No, seriously. It has its moments. It really does. And I know it doesn't seem like this makes much sense now (just like calling a scene from The Incredibles the best mil-spouse movie scene ever didn't make sense at first, either), but just bear with me here...
One of the things I have really gotten used to in my years as a military spouse was the family atmosphere that grows on you. If one of my neighbors was running to the store and knew my husband was gone and I was nursing three barfing kids at home, I'd get a call to see if there was something they could pick up for me. If there was a class one of my kids was taking and I had to take another child to soccer practice/Girl Scouts/etc I could usually find someone I knew at Class A to keep an eye on my child while I ran another child to Class B.
This also extended to childcare - I often had other people's kids at my house. On the other hand - it wasn't unusual for me to send a kid to someone else's house when I needed to do something sans children myself.
The military family dynamic is really "pay-it-forward" based. You kind of have to be, one only needs live through one PCS or deployment to know how quickly karma can turn on you.
So when we moved back into a civilian community I spent a lot of time being surprised at the difference in the barter system here. My third daughter frequently acts as a mother's helper to another family on the block - and they insisted on paying her for it. This makes me a little uncomfortable, because I just KNOW that sometime while AFG is deployed I'm going to need to take a kid or two to the emergency room and I think that means I'll have to pay the neighbor for watching my kids while I do it.
The same thing goes for my animals - even though another neighbor of ours is tremendously busy, when daughter #2 offered to walk his dogs for him a few times he refused, quite uncomfortably. Apparently he thought she was making a business pitch rather than just trying to be helpful. So, I guess I won't be asking that neighbor to check on Ike and Mamie if we're gone somewhere for the day.
Anyway, when I was thinking of all these incidents the other day, it reminded me of a scene from The Godfather, one which I think perfectly encapsulates the military family approach to community and doing favors for each other:
What do you think?
