Freedom to Serve, Freedom to Marry

I want to take a break from my reflections on my personal military spousehood for today and highlight something far more important: those who are denied the right to be full partners to their military spouses due to their gender. From my very limited experience, I've seen what a challenge it is merely to be a male spouse of a female soldier. Anything that doesn't fit the "army wife" mold takes extra work, and when I think of the barriers same-sex partners face to being a welcome, active part of the military community I worry about what "freedom" it is we fight for.

The campaign Freedom to Serve, Freedom to Marry offers this heart-wrenching look at what can STILL happen to same-gendered partners of military members:

I don't know a single military spouse who finds it easy to cope with the challenges of having a partner in the military, and that is from those who do have access to the benefits of being a recognized military family member. Although the Don't Ask, Don't Tell (DADT) policy that required secrecy of gay service members, the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) still bars same-gendered military families from the sliver of access that make being a spouse workable.

Without health care, the access military IDs bring, support from morale and welfare programs, surviving spouse benefits and other benefits denied by DOMA, these spouses suffer unfairly even after we've taken the huge step forward of removing DADT. Regardless of anyone's personal beliefs around what constitutes marriage, I can't think of a single reason that legally married couples should be able to fight and die for their country but not have the right to be treated as family. For decades the military has created structures to support spouses and children precisely because they know how crucial family input is to whether a soldier, sailor or airman continues their work in the military or moves on. Then why ostracize the partners of good service members due to their gender?

The Servicemember Legal Defense Network has more information here: http://www.sldn.org/ if you'd like to help.

Vocab of the day: 
Military: FSC = Family Support Center

Tide out, tide in

So, the fabulous news is that I have a) acquired summer work and b) almost completely navigated through house negotiations to arrive at a sale.  And of course, after months of waiting and watching, above events happened within a day of each other.

I have discovered that the lovely hubs and I seem to have different processing for future stressful/intense events. I internalize immediately and begin my freakout, tapering off somewhere right before or shortly after said event. For example, deployment. Orders issued about three months before the move: instant Shannon implosion. I was still functional and mostly normal but it only took a tiny trigger to send me into worry mode- sappy movies, terrible commercials, a particularly nice day... bizarrely almost anything. It has been more or less steady suck until about a month after the deployment began and while things are still not fun, I feel like I've already put all my stress and worst-case-scenario thinking in and have exhausted my stash of worry. The recent bad news of Koran burnings has caused some stress, but honestly I've already been through most of it already. Which is kind of nice.

On the other hand, it seems that the hubs does less of this pre-projected worrying. Not to make a value judgement on it or say he's not aware of roughly the same things that have freaked me out for months, but it seems to be dealt with on a more case-by-case basis. Perhaps this is an evolutionary advantage- if we both hit the stress-ball stage at the same time, who is there to be reassuring? I find this pattern emerges in most of our major decisions, and in some ways I find it amusing- "Oh, I've stopped having nightmares about buying the wrong house and being trapped forever? About time for hubs to start voicing some concerns." I find it quite amusing now that I'm calming down overall.

Anyone else find this a trend in your partnerships?


Vocab of the day: 
Military: CIP = Community Involvement Plan