Military Spouse Appreciation Day
It’s always nice to have a day of national recognition, but the bloggers here at You Served® and also the good folks at VAmortgagecenter.com appreciate military spouses 365-days a year!
I was looking for news articles and wanted to find something nice to share here. All of the coverage is great and I am happy to see that word is getting out about all that military spouses do, and most importantly that our lives do not come to such clean resolution as we see in 60-minute shows portraying the very complicated and complex lives of military families.
Last night I spoke with a good friend whose husband is deployed again. I was amazed and humbled by her deep love and admiration for her soldier and the men that serve with him. It’s hard. She misses him terribly. Their children miss him terribly, but she has learned the trade secret of balancing out desire, longing, pride and fear. They all coexist and commingle in the life of a military spouse.
Below is a poem I fond on militarywives.com. It’s an adaption of an early poem, but very well done. So, to all of our military spouses today, THANK YOU! Thank you for all that you do in your homes, in your communities, in your families, in your social circles, in and for your Country. You are truly salt to me in a rather, sometimes, tasteless world!
About the Military Wife…
The military wife is a special individual. When she was a girl, her dreams were bold, as bold as her fine, free gaze; And every gift of grace and mind was hers in her younger days. When she was a girl, a golden girl, with a sould as fine as fire. She could outshine the brightest jewel that a rich man’s love might buy her. Yes hers could have been the glittering path through a careless, carefree life. But she fell in love with a military man, so she became a military wife.
Away from the home of her childhood she marched at her husband’s side, For she chose a wide and winding road when she became a bride. And somtimes the road was a hard one, so different from what she had planned; And sometimes she wept for the home she had left as she lay in a foreign land; And sometimes her steps would grow weary as she followed the drum and the fife; But she set about making the world her home because she was a military wife.
She learned to build a hearth for them wherever her man was sent; And she knelt to plant a garden every time he pitched their tent. Yes, she always planted a garden though she never saw it grow, For she knew before the flowers came that she would have to go. But she left each garden gladly though it cut her like a knife, For she hoped it might bring some comfort to another military wife.
To the hardships in her married life she brought one simple truth, A promise that once was spoken in the ancient words of Ruth: “Wherever you go, I will go. Wherever you lodge, I will lodge; Thy people shall be my people and thy God shall be my God.” She shared his joys and sorrows as they made their way through life, For she was proud to love a military man and to be a military wife.
She bore the weight of worrying what fate might hold in store; And the wordless fear of waiting when her soldier went to war; And the nights that she spent fearing that her waiting was in vain; And the pain of wanting someone she might never hold again. But she bore his children gladly through uncertainty and strife, And they never heard her crying for she was a military wife.
She raised a military family with the faith her love had taught her; And she gave the pride she had inside to her son and to her daughter; And she taught them to love freedom and to know what it was worth, As they helped her plant her gardens in the corners of the earth. And she never wished for better than the road they marched through life, Because she was as much military servicemember as she was a military wife.
Adapted from a poem by Caroline Franklin Berry
