The Silent Rank: Life as a Military Spouse

This past week, we marked Remembrance Day. Around the world, ceremonies were held, moments of silence observed, and thoughts dedicated to the soldiers that have experienced great personal sacrifice in order to allow us to enjoy the freedoms that we do today.

Even the most devoted pacifist must admit that although we do not always agree with the causes behind the conflicts that our countries may engage in, we must respect the bravery and strength of those who are willing to lay down their own lives for the freedom of so many that they do not even know. I have huge respect for our Canadian armed forces, and always have done.

Recently, I was speaking with an old elementary school friend of mine- we will call her "Diana"- whose husband is a Sergeant with the First Combat Engineer Regiment. We were having a casual conversation about the ups and downs of our lives: antics of our toddlers, who are only 6 weeks apart in age, arguments with fellow mothers... pretty standard stuff. In the course of our discussion, my friend mentioned that her husband was on an exercise, and that she was having a hard time getting everything she'd like accomplished.

The offhand remark got me to really thinking about the life that one must lead as a military spouse. Soldiers are generally lauded and revered, and rightly so, but one rarely hears much appreciation expressed for their support systems. Luckily for me, Diana was interested in answering my questions and giving me a little bit of insight into what it's like to be married to, and raising a family with, an active service member with the Canadian military.

When I sent Diana a list of questions, she was instantly stuck on my first (admittedly ridiculous) one:

What do you enjoy most about being a military wife?

Her answer? When it comes right down to it... not a lot. This is not a life for the faint of heart, or the weak of character. It's an extremely difficult line to toe, and not all can manage it. Military wives, husbands, and children are responsible for so much support and morale for their soldier family members that they even carry an unofficial title: "The silent rank." According to a 2008 study conducted by Princeton University, divorce rates are higher amongst military women and their spouses than their civilian counterparts.  Rates are even higher amongst couples where one partner is former military.

The hardest part? The unending lengthy separations. Diana met her husband "Clark" while she was studying in university. Throughout the first two years of their relationship, they spent an approximate combined total of four months actually enjoying each other's company. During that time, Clark was actively deployed in Afghanistan for two seven month periods, and spent much of the remaining time on training exercises.

While today's military wives often have access to platforms such as Skype and Facetime, in the early days of Diana and Clark's relationship, the only way to connect was through email. While deployed, Clark has fifteen minutes of computer access per day. This usually means that a choice has to be made as to where his fifteen minutes are spent: a brief email to his parents here, a bill paid there- cat videos don't exactly factor in here.

And of course, there's the constant danger. Sometimes, in the back of my mind, I'll worry about my husband getting hit by a car on his way to work in the rain. For the better part of two years, my friend's husband was working as a tank mechanic in Kandahar, his life in frequent, if not constant peril. Clark has survived hours of enemy fire, and was even awarded the Medal of Military Valour- Canada's third highest military award- for his service. He has had friends who were not as lucky as he has been, and who perished in battle. Though Diana burns with pride for her war hero husband, it's hard to imagine knowing that any second of any day, she could be on the receiving end of the phone call telling her that he won't be returning home.

In addition to the big, obvious stresses of being a military spouse, there's all sorts of minutae that the average civilian might not consider. Now retired from teaching elementary school classes, Diana runs her own successful business out of her home. She works a variety of hours, and when her husband is on exercise, child care can be difficult to obtain in a pinch. Resources exist for emergency child care situations, but Diana can't just say, leave her kids with the hubby and go to Target just to escape for a few hours (as I am wont to do). Neither Diana nor Clark have family available to watch their two children nearby.

And then there's the relationship with the children itself. I know that many stay at home parents such as myself can relate to the fact that it can be a pain in the ass when, after working hard all day handling issues from tantrums to fights, working Daddy or Mummy comes home and gets to be the "fun" parent.

