by Michelle Hozey

Created on: April 14, 2009

A common statement among military spouses is that being a military spouse is a full-time job. As a military spouse your job is to support your husband/wife in their career, make sure your family is taken care of, uphold a good image so as not to make your service member look bad, and at the same time try to succeed in your secondary career whatever you're doing to help bring in some extra income. All the while you are away from your parents, siblings and friends, and everything else you know. You have been suddenly thrust into a new environment where you are confronted with a completely different culture and set of challenges than you are accustomed to. It can be extremely overwhelming at first, but unfortunately, as the enlistment stretches on, it doesn't get any easier.

So how do you survive and even thrive in that type of environment? Patience and understanding. Those are the key elements to survival when your spouse is in the military. The first thing you will learn about being part of a military family is that in the military you are constantly being told to "hurry up and wait". Your spouse is at the beck and call of the military, and because of that, so are you. You must wait. You must try to understand that it's not your husband's fault that he has to work a different shift every other day, making it difficult to maintain a sense of structure in your family life. You must understand that your spouse isn't the one who decided he'd like to live halfway across the world without you for a year. It's his duty; therefore, it's your duty to support him.

Military spouses also need a sense of responsibility and independence. What happens when your spouse deploys and you don't know what bills need to be paid when or how to fix a clogged drain? You must be able to single-handedly run the household without him. While some career fields don't deploy, there are far more that do. You must be prepared.

Another quality military spouses should possess is a sense of adventure. If you're the type of person who would be content to stay in your hometown forever, never venturing outside the county, then the military life is not for you. Military families are constantly being relocated, sometimes to places you may have never heard of. Just when you feel settled and comfortable in one place, you could find yourself being pulled away to a completely new place where you must start over from the very beginning.

The military spouse's image is very important. You don't have to be a social

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