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Afraid I'm becoming a crabby old military spouse!


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Ugh! I've been on another parenting board (not hsing) for years, and one of the sub-forums is for military spouses. I have been on these board for a long time (9+ years) and am always more than willing to offer support and assistance. I've been around the military for a long time and know it can be hard. I also know a lot about various bases and can give information to those who need it. I've also made several great friends IRL, whose paths I've crossed in our various travels. Having said this though, I'm sick to death of the 18/19/20 year old spouses griping and moaning about every. single. thing. It's the military, not summer camp.

 

My BIGGEST pet peeve is all the young spouses who post about how their military member is cheating on them and want to know how they can get said military member in trouble with their chain of command. OMG! If your spouse is cheating, walk away. If you have children with the military member and you do somehow managed to get them in trouble (really hard to do, short of them doing the deed on the CO's desk in front of the CO), what's the point? If they lose rank (doubtful) or get put out of the military (more likely now that they are cutting back on the military, despite the fact that there are people on their 5th and 6th deployments), what good does that do? If there are children involved, all they are doing is losing money they should be getting for child support and should the military member get put out, losing all benefits for the child, including medical and dental. What is the point in that?

 

It just makes me so mad. It's gotten to the point where I rarely stop by those boards anymore (though I do because I know a bunch of people there and have for a long time). Tell me it's just hormones from being pregnant and not that I'm getting bitter and crabby.

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Sounds like preggo hormones to me.

 

I would probably develop a spiel of stock advice to post to those young women, along the lines of what you just said: walk away, and the military will be more than happy to garnish his pay and give you a large chunk of it in child support. Being vindictive isn't going to help their life situations, and isn't likely to teach them anything. Beyond that, ignore such posts and focus on others while on the forum.

 

It's not worth your mental energy to get bitter over it. It takes a lot to make a successful military marriage, and thanks in large part to the way benefits are structured many rush in before they are anywhere near mature enough to handle it. That's been the reality for a good long time, and likely has only gotten worse in the last ten years since I got out of the service.

 

IMO, they ought at a minimum to require some kind of counseling to these young couples before they get married.

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:iagree: Especially the active duty types who get married quickly, in between deployments. Ugh.

:iagree: It takes a special person to be able to endure deployments on both sides of a marriage.

 

Immaturity definitely rears its head when it comes to 18-20 yos being married. When I think of me at 18...'nuff said.

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:grouphug: I know exactly what you mean.

 

I'm not a military wife but I have been married for 30+ years. The company he worked for transferred us a lot, and most of the years that the girls were little he travelled for business as often as he was home. It is not the same as a dh in the military, but I did have to grow a backbone and do many things I didn't want to do and learn to get by on my own.

 

 

Through some of my activities, both irl and online, I talk to younger women (I still think of them as girls even though they are out of school and some are married). I try to be polite and supportive but really, inside, I want to smack a b**** and yell 'stop whining'. :001_smile:

 

things I repetitively say in my head:

 

'grow up'

'THINK about it'

'life isn't always kittens and rainbows'

 

I don't say them out loud but I think them.

 

I'm sorry you have had to cut back on a forum you enjoy. I hope you have lots of happy interractions with grown-ups.

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Thanks ladies. You made me feel better. Of course I've been boohooing over the bomb sniffing dog "Lex" that CNN news just profiled (he was severely injured in a bomb blast that killed his handler), so maybe that took my mind off it.

 

I whole-heartedly agree on the counseling for young military couples newly wed or planning to wed. James Bond and I were already married when he joined the Army, but we still could have gone through counseling. James Bond's 19 year old niece is engaged to her 19 year old high school sweetheart (they've never dated anyone else) who is now in the Navy. We are sooooo hoping she will finish college before they get married (the plan is to marry after she graduates, but that won't be for 2.5 more years). He's stationed in New Groton, CT (his first duty station after A-school) and she's upset that he's so far away from her (she goes to college in north AL). I've tried explaining to her that you don't get to choose where you're stationed and that separation is a part of the life. JB and I are just so worried that she's going to quit college to go be a military wife. Other than going to college, she's never been anywhere (other than a band trip or two). When she graduated last year we offered to pay for her to fly to Europe (and take her to Paris and London) for 2 weeks as a grad gift, but she turned it down because she'd never been on a plane and was too afraid to travel alone. If someone had offered ME an all expenses trip to Europe as a graduation gift, I'd have been packed before they finished speaking the words. I worry about how she's going to adjust to military life.

 

I try to be nice and helpful to the younger spouses but sometimes I just want to smack them all very hard and ask what they thought military life was going to be like with 2 wars going on. Argh!

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This is why I'm not on the spouses board. The one and only time I went there 90% of the wives were whining about being alone for the 5 months of their husband's training.

 

"oh, what will I do with out him?"

"I don't know how I'll survive for 5 months without seeing his face."

 

Whine, whine, whine.