This phenomenon is only exacerbated when Daddy/Mummy is away for weeks, or sometimes months at a time. It's understandable that the working spouse would want to maximize their rare time with the children- but unfortunately this often comes at the expense of the parent who is home managing discipline and doling out chores day after day. Luckily, Diana tells me that Clark shares equal authority over the unpleasantries of parenting when he is home, though she assures me this is more the exception than the rule.

There's also a pretty archaic attitude still firmly, if not officially, in place within military families: the military spouse is expected not to "trouble" their active duty partner with minor details about their day to day difficulties. In a hand-out for military spouses Diana was once given, she was advised to simply "bake cookies" whenever she was feeling stressed or unhappy. I actually laughed out loud in shock at that one. She tells me that during Clark's first deployment, she was sending him cookies constantly because she baked "so god damned many of them."

It is absolutely evident why a soldier in a war zone would need to be 110% focused on the job at hand, and need to not be distracted by stresses from back home. If I lose focus at my "job," my baby might eat cat food. If Clark loses focus at his, lives can be lost.

Still, a huge burden is placed on the non military spouse, having to give so much support and frequently not expect it in return. So how does Diana make her marriage work? She chalks it up to her fierce independence, and the fact that she knew what she was getting into from the beginning. When they first met, Clark was already an active serviceman, and had previously finished a tour of Bosnia

 Diana fell in love with Clark, job and all, and was prepared to take it. Their wedding took place between Clark's two tours of Afghanistan. He almost wasn't able to make his own wedding, stuck on a training exercise.

My friend is a highly admirable, take charge person. She has started and grown her business. She claims she's not a great housekeeper or cook (you and me both, sister), but the crafts and snacks she makes for her kids always look pretty Pinterest perfect to me. She fills her shoes as mother and wife fabulously, and even does a bit of Dad's job while he's off on exercise- and somehow she doesn't fall apart. I honestly don't know how she does it.

Our military families need our support. They need visibility, they need appreciation, and they need to be recognized for the huge sacrifices they make in loving a soldier. When so many young men and women return from conflict with PTSD, it is their families who are there to nurture them and help them overcome their pain. They are vital to the happiness and success of our military personnel, and yet they remain so frequently in the shadows, ever the "silent rank," ever supporting, ever anonymous.

So today...or...next Remembrance Day, since it's 11pm and I'm only just wrapping this now...but next time you lend a well deserved thought to the brave men and women who have served and died for our country, try and spare one extra thought for the brave men and women who love them. It's not an easy job, but someone's got to do it.


As always, the opinions and conclusions herein are my own, reached after a primarily casual chat with a friend. No compensation of any kind was provided for this post. Names have been changed at the request of the involved parties. I chose Diana because she's tall like an Amazon, so her husband naturally had to be Clark.

Contesting: How to Score Free Stuff for Little Work

So a few weeks ago, I won a trip for two to Paris. I was shopping at Toys R Us for my son's second birthday present, when I got a phone call telling me I was the grand prize winner of the Excel Gum Shut Out Bad Breath contest. You may have seen it advertised-- I certainly have. My prize includes airfare, 7 nights in a 4 star hotel, dinner at the Eiffel tower, a Paris city tour, Versailles tour, Seine cruise, day trip to Bruges, and $750 in spending money. I'm still kind of in awe, and I don't know that it'll feel completely real until we leave in September.

The truth is, I win a lot of things. I was turned onto "professional" contesting by my friend Sunshine, of Transforming the Now. She's been doing it for years, and has had great success herself: last year she won an all expenses paid trip to Australia. She swore that with persistence and diligence, you will win, and you will win big. Here I am, a year and a half after starting, with a $10,000 trip in front of me. That's not to mention all the smaller prizes I've won. In 2013, I won over $8,000 in prizes. So far in 2014, I'm up to over $12,000. I've won three trips to Whistler, an iPad, multiple cell phones, and countless household items. Contesting basically keeps me in a lifestyle that I couldn't otherwise afford.

Since winning the trip to Paris, I've had a lot of friends ask me what, exactly, it is that I do to win such awesome stuff. I decided to write a blog post explaining how I contest, so that interested parties can check it out. I developed my own system from advice given to me by Sunshine, and it's not the same as her system. Should you start to contest, your system will no doubt be different from mine. But here is what I do, to get you started!

