Uncle Sam Needs YOU: I'm Pointing At You Military Spouse

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There is nothing more frustrating than feeling like you’re stuck in someone else’s life while watching your hopes and dreams drift further out of reach. Yes. I chose to marry a man in the military. No, that doesn’t mean I’m just supposed to stay home waiting patiently for our next duty station with hopes I can find myself in a place where my career goals can be achieved. In the last 10 years there have been days, months, and actually years where I sit back and look at him proudly as he is advancing his career, loving his job, and tasting success and promotion around every corner, all the while I’m over here swabbing the decks and rallying the troops to support Daddy while he’s away on another TDY or deployment; through tears, frustration, and missed holidays.This doesn’t mean I don’t love being a mother. It doesn’t mean that I don’t love serving this country. What it does mean though, is that I want more. I want to be in a place where I can be home for my children when life throws us those curveballs, but I also want to be intellectually challenged, see myself succeed in a career, and be part of something even larger than the military.  

Being a military spouse isn’t easy, but it is possible to find a career, something you actually enjoy, that has flexible hours, allows you to put your family first, all while using skills you didn’t even know you had.

A few years ago, in the midst of a PCS from the East Coast to the West, I got a call from a friend asking if I wanted a job. My first reaction was YES! But my heart screamed NO. I was totally torn. I was literally living out of a car and finding refuge at hotels with pools across the country to appease my children who were growing restless with the intensity of driving 2500 miles. I didn’t know where we were going to live as base housing hadn’t offered us a home yet. I hadn’t had a real job that paid more than $200 a month, and I hadn’t had a real résumé building job since I had my second child 5 years earlier. My mind was moving a million miles a second trying to comprehend what made me qualified to do this job...and what was it again? Business Development, a career that sounded interesting, but one I knew NOTHING about.

Why would my friend suggest that I was qualified? He said, “you’re smart, you write well, you know how to create conversation from nothing, and you’re completely underutilized!  That’s what I need”. Even though I was 100% certain that those weren’t real job skills, I was convinced by his enthusiasm and I decided to accept the job.

As I learned the company I worked for and the job I had been placed in, I realized that I didn’t know the lingo this corporation was using, but that was OK because I didn’t understand half the acronyms my husband would come home and spew off when telling me about his day. I quickly picked up the lingo, and  I learned that business development was in fact a really cool and interesting job. It allowed me to start conversations with powerful people, it used my research skills that had previously been used for figuring out my new duty station and where to live or which school was best for my kids, to now trying to figure out why company X would be interested in some technology that would change the future of their products. This job was exactly what my friend had said it would be. I believed that this job was something any SAHM or Military Spouse could do, because we already had the skills within us to market ourselves into something valuable to the company, something that gave me pride in what I was doing, and something that gave me a problem to solve.

Forbes has pointed out three main reasons why Military Spouses aren’t getting jobs, but the most important aspect of this article is that we have to advocate for one another. We have to apply for jobs, showing employers that we are highly diverse, customer focused,  extremely hard working, and the most adaptable group of people in America. And Entrepreneur Magazine agrees that Military Spouses, like their service member counterpart, are typically bound to the statement, “Service Before Self”. However, that doesn’t have to be the case, you can still serve this country while doing something for YOU. Trust me, you deserve a pat on the back for your hard work. You should go after your dreams; Invest in some training, a certification, or schooling to advance your career. If the military keeps advancing our spouses, why not take some time for YOU, and make you a priority for a little bit. And you should feel proud knowing that you can juggle all of these hats at the same time- you were doing it before, you just weren’t getting paid for it.

The point is, there are a million blogs that will tell you that you can do X, Y, and Z from home without any training or endorsements. You are probably in awe of your neighbor who has amazing photography skills and started her own business, and you have definitely thought of becoming an FCC provider to watch children in your home; I want you to hear when I say that these are excellent careers for military spouses, but I want you to also know, as one Military Spouse to another, that you have the qualifications already to become a competitive employee and have a corporate existence. You are, and should be proud to be a Military Spouse, but it’s OK to be more than that too. It’s OK to want a career  of your own, to want the excitement of a promotion, or the joy of closing on a deal. You can have it all, actually. It’s possible to be the backbone to your spouse while caring for children. You can work from home and still be there for the squadron. We just need to redefine skills, write those résumés, and look out for one another as we find opportunities that are right for Military Spouses.