On Breaking the Mold

Do career-minded military significant others have anything in common with figure skaters? After reading this Atlantic piece on US Olympic figure skater Ashley Wagner, I am beginning to think that we just might.

Figure skaters are expected to be proper. In her article, “Thank You, Ashley Wagner: Skating Needs More Outspoken Women”, author Amanda Palleschi praises Ashley’s visible anger when her skating scores were lower than she expected. (More here if you are unfamiliar with what happened). Palleschi writes, “Olympic observers may call her a poor sport; I say she’s an athlete daring to be a human in a sport that asks its female athletes to be camel-spinning Stepford wives.”

Palleschi welcomes the chance to see a young woman break out of the “Stepford”, lady-like and princess-y mold that figure skating sets up for its female competitors. And I do too.

Ashley Wagner

While we ambitious military significant others may not be twirling on the world stage for medals, we are trying to break out of a mold. This mold is one that has been broken in the “civilian” world but still remains prevalent in the military world.  It is a mold that asks us to be a wife first, and a career woman second. It is a mold that asks us to hold inside our frustrations rather than voice them. Most of all, it is a mold that asks us to be followers, not leaders.

I profile successful military wives to show that it is possible to, in Palleschi’s words, “be a human” in a lifestyle that asks its wives “to be camel-spinning Stepford wives”. No, I’m not saying that military spouses who choose not to have a career are Stepford wives. Rather, I’m saying that women who do choose to have a career with the military lifestyle show us that there is another option. We do not have to all be the same way. I welcome that diversity.

Until I started this blog and started reading more about military spouse careers, I had always felt ostracized for trying to have a career and a military relationship. No other military significant others I encountered understood why I was choosing to live in a different city from my significant other because I wanted to establish my career first.

Now that I know there are so many successful and thriving military spouse careers out there, despite the ups and downs they may have had along the way, I know that it is possible and I am not the only one. I love when I hear or read about military spouses toughing out the rough spots to pave the way to a successful career while marrying into the military.

We don’t all have to be the stay at home, follow you around, military wife that seems to be expected of us. We can break the lady-like mold that has been established for us, just like Ashley Wagner inadvertently exposed the mold that had been established for her.

Palleschi closes her article by noting, “Keep being honest, Ashley Wagner. Because people also don’t want to watch a sport whose athletes don’t reflect the humanity of the very real women who practice it every day.” To this point I say that I hope ambitious military significant others will speak up about their struggles and successes. I hope they keep helping each other along the way and teaching each other how to use the military lifestyle to achieve their professional goals.

Because in a world where every girl is being told to “lean in”, I don’t want any girl to feel that she has to choose between being a military wife and being her professional self.

Adapting Career Tips from Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In to Military Relationships #3

“Don’t Leave Before You Leave”

I think that this might be the most important lesson of Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In for women in military relationships. Sandberg argues that women often jump the gun in their careers by turning down professional opportunities that they think would make it hard to balance their professional and personal lives. In other words, we prepare to leave the workforce behind before we actually physically decide to leave it behind.

According to Sandberg, “the classic scenario unfolds like this. An ambitious and successful woman heads down a challenging career path with the thought of having children in the back of her mind. At some point, this thought moves to the front of her mind, typically once she finds a partner. The woman considers how hard she is working and reasons that to make room for a child she will have to scale back” (Lean In, 93).

Basically, we are letting our future personal goals hold us back today. Now let’s apply this scenario to military relationships. What would Sandberg say to us? I think she would say that women shouldn’t slow down their careers today with the anticipation of the military making their professional goals harder tomorrow.

As soon as I read this chapter of Lean In, I knew I was already guilty of leaving before I left. Knowing that I was going to have to balance my professional ambitions with my boyfriend’s military career, I wrote out a long list of possible careers and evaluated which ones I thought would be conducive to a military lifestyle. I then erased the ones that I thought would not work with my boyfriend’s career and decided to pursue jobs that fit into the careers that did. At the time, I thought this was prudent planning on my part. Now, I realize that it was limiting my options before I had to.

Sandberg would not be happy with this! I was putting the brakes on most of my opportunities before I needed to. Don’t erase certain career paths now because you think it will not mesh with a future military lifestyle. Don’t turn down that promotion at work because you think that if your husband were to eventually possibly deploy, it will be difficult to balance work and family. Don’t throw away your job application to a new company because you worry it would be too intense and you would not have enough time to spend with your boyfriend when he is home.

Don’t base your career decisions on future hypotheticals. As Sandberg writes, “Don’t enter the workforce already looking for the exit. Don’t put on the brakes. Accelerate. Keep a foot on the gas pedal until a decision must be made. That’s the only way to ensure that when that day comes, there will be a real decision to make” (103).

