Arts

For Military Wives, Happiness is Delayed Gratification

How I learned to wait for the marshmallow.

Welcome to "Threeway," a regular Double X discussion feature in which three contributors dissect politics and culture from distinct points of view. Our second discussion is among three women who have written memoirs about their experiences as military wives: Lily Burana, author of I Love a Man in Uniform: A Memoir of Love, War, and Other Battles, Alison Buckholtz, author of Standing By: The Making of an American Military Family in a Time of War, and Sophia Raday, author of Love in Condition Yellow. This is part five. Read part one here, part two here, part three here, and part four here.

Dear Lily, Dear Sophia,

I’m surrounded by boxes, the pantry shelves are bare, and we’re sleeping on mattresses on the floor until our cross-country move later this week, so the question Lily poses—how much control we military spouses have over our lives—has been very much on my mind. We didn’t choose to move to Washington State; the Navy picked it for us. I am choosing to move with my kids back to the East Coast, but only because my husband was tapped for a year in Baghdad. Coming to terms with this lack of control over my short-term destiny has been one of my greatest challenges in assimilating into military culture. So when others tell me, “I don’t know how you do it,” I usually assure them I don’t do it very well.

But it’s not just about accepting the lack of control. It’s about embracing delayed gratification. Perhaps the most successful military spouses are the ones who as children would have passed the infamous “marshmallow test,” recently mentioned in the New Yorker, in which psychologists gave child subjects a marshmallow and told them that if they waited to eat the marshmallow until the researcher came back, they’d get two instead of one. Decades later, researchers found that the kids who were able to delay gratification were more successful; good strategizers, they were patient enough to distinguish between short-term gains and long-term goals.

To me, life as a military spouse is the ultimate marshmallow test. It’s all about deferring the dream, and waiting 20 to 30 years until you can get your husband back. After the tour is over, I keep repeating to myself, we’ll be together again; after he returns, we can do all the things normal families do; after his deployment, we’ll be whole again.

I know how important it is to live in the moment, but I can’t control the moment, so in the meantime I make the most of it, enumerate the positives (like job security, financial freedom, and no-cost health insurance, all triumphs in today’s America), and wait to get my husband back. I value his service, and I’m proud of him for doing well while he’s doing good, so this isn’t as painful as it might sound. I see the marshmallow, I can even smell the marshmallow, but I leave it on the table.

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