The sticker. The logo. The name. I get so sick of discussing, ad nauseum, what new products and gear we can emblazon it on. We can etch it! We can embroider it! We can screen print it bigger than our heads! We can wear it on fleeces, T-shirts, hats, vests, jewelry, and onesies! If, by the end of our three-year tour here, any single one of our personal contacts is unaware that Pants worked with this illustrious instructional organization, it will represent an epic failure on the part of our wives' club. We are very, very good at the merchandizing side of things.
What we are not so good at: sharing useful information on babysitters, for example. I spent, no kidding, two and a half hours of Little Man's precious nap time, on the phone attempting to unfuck a writhing tangle of conflicting rhetoric on the "adult" solution to the accidental overbooking of a certain babysitter. It's too stupid to lay the whole thing out, but essentially it comes down to the ridiculous idea that we should be able to "claim" a babysitters' primary loyalty and expect her to run every one of her job offers by her primary family first, just to be sure they don't need her. In the absence of a retainer, or a contract, or, I don't know, ankle shackles, I find this a little too much to ask. Apparently, though, my view is dangerously naive, hopelessly optimistic, and likely to land my ass home alone with a baby while the rest of the wives of the illustrious instructors are out sipping wine, pinkies most definitely out.
What we are not so good at: discussing issues of substance, like how can we interact with our non-military community and justify the shadow our organization casts over the entire town, such that multiple private businesses bear our name, or the image of jets? How can we create meaning for our time here, given that our wives' club is not a tax-free entity protected by the JAG, and therefore able to engage in fundraising activities? Why do we exist, given that we don't support a full-out deploying combat squadron and the attendant needs of its families, but rather a fairly stable instructional school whose scenarios, while extremely valuable training exercises, are nevertheless elaborate works of fiction? The answer I've received so far is that we're a purely social organization whose main goal is to support each other, but by the numbers, I'd say we're a merchandise sorority with some pretty perplexing unwritten rules.
[A side note, perhaps unimportant: Pants' organization treats itself as do many special forces, i.e., they claim, in writing, not to honor rank amongst themselves in day to day interaction. Enlisted personnel and all officers are on equal footing and address each other only by call sign or first name, and salutes are dispensed with unless in the presence of outsiders. There is not a traditional commanding officer, per se. My brother did a beautiful job of explaining the pros of this system to me, namely that when someone reaches the kind of peak performance that allows them to join this organization, that competence deserves recognition; also, the organization prides itself on cutting edge thinking and innovation, so rank informality also encourages candid sharing of ideas and critiques.
But in practice this idea is sticky. Some people will take it at face value, others will read the words and mouth them faithfully, all the while struggling, sometimes without even realizing it, to create and enforce an alternate system of rank, such as simple seniority. Or a far more thorny perception of social popularity. The In Crowd. Both exist here, and I suppose I shouldn't be surprised-- you can't spend a whole career breathing the culture of rank and suddenly set it aside like an outgrown uniform. More to the point, neither can your wife. Families become fluent in this unspoken language of rank because it's built into every aspect our lives-- our base houses are organized to group similar ranks together, we do or do not get saluted coming through the gates every day based on the color of a sticker on our cars, and most of us are used to fleet squadrons where the Commanding Officer's wife and the Executive Officer's wife run the wives' clubs, and the branches below them are where the department head wives roost, and below them, the junior officers', and then in a whole separate tree barely within shouting distance, the enlisted wives.
All of this is to say that part of the rudderless merchandising, backbiting, and clique enforcement of my current group likely stems from this well-intentioned vacuum where rank used to be. And, of course, the rest of it is simply because this is a wives' club and that's the nature of the beast.]
So now it's come down the Christmas party and the question of centerpieces-- should we have them or not, and if so, how much should we allot budget-wise, and finally, what elegant and economical design will most accurately capture the ambiance of an illustrious instructors' holiday soiree? Luckily, I've been a Navy wife long enough to recognize certain disasters from afar, and talk of centerpieces is definitely a cue to break out the flak jackets. I have been part of three separate gatherings in three separate states where a woman has left the room in tears over centerpiece planning. Hand to God. And if it hadn't happened three times, with three nearly identical scripts being recited, I wouldn't have recognized it so quickly this time and jumped on Continental's website to get the hell out of Dodge. Yes, for the record, I am fleeing the state to avoid the Christmas party.
Let us consider the centerpiece: its job is to sit in the middle of the table and create a certain ineffable ambiance, a mood, that says that this is no ordinary evening in which we simply eat food and go home, this is an event. It must somehow satisfy everyone's budget and everyone's artistic taste (or lack thereof), and ideally, it will generate some level of pleasant discussion. In reality, it is a fractious piece of frippery (boom! Alliteration!), over-budget and under-expectation, that will likely block fellow diners' view of each other and therefore achieve the opposite of its stated goal and shut down conversation. It occupies a space on the table that claims to be the focus, but for the majority of diners, it will barely register. (Most Navy parties I've ever attended end with everyone stumbling drunk anyway, and sometimes throwing food, so the idea that we even need ambiance is kind of laughable.)
The parallels between a centerpiece and a dysfunctional wives' club, in other words, are painfully obvious. We think we're the point, but we're not. We climb on each others' backs to achieve some kind of status in a rank-less, yet high-pressure, high-visibility world, and yet, as always, we're not the ones doing the actual job.
So. Home I go, for a much-needed attitudinal recalibration. I'll eat good Mexican food, wander through my favorite toy store, push Little Man around the lake in his stroller, and stay up way too late night after night talking to my mom and watching trashy crime shows on TV. I will not knife fight someone for a babysitter or squeeze myself into pantyhose and heels and scorch my hair flat to spend an evening smiling at people and wondering if I'll be able to reach all the little poison darts raining into my back. My only regret is that I'm leaving Pants defenseless for this... I hope he forgives me.
