I have been dreaming for the last three years of my existence as a Marine, of the day that I could finish my contract and get out to become a stay at home mom. I can still clearly remember the day when my six weeks of maternity leave ended, and I was dropping my six week old daughter off at the home of a stranger. I bawled my eyes out all day. It didn’t help that all of my coworkers were “macho-headed”, combat hardened, male Marines with wives who watched their children all day at home. They didn’t get it. To them, I was just an overly emotional “chick” that needed to “suck it the up” and get working. I had six whole weeks off of work, and that was more than any of them ever got. To them, I was a Marine. Marines don’t cry. It was that day when I decided that this was not what I wanted to do. For the first time in my seven year career in the Marine Corps, I wanted out.
I’ve always been extremely envious of all my stay at home mom friends. I would see their Facebook posts on my phone throughout my workday of them doing fun things during the week with their children. I was at work working on aircraft parts. I secretly despised them. Of course I “liked” all their Facebook posts about how amazing their lives were with their children at home (just to be nice). They made me feel so inadequate as a mother, and there were days when I fell into depression because I couldn’t be the mother that I wanted to be to my daughter. I hated it even more when my friends would invite me to go on a play date on a Monday at one in the afternoon. I didn’t get off work till five, and even then, I had an hour long commute home. In my head, I felt like they were throwing it in my face that they got to do fun play dates every week while I had to work. There were days when I wanted them to feel lesser than me. “I am a super mom. I am a Marine. I’ve been to war. I have done it all while raising a child. What do you do all day?” I was jealous of their life, and sometimes, I told myself things like that to make me feel better.
My last day as a United States Marine came. My first day as a stay at home mom started. I finally got to be just a “Marine wife” and not the “Marine”. I was excited. I was nervous. I was scared. The Marine Corps had been my life for ten years. I made almost equal pay as my husband (who is also an active duty Marine), and money was never an issue. We bought a house in Orange County and I drove a Mercedes. We were going to have to make some huge adjustments so that I could stay at home with my daughter rather than start working right away.
I got rid of my Mercedes knowing that I would not be able to afford the payments on it anymore. That was my first “pride check”. I loved that car. I loved it because it was mine. I loved it because I was paying for it. I loved it because I worked hard to be able to afford it. I was giving it up because I was no longer financially independent enough to have things like that.
Life was completely different now. I was waking up early with my husband to make him breakfast and send him off to work with last night’s leftovers in Tupperware. Just a few weeks earlier, I was up at four in the morning, strapping on my combat boots and putting on my uniform to go to work on thousands of dollars worth of aircraft armament equipment. Here I was now making sure my husband had lunch for the day. Here I was now standing at home alone with my daughter in my PJ’s with no agenda. That was “pride check” number two. I almost felt unimportant. My whole identity up until this moment was being a Marine, a mother, and a wife. I did all three of those things well, and I balanced all three of those things on my own.
The day finally came when I had to go to the nearest base to get my military dependent ID card. That was “pride check” number three. The guy at the ID card center took my military ID from me, scribbled all over it in sharpie, and put it away in a file, and just like that, it was gone. That ID card gave me pride. It had my rank on it. It had my Geneva conventions category on it. When I showed that ID card to people, it told them that I was a Marine. I was treated differently because of it. For whatever reason, that peach colored dependent ID card took a little bit of my pride.
I must admit that being a stay at home mom has definitely been rewarding. Spending the day with my daughter and just watching her grow and learn new things all day long makes me sad that I missed out on so much of her life already. I have a lot of happiness in my heart when I get to make lunch for her and do fun arts and crafts projects everyday with her. All the things I used to secretly envy my stay at home mom friends got to do, I finally get to do. I am still getting used to embracing my new title of “stay at home mom”. Maybe I’ll never fully embrace it. Being a Marine is one of my greatest accomplishments in life, and I am so excited for the day when my daughter will fully grasp just what her mommy and daddy are. I feel like we gave her bragging rights. How many kids do you know that can say that both her mom and her dad are Marines? I guess at the end of the day, there is no harder job between a working mom and a stay at home mom. It all lies on what we, as individuals, pride ourselves on.
