Things to love

As I mentioned before, I received the book '1001 Things to Love About Military Life' for Christmas.  When I had skimmed through the information online, I never realized it would be a book I would look to so regularly.  I don't think there is a soldier or spouse out there, even those who love the military life, who doesn't have a day from time to time that they feel that living the military life just plain sucks.  I loved being a soldier and I love being a spouse, but I'm no different than anyone else.  I had days as a soldier that I wondered why I had chose this route for my life.  The same is true in being a military spouse.

I guess the difference in how you feel is in the persective you take, the people you choose to be around and what you allow to affect you.  I've been guilty of staying around people for too long who no matter how hard you try to help them, they just simply refuse to try to make the most out of this lifestyle.  Then after time, they started bringing me down.  There has also been days that the weather has been cruddy or new orders for my husband to be gone have come down, etc, etc and I have found myself in a funk that was hard to shake. 

There was a situation recently that my husband had to be gone for a couple of days, but I had been assured by the senior person he was going out with that he would be back in time for a post level Volunteer of the Quarter award ceremony that I was being recognized at.  Well, weather moved in and they weren't able to make it back and my husband missed the ceremony.  Any other day, I would have just shrugged my shoulders and said it happens, but this really got to me.  I guess it's one of those things - when I know ahead of time he is going to miss something (which is more often than not), I don't get my hopes up.  But this time I was sure he was going to be there and then it didn't happen.  I was upset for a couple of hours, but then the bigger picture kicked in.  With weather, flying in helicopters can be very dangerous - I was glad to know that my hubby was going to make it back safe to me instead of them risking trying to fly back and have something happen. 

I'm not saying every situation has a silver lining, because sometimes it just plain doesn't.  But allowing yourself to drown is just going to make every day more difficult as you move through this life.  My book has become a source of positive encouragement when I'm having a bad day... 

What I'm getting at is there is so many things you could possibly hate about being a part of the military life, but there are so many good things about it that it could easily outweigh the negative.  The difference is how you choose to handle the situation.