My mother always told me that not everyone has the strength or is cut out to be a military spouse.
She’s reminded me in handwritten cards, while we’re catching up over the phone, and in the rare occasions I get to visit with her. She reminds me of how I, me, Jordan Elaine, made the cut.
I’ve always accepted her kind and loving words of support and encouragement with a smile and am, “Yeah, I know,” but it wasn’t until a harsh and emotional breakdown on the bathroom floor, in the middle of the night, that those words of encouragement pierced my heart and opened my eyes to realize her words held a powerful truth.
I found my inner military spouse strength that night.
I found my inner girl-power.
“It takes a strong woman to be a military spouse”
The words rang loud and clear when I was crying out my stress, anxiety, fear, and loneliness on the bathroom floor a few weeks ago. My two babies were crying in the background. Each keeping one another awake with their cries and shrieks. Both seeking my comfort. “Why! I only have two hands!!” I cried to myself.
My patience and ability to comfort them was drained from the day. Two hands were missing that night. My husband’s.
He wasn’t home.
He couldn’t help me.
He couldn’t carry the load.
He wasn’t there to comfort one child so I may comfort the other. He was thousands of miles away, serving a tour in Afghanistan.
So instead of tending to their immediate cries, I take a moment and I cry. Oh my goodness, how amazing it felt to cry, NO, to bawl. I slowly began to regain composure when my mother’s incessant statement of, “It takes a strong woman to be a military spouse,” was ringing loud in my head.
I started to then think about all of the really tough seasons in my life that I have had no other choice but to simply embrace and overcome less favorable or flat out difficult moments because the military needed my husband.
This country needed my husband.