As we know far too well, the military life is unpredictable. We know we shouldn’t try to predict it so why would we base our career on the unpredictable? Follow your ambitions and don’t let the military decide your career choices until it is necessary. Don’t leave before you leave.

Adapting Career Tips from Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In to Military Relationships #2

“It’s a Jungle Gym, Not a Ladder”

 

Jumping around a lot is something that military girlfriends and spouses are used to. We have to be good at jumping cities and jobs because that is the life that we have thrown ourselves into. Although it can be easy to see the negatives of this constant moving and shuffling, Sheryl Sandberg suggests that maybe jumping around isn’t such a bad career move after all.

Sandberg says that more women need to view their careers as jungle gyms instead of ladders. She wants us to understand the value in taking lateral career jumps just as much as the value of taking vertical career jumps. In other words, sometimes it is okay to move from one position to another  even if it doesn’t necessarily move you higher up the corporate ladder. Sandberg notes that “the most common metaphor for careers is a ladder, but this concept no longer applies to most workers. As of 2010, the average American had eleven jobs from the ages of eighteen to forty-six alone. This means that the days of joining an organization or corporation and staying there to climb that one ladder are long gone” (Lean In, 53).

Sandberg even says “a jungle gym scramble is the best description of my career” (Lean In, 53). I think that many women in military relationships would probably have to describe their careers in the same way.  Sheryl Sandberg is proof that women can jump from one job to another, rather than climbing up the ladder of one company, and still find success.

For military girlfriends and spouses, Sandberg’s advice is reassuring. We really don’t have much choice but to choose the jungle gym career plan because it is not likely that we will be in one place long enough to move up the ladder in one or two companies. Sandberg suggests that we can use this career scramble to our benefit when she explains the difference between a jungle gym career and a ladder career. She says, “ladders are limiting-people can move up or down, on or off. Jungle gyms offer more creative exploration. There’s only one way to get to the top of a ladder, but there are many ways to get to the top of a jungle gym.” (Lean In, 53).

Sandberg’s advocacy for “jungle gym scramble” careers really resonated with me as I am planning where I would like my career to go. I suggest that military girlfriends and spouses should take Sandberg’s advice and embrace the uncertainty and creativity that our jungle gym career models allow. We are most likely free from the constraints of the traditional corporate ladder. Go forge your own path!

 

Adapting Career Tips from Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In to Military Relationships #1

“Make Your Partner a Real Partner”

One of Sandberg’s main points is that women shouldn’t have to do all the housework and childcare, especially if they want to also pursue a career of their own. She argues that men should share the responsibility of cooking dinner, staying home and watching the kids and cleaning the house. According to Sandberg, “when husbands do more housework, wives are less depressed, marital conflicts decrease and satisfaction rises…the risk of divorce reduces by about half when a wife earns half the income and a husband does half the housework” (Lean In, 118).

While I certainly agree that the wife shouldn’t have to do all the housework, childcare AND have a full-time job, I think the fact that Sandberg approaches this issue as a choice for men makes it inapplicable to military relationships. For her, the problem isn’t that men can’t do these things; it is that they just simply don’t choose to do it. Unfortunately in the military, these things are more of luxuries than choices. Our boyfriends/husbands can’t just choose to take a day off from the military to clean the house.

We have to take what we can get in military relationships, even if it seems small to Sandberg. Some ideas include: maybe he chooses to be stationed to your dream job next time, you alternate/see-saw deciding general locations of where you’d like to be stationed next (give preference to one career the first time then the other’s career the next time, etc). Or maybe he helps out more with housework whenever he is home or you agree to split cooking duties each week.

However, my favorite tip from Sandberg in this topic is something that actually does apply to military relationships. She suggests that one reason men stop getting involved in housework is that we women tell them they don’t know how to do it. For example, we cook dinner because we tell them that we don’t trust them in the kitchen. We need to let our boyfriends/husbands give it a go. Yes, they are going to mess up but they will never learn how to use the vacuum, the stove or the crock pot if we don’t let them try. So next time they offer to help, let them do it (and don’t get mad when they mess up….unless they start a fire!). Less time cooking and cleaning means more time to focus on yourself, your goals and your career.

Military Spouse Leans In

I recently read Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In and I really enjoyed it. I plan on unpacking Sandberg’s tips and applying them to military relationships in a future post. For now, I was reading through the Lean In website (you should check it out if you haven’t already) and I came across this great Lean In story featuring a military spouse who turned the “cons” of her military relationship into a “pro” that enabled her to start her own projects.

Check it out here: http://leanin.org/stories/maria-sanchez/