Confessions of a Military Wife (30 page)

When you are not around each other every day, these “outbursts” can blindside you. Jon knew I was in charge of the money and the house. But it was hard for him not to be part of what was going on at home. He also forgot that his first communication with me needed to be more lighthearted and upbeat, like, “Hey, babe, I’m all in one piece!” Not, “What in God’s name did you spend all the separation pay on?”

I think the hardest part of getting calls from overseas is that they come in at all hours. Worst of all, you never knew when you would get another one.

The pressure is always on to keep the conversation positive. The toughest time is when you have had a horrible day and you just want your best friend to be there to listen and comfort you. But you know, deep down, that if you dump on your husband he will get worried and it will pull his focus from doing what he needs to be doing. You just can’t afford to bother him with anything while he is deployed.

Trust me, these men feel helpless because they can’t fix our problems. They hate that feeling, so spare them from it and don’t rub salt into their wounds.

So here you are, you have cried off and on all day. The dog threw up on your pants. Your friends are in their own little world. No one wants to talk to you. You got a flat tire, and now you’re feeling sick. The phone rings. It’s your man and he needs a little phone R & R.

It’s time to remember that as bad as your day has been, it hasn’t been as bad as his day. Your husband has literally been dodging bullets to stay alive.

Now, I’m not suggesting you fake it or hide things from him. I’m just saying you need to think before you speak. As much as you have to act, you need to remain positive and upbeat. He needs that deposit made into his heart.

Write everything out you want to say in an email, journal, or letter. Then sit on it and wait for the right time to send it. For me, letters were a way to get everything out clearly, intimately, without being interrupted. And I lived for Jon’s letters in return.

When you are on the phone, you won’t be able to take your words back. Besides that, the phone could cut out at any time—and it is usually at the worst time.

I always thought of phone calls as quick ways to touch base, and never really put a lot of expectations into our calls. We used them as a way to hear each other’s voices, not as a venue to discuss our feelings.

Phone calls are an art. You’ve got to work on the rhythm and flow. First, you have to get past the awkwardness of not having spoken in a while. Add being hyper and wanting to talk at the same time. Then there’s the classic delay that comes with using government phones.

So you have a phone call that sounds more like two sixth graders with a crush stumbling through a first phone conversation.

When my husband first deployed, Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs) were a huge fear. Chemical weapons were something the troops prepared to face and the wives feared.

The one place that chemical weapons attack first is where cells multiple the fastest: the testicles. All of us had heard about the horrible disaster following the 1991 Gulf War. Some of the troops developed a problem with their semen. It felt like fire when they ejaculated, making sex miserable.

The wives were freaked. Not to mention, none of us wanted one-eyed babies. So the first couple of times my husband would call from Iraq I would blurt out, “How are your balls?”

I begged him to snag some extra kevlar and make a kevlar cup.

Sometimes during deployments you get calls from your husband at odd times, including the middle of the night. The phone rings when you’re half asleep and you have no idea what’s going on.

Some of my more organized girlfriends suggest keeping a list next to the bedroom phone so you won’t forget to talk about the important issues when he calls.

I was never upset when he called late at night, but it did take me a minute or two to get my thoughts together.

PHONE SEX OPERATOR

There was an opportunist who thought he could take advantage of lonely wives accustomed to late-night calls from their husbands.

I heard rumors about a prank caller phoning wives and asking for phone sex in the middle of the night. I was appalled. Of course, we were all afraid of being raped.

This master of “self-love” had learned the base phone prefix and spent his nights dialing away. Wives always answered in fear that they would miss a call from their real husband.

I, too, fell prey to this creep. It was about 2:00 a.m. one morning, and I had not heard from Jon in more than a week.

When the phone rang, I heard a quiet whispering voice on the other end. This was not unusual because Jon liked to keep his conversation private. He called me “Baby.”

“Are you ok?” I asked sleepily. “Are you getting my letters? Darius is in bed with me.” Darius is our cat.

