Improvise, Adapt, and Overcome

For all you military wives out there, especially the Marine wives, I'm sure you have heard this saying: "Improvise, adapt, and overcome." I'll never forget the first time I heard my husband say that.We were stationed at MCAS Miramar and lived in these crappy, stinky, roach infested base apartments. They were built in 1955 and reeked of mold. Considering my husband was only a Lance Corporal when we moved there-we could not afford to live off base and it was the only thing available to us. The day we moved in I was mortified! I was 8 months pregnant with our first baby and my husband had just returned from a 6 month deployment. We had barely been married a year and THIS was going to be our first house! NO! As we were unpacking boxes this HUGE roach comes creeping out behind the stove and marched his fat ass across the kitchen floor. It scared me so bad that I climbed on top of the kitchen counter(mind you I am 8 months pregnant) and peed myself from screaming. My husband comes running in there thinking I had gone into labor or something and he sees me standing on top of the counter, holding myself and pointing towards the floor. He looks at the floor, sees the roach, and rolls his eyes. Let me just tell you-this roach was GINORMOUS!! And I am still convinced to this day that it was taunting me and trying to claim its territory. No telling how long the disgusting thing had been there! So my big bad ass Marine walks over and stepped on it with his boot. After my superhero husband cleaned up the evidence, he walked over to me and helped me down. I look at him crying and said, " This place is disgusting, I cannot live here with a baby!" He looks at me as he is stroking my hair and says, " Baby-we will adapt and overcome." I looked at him in puzzlement, not really sure what that meant but he was so reassuring that I just rested my head on his shoulders and cried some more. Gotta love pregnant hormones! Later that day he went to the store and bought cleaning supplies, then came back, opened all the windows, and performed a Marine "field day" on our new apartment.
Throughout the years my lovely Marine continued to apply this tactic to our "shit now we are grown ups with babies living 1500 miles away from home" issues. He inspired me with his patience and optimism. I have always been more of a head strong and "my way is the highway" person. He taught me that life is messy and nothing is ever going to be perfect. I began to embrace the "adapt and overcome" motto and was surprised at how much better I felt. We made a drastic change 2 years ago when my husband was moved into the "B" billet arena and took the job as a recruiter. I never imagined that recruiting duty would be so tough. We had been through deployments, surely this would be a walk in the park. WRONG- it took us a good year to work out the kinks and get adjusted. