A curious thing happens to a military wife when she knows her family will relocate soon. I liken it to the last glass of wine, the one that makes you go from the woman who would never sing “Sweet Home Alabama” in public, to the woman who requests it at a bar and then shushes everyone so they can hear her sing it. An impending move causes military wives to do things they may regret later, but it doesn’t matter because they will already be soon.

However, before we get to that let’s back up a bit and define “soon.” Experienced military wives probably read the first sentence of this column and chuckled. “Aren’t we all moving ‘soon’?” they might have said. “Aren’t we living in a constant state of ‘moving soon’?”

While it’s true that most military wives suffer from a lingering sense of "temporariness," (another word that could stand for clarification) something changes once moving is imminent.

My mom, a military wife of more than 30 years, lived in the same city for the last 25 years of my dad’s career. It was an anomaly understood only by my dad’s various detailers. Even so, just by the fact that Mom was a “military wife,” she lived in constant fear of the next move, which actually never came. So it’s fair to say that military wives are always “moving soon,” even when they don’t move for decades or more, but once the servicemember has orders in his hands and the date and location of the next move is, in theory, final, that is when the military wife officially becomes a “short-timer.”

I had forgotten about this phenomenon of military life (perhaps because we’ve been at our current duty station for almost five years now), until I embarrassed myself at my son’s tee-ball game by confronting the opposing coach for yelling insults at the children.

“I’m so embarrassed,” I said more than once the next day.

“Ah, don’t worry about it,” my friend Beth, a military wife, said. “You’re a short-timer now, aren’t you? Heck, I only have eight weeks left here. I’m liable to cause all kinds of trouble before then.”

Short-timer military wives have been known to do many things in the weeks leading up to their moves. Chewing out a tee-ball coach is probably the least of them. Shore-timers have dramatically quit jobs, sunbathed on the driveway (even if they shouldn’t wear a bikini in public), yelled at principals, and told their neighbors what they really think about the pink flamingoes in their yard.

When my husband and I were leaving our last duty station, I finally got up the nerve to confront the teenagers one house away who threw wild parties when their father was out of town. I went out into the driveway in my flannel pajamas,  traipsed across the wet yard and told the teens, who were standing on their father’s driveway smoking and drinking, “If you don’t all disappear in 15 minutes, I’m calling the cops!”

“Go home, lady,” one of them yelled back and kicked an empty beer can at me.
Me, a “lady”? It sounded so old, so matronly. Sure, I was standing in the grass in pajamas that looked my my grandfather’s, but I was only 25 years old at the time. Embarrassed and more than a little deflated, I went back inside to my husband who was asleep and didn’t care. I was mad that I didn’t stick up for myself, and even more mad that I didn’t actually call the cops. But mostly, I was mad that the teenagers had always made me feel that way.

About a week later, after my husband had his official orders to change duty stations, I was pulling weeds in the yard when the teenagers drove by in a beat-up truck. They yelled out their window repeated.

But it least it wasn’t “lady.”

I stood up, waved my shovel in the air, and yelled, “A *^%&$, huh? Now that’s more like it!”

The next night the teenagers had a party. I called the police.

It is both liberating and anxiety-provoking to leave a place that has become familiar. Emotions run high, and sometimes, inhibitions take a back seat.
Which is to say, if you want to know what a military wife really thinks, wait until her husband has orders to move. Or give her another glass of wine. Whichever.