Pause. “How are the kids doing?” asked the soft voice.

The kids?
Wait a minute—time to wake up! I had to think fast. I didn’t want to offend my husband if I was wrong. Was Jon referring to our pets as kids, as I often do? But Jon never did that.

This is more of a mess than you think. You’re thinking, “Well Mollie, just hang up!” I couldn’t! My husband didn’t know about the prank caller because I hadn’t told him. Why get him upset about that?

If I had called my husband a pervert and hung up on him, what would he think on his end? And what if he could not call me back?

Just when I was starting to dismiss my paranoid thoughts my “husband” asked me to have phone sex with him.

That did it. Jon’s a Scorpio, but he’s also Catholic. There was no way this whispering, muffled voice on the line belonged to my husband.

I hung up.

This guy called a lot of ladies on the base. Can you imagine how many wives thought it was their husband and actually had phone sex with this perve?

Maybe they actually were grateful for a little action and refused to accept the fact it was a prank call. We’ll never know.

I know Michelle sat by the phone every night with a bottle of wine waiting for this guy to call. To this day I’m not sure if she was looking forward to cursing him out or going along for the ride!

IN PRINT

During Jon’s first deployment, a reporter from CNN was embedded with his battalion. It was bittersweet and surreal to see this reporter on the news knowing he was with my husband’s battalion.

During his second deployment, it seemed like at least once a month Jon’s photo was on the front page of the local paper. I would get a call from Natalie or Christa screaming that Jon’s face was plastered across the front of the newspaper. That’s when we would jump into action and go out and buy as many copies as possible to mail them out to family members.

That’s also how I found out he had shaved his head. I cried when I saw the image of my husband praying on the front page of the paper. I didn’t recognize him at all, and it shocked me.

I knew this deployment was harder on him because he wasn’t writing as often. The fighting had escalated, and there were numerous casualties.

This shot captured such an intimate moment in my husband’s life. He was frozen in time, caught in a moment of intense prayer. The photo shook me to the core. I could see things about my husband in these photos that others would not notice. It was an odd way of communicating, but I could sense his emotions.

But I had no one to share these feelings with. The other wives had their own issues, and my civilian friends couldn’t relate.

WHY YOU NEED TO SHAVE YOUR LEGS

They say when a bunch of women are around each other for a certain amount of time, they start cycling their periods together. This phenomenon happened to those of us who spent much of our time together. Did I tell you how close the ladies of Del Mar had become?

During tough deployments we shared meals, secrets, tears, fears, exercise, and even helped raise each other’s kids.

But I was not ready to share everything. I had to draw the line somewhere, and Michelle tried to cross it.

It was a hot afternoon. Just another lazy day in Southern California. The kids were playing in the blow-up pool in the front yard. Jon and Kevin had both been deployed for about four months. Michelle and I were both dragging.

When Michelle got thirsty, she asked her son David (who was four at the time), to “bring mommy a coke.” He came back with a Coors Lite.

I don’t think the confusion came from the diet coke can being silver like the “Silver Bullet.” I think Michelle had been busted. And it was priceless.

She drank it. After all, it was five o’clock somewhere. From then on, Michelle referred to her beloved Coors Lite as “Mommy Coke.”

After everyone was done swimming, Michelle needed help emptying the pool. Besides the water, there was grass, plastic wrappers, a swim diaper, and urine from all the neighborhood boys who had been swimming in it.

There was no way Michelle and I could lift it. It was more than two feet deep and weighed a ton. So we stood on the sides of the pool and pushed it down, letting the water leak out. We kept losing our balance because the plastic sides were so slick, and began laughing hysterically. We hooked arms and stepped on the edge at the same time.

It probably looked like a scene from a “Mentos” commercial.

We held onto each other trying to keep our balance and that’s when my leg brushed up against hers. We had become close friends, so I didn’t have a personal space issue with Michelle. Touching her didn’t bother me.

