aspiring pilot. Mix all this with a demanding curriculum and, well, you know, learning to fly giant aircraft that cost millions of dollars can seem overwhelming.
In hindsight, however, flight school is a breeze – for the wife, at least. As soon as your husband receives his wings, the military sends him to a new job (again, not in his control). That’s when the real "fun" begins – deployment time!
In other words, getting through flight school is a lot like being pregnant: It seems uncomfortable and tiresome, until the baby actually arrives and you realize that you won't sleep again for the next 18 years.
I spoke to the student wives at the base auditorium, which, coincidentally, is where my husband received his wings in 1999. Only I remember the stage seeming taller and the room darker. I told the audience that it was like going back to your elementary school and realizing that the chalkboard, contrary to your memory, was actually very small and low to the ground. Could time – even such a short period of time – really have changed my perspective that much?
Apparently not. After going on and on about my skewed memory of the auditorium, I found out later that the building has in fact been renovated since 1999. The stage was taller, the room darker.
What hadn't changed, however, was the wives. Young, slender and sun-tanned, with long hair and hip clothes, they were a mirage of me at 22 years old. I would bet money that they didn't have a single diaper or binkie in their miniature purses.
The next night was the publisher's release party in downtown
"Susan! Is that you? I haven't seen you in ages."
"Wow, how are you?"
(Both together, with twisted up, curious faces) "So how do you know Sarah?"
"I'm on page 65 of her book. How about you?"
"Our dog, which used to be Sarah's dog, ate a metal sign in the second chapter."
At one point in the night, I was standing in a small section of the room with my children's pediatrician, my pastor, my drinking buddy, my one-time therapist, my old dog's new owner, my son's preschool teacher and my husband's roommate from his first deployment. What do you say to a group such as this? Well, I said, "My dress is so darn tight, when I sat down a minute ago, I busted open the zipper."
Everyone politely looked away and pretended not to hear my nervous, untimely comment.
Then one friend said to another: "So, are you in the book?"
"Several times, actually. I'm a page-65, -82 and -101 kind of guy."
"You the one who gave her the Friendship Bread?"
"No."
"Tried to run her over with a tractor?"
"Um, no."
"Broadway show-tunes guy?"
"Yep, I know them all."
"I should have known. I should have known."
It occurred to me that I had failed to tell the student spouses the previous night the most interesting aspect of military life: the extensive travel that allows you to acquire a delightfully eclectic set of friends. That’s an education all its own!
Just don't put them all in the same room together.
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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.
