There was a treasure waiting for me every week in the Orange County Register when I lived at Pendleton.
Jenny Sokol.
In 2004, I first read her column, titled "Singing the Cowgirl Blues." Jenny wrote about getting used to her husband being gone. All the little things that we do as we slowly accept that our husband isn't coming home for dinner that night or any other for a long time. She nailed it and I was hooked! Sadly, her column wasn't archived at the time or I'd put up a link to it.
The Marine Corps is a very small place and it turns out that Jenny and I have mutual friends.
Dave and Nicole are both active duty Marines AND parents. Jenny has written a couple of columns about their lives, trials and tribulations.
Her columns are snapshots of our lives as milspouses and sometime single parents. erious, sad or silly, you will find something from your own life in her words. Jenny's columns appear weekly in the Family/Parenting Section of the OC Register.
Many of her columns are about adventures in parenting. When her husband was getting ready to deploy to Iraq , Jenny looked for books to help her family deal with the separation. Not finding much and true to the ingenuity of a milspouse, she WROTE one.
I have read "I'm a Hero Too" and I highly recommend it to all of you looking for a way to help your children deal with the hard realities of having a parent deploy. Written from the perspective of a young boy, Jenny discusses the feelings of sadness, of missing Dad at school events, of staying in touch with care packages, emails and phone calls and the importance of staying busy.
Check out Jenny's website. I think you'll be hooked too.