First of all, in order to win, you need to do this every day. I spend roughly 2 hours, more at Christmas, just entering contests. I do it while my kids are napping, and it's not a fun time. I make myself a cup of coffee, put on some music, and get'er done. You can't do it once in a while, or a couple of days a week. If you want to win, you need to be persistent. You also can't just enter 10 or 15 contests...I enter probably 300 every single day. In the average month, I win a prize or two once a week. I have also had slumps- before winning the trip to France, I hadn't won anything beyond a chocolate bar or two in over two months. Slumps are really, really hard to get through, and it's easy to give up. You need to push through them and keep at it, because tomorrow could be the day you win $20,000, or a trip somewhere cool, or a new car.

The first thing I do every day when contesting is visit my big site: Contest Girl. It's run by a wonderful woman named Linda, who fastidiously searches high and low for every contest she can find to enter. Another site you can use is Contest Canada, but it charges a yearly fee beyond the one month trial period, and I found that it has the same contests as are available on Contest Girl, and I found its layout less efficient. So for the purposes of this post, I'll just discuss Contest Girl (CG).

You're going to want to make an account on CG. This way, you can keep track of all the contests you've entered, and all the contests you enter daily. What I do each day is first visit Canada - Single Entry. These are contests that allow for only one entry per person/household. I will enter all of the new contests. CG is updated every day, 365 days a year. After entering all the new single entry contests I'm eligible for (and you want to pay attention to eligibility- make sure you're not entering one that's only open to ON residents if you live in BC. CG states eligibility clearly on every listed contest), I move onto daily entry contests. This is where the bulk of my time is spend. Every day, I enter all new contests like with single entry... but these contests allow for an entry a day, so the ones I'd like to enter daily, I add to my "my contests" folder. This saves them for me to return to the next day. Upon adding the day's new daily entries, I go to my 'my contests- dailies' and enter all of my saved contests. There are usually roughly 150-200 contests saved in there. CG automatically removes a contest once its end date has come.

Weekly, monthly, and odd entry contests also exist, and you can also save them into your folders. I don't enter these ones, namely because I can never remember to do so. But they are there, and you can definitely experiment with them.

Upon completing my dailies, I check one more section of the CG website: Canadian blog contests. These are the most fruitful contests by far. The prizes are genuinely smaller than those sponsored by big companies, but the odds are also far better. The bulk of my winnings come from blogs. Most blog contests are run using the 'rafflecopter' widget, and most have an option for daily tweet entries. It's crucial to have a twitter that you use exclusively for contesting, as you'll be spamming it right up. You're not technically breaking any of Twitter's rules by doing so, but you need to be aware of the daily tweet caps- I usually hit them around Christmas, when contest volume is through the roof. But I digress, go through the Canadian blog contests and add any you're interested in entering to your SINGLE entry contests folder. I do this just because it keeps them separate from the corporate contests. If a blog contest is listed as daily, I will just use the 'add your own' tool to add it to my singles folder. I'm OCD like that. Everything in my singles folder is still daily entry.

After completing everything on CG, my next step is to enter local radio, television, and newspaper contests. These are another outlet with great odds. I win from local papers all the time. The great thing about these contests is that you can often win tickets to local events and concerts, which is really fun. Some great experiences can be had. I keep a bookmarked list of these outlets and run through them daily. Most are single entry, but it never hurts to check for a new contest and takes very little time.

Finally, my last step is to go through a bookmarked list of my favourite blogs. I have about 25 that I check daily, and they usually have multiple contests running, again with daily entry options via Rafflecopter. These really blow up around holidays, and your time spent contesting will increase dramatically. It's usually worth it- I won almost all of my Christmas presents last year.

So that is basically the long and short of it. It really takes hardly any time, for relatively big payoff. You just need to be consistent and persistent, and before no time you could find yourself on a plane to France as well! Bon voyage!