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This is why I'm not on the spouses board. The one and only time I went there 90% of the wives were whining about being alone for the 5 months of their husband's training.

 

"oh, what will I do with out him?"

"I don't know how I'll survive for 5 months without seeing his face."

 

Whine, whine, whine.

 

 

LOL, I feel you on this. You should hear me when I catch a reality show where they have to be away from their family for a month or two. They're on a game show for Pete's sake. :glare:

 

 

BTW, I think it must be hormones. I've been ticking people off left and right on the other boards yesterday and today. Mostly though I think it's because I tell them what I think (always respectfully though) and they don't seem to like it. A woman on a board altered a lot of traditional T-giving meals (including adding Splenda to something-ACK!) and wondered if she should tell her guests. I (and many others) said that yes, of course she should tell her guests (what if they have a food allergy to something she added?) and many people took offense to the fact that I disagreed with the line of thinking that they didn't need to know until after dinner. WHAT? I would flip out. I'm all for full disclosure when it comes to food. On my birth board a woman posted how she punched another woman at WM this morning because they woman hit her several times with her cart. Several people were saying "way to go" and "good for you" and I (and others) told her that she was wrong and lucky that the woman didn't press charges. The wtg camp is all, "get off her back, she was protecting herself and her unborn baby." Um, no, she was assaulting another person. I (and others) pointed out that if the woman hit her "several times" then she had ample opportunity to tell her to knock it off, but had no right to punch her in the face. Good grief.

Maybe I just need to hang out here for a while instead of going there and getting ticked off at stupid things people say and do. You guys don't make me crazy and if someone happens to disagree on something, you're normally pretty sane about it and accept the fact that we can actually have differing opinions. Thank goodness for that.

Edited by Mom in High Heels
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My neighbor returned from Iraq to find out his wife was 'friends' with half the nearest military base. One by one he turned them in to their superiors. His wife left anyway, his marraige left anyway, but he felt like he had done what he could.

 

If they're cheating with another member of the military that seems like an even trashier deception. I can't blame the military men and women for doing what they legally can to stop it. It's disgusting when someone cheats, it's absolutely disturbing (imo) when a military person cheats with the spouse of one their brothers or sisters in arms.

 

ETA, I misread :blush:

 

Yeah, the spouse doing that does seem a little odd, but I guess I can still sort of understand.

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LOL, I feel you on this. You should hear me when I catch a reality show where they have to be away from their family for a month or two. They're on a game show for Pete's sake. :glare:

 

 

BTW, I think it must be hormones. I've been ticking people off left and right on the other boards yesterday and today. Mostly though I think it's because I tell them what I think (always respectfully though) and they don't seem to like it. A woman on a board altered a lot of traditional T-giving meals (including adding Splenda to something-ACK!) and wondered if she should tell her guests. I (and many others) said that yes, of course she should tell her guests (what if they have a food allergy to something she added?) and many people took offense to the fact that I disagreed with the line of thinking that they didn't need to know until after dinner. WHAT? I would flip out. I'm all for full disclosure when it comes to food. On my birth board a woman posted how she punched another woman at WM this morning because they woman hit her several times with her cart. Several people were saying "way to go" and "good for you" and I (and others) told her that she was wrong and lucky that the woman didn't press charges. The wtg camp is all, "get off her back, she was protecting herself and her unborn baby." Um, no, she was assaulting another person. I (and others) pointed out that if the woman hit her "several times" then she had ample opportunity to tell her to knock it off, but had no right to punch her in the face. Good grief.

Maybe I just need to hang out here for a while instead of going there and getting ticked off at stupid things people say and do. You guys don't make me crazy and if someone happens to disagree on something, you're normally pretty sane about it and accept the fact that we can actually have differing opinions. Thank goodness for that.

OMGness! I've got several members of my family that cannot have artificial sweeteners. If dh has any he is liable to end up divorced. It is that serious an issue with him.

 

And the pregnant lady punched another woman over the grocery cart incident? She is luck that the lady didn't punch back and knock her on her @ss or her kid.

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When I was a division officer I got to take a phone call from a wife who had been calling and complaining that she wasn't getting financial support from her dh, who worked for me. I explained that we'd taken him down to disbursing, had him set up an allotment and explained when it would show up. Then she asked me, "How do I get back pay?"

 

It was all I could do to not blast her over the phone. She married this sailor after knowing him for about 6 weeks, had not moved to where the ship was built, had not moved to where the ship was permanently stationed and had no declared intention of moving out of her mom's house to live with her husband, but wanted back pay? :confused1: I managed to not express that I thought that back pay was reserved for situations where there'd been services rendered. I'm all for using the system to make sure that sailors are supporting their families. But this one really got my blood boiling.

 

I think there is a lot of childish behavior on both sides of the aisle. People who are selfish and out to "get what's owed them" but who aren't always looking for a lifetime marriage come better or worse.

 

I don't frequent military boards. I just don't have the emotional energy for that. But I don't see that there is anything wrong with pointing out some flaws in their logic.

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