That was when I noticed she had stopped moving and was staring at me.

I looked at her. “What?”

“Miss Mollie, your leg is so muscular and hairy,” she answered. “It’s quite masculine. I think I just got aroused!”

“Yeah, yeah.” I thought she was joking. Then I realized she wasn’t.

This is the price you pay when you don’t shave your legs for a while. Gals, one of your hard-up, horny neighbors may get aroused. Before she could kiss me, I jumped off the pool and ran into the house.

The Bible talks about “Love thy neighbor,” but I don’t think this was what He was talking about!

For days, every time I stepped outside, Michelle would be waiting for me in the driveway we shared. She would stand there waving and giggling. It was too much for me to take, and I was beyond embarrassed. In fact, I was a little afraid and refused to face her. So I stayed inside my house for a week. Michelle would call, but I wouldn’t pick up.

I really freaked out when I heard her purring outside my bedroom window, “Miss Mollie … I know you’re in your room … I can hear you in there breathing. Why aren’t you coming outside? Is it because I was having lustful thoughts about your legs! I have never been ‘lesbian’ before, but there was just something about you the other day …”

Then she would break out laughing. She was getting such a kick out of messing with me!

A week later, when I finally ran out of food, I was forced to leave the house. I waited until I saw her drive off with the kids before I stepped outside.

We laugh about it now. She’ll still call me once in a while and tease, “Mollie, do you remember when I turned gay on you by the baby pool? Your legs were just so masculine. I’d never had thoughts like that before in my life.”

I made sure to keep my legs shaved after that.

Michelle and I were what you could call connoisseurs of lingerie. We bought most of our nighttime fashions at Wal-Mart because we were afraid of being seen at some scandalous store off base.

But Michelle had also found a catalog source that would anonymously mail her selections. She spent hours at night pouring over the catalogs and asking me which I thought she would look best in.

Like I said, we were very close and did share a common bedroom wall. We had few secrets. But our husbands avoided making eye contact for the four years we were neighbors.

One day Michelle came over in a panic.

“You have got to help me! I have a package coming and it’s not here yet. I called the company and they said their driver dropped it off this morning! That means they delivered it to the wrong house!”

I didn’t think it was such a big deal until she reminded me of the selection she had picked out of the Adam and Eve catalog. The company, she continued, “assumed I was a man” and had addressed the package to “Mitchell.” It got worse. They told her this particular package included a “free gift—just for him.”

Then she flipped open the catalog and showed me the free gift. “Oh, no,” I moaned.

It was a fake rubber vagina.

Now I realized her reputation was really at stake. What if someone opened the package without looking to see to whom it was mailed and then doubled checked to find Michelle’s address on it! Someone on our side of base housing—a Navy Captain, or Marine Colonel—was about to find a surprise on his doorstep.

We took off on foot, deciding we would cover more ground if we split up. It took a while, but we finally found Michelle’s box of love and her free fake vagina. With her naughty treasure in hand, she breathed a giant sigh of relief.

And now our Bunco boner had a friend!

Although I saw a few cute things in the catalog, after Michelle’s delivery crisis I decided to stick with my Wal-Mart knock-offs.

It’s important to get exercise weekly, whether your husband is deployed or at home. I am not talking about doing your kegals, although your husband won’t complain if you do.

You need to make a commitment to get your endorphins up during the deployment. I’m not one of those people who likes to sweat or even exert myself. My theory is that since I had done competitive gymnastics for more than twelve years as a child, I was pretty much done with exercise.

However, my weight had fluctuated since meeting Jon. I knew I needed exercise—at least for the endorphins if nothing else.

I had some great neighbors, including Cathy and Brad (who is a Navy Captain) living across the street. Cathy works from home. Like Jon and I, at that point in their lives they were “child free.” They took me out for sushi every couple of weeks and invited me to attend yoga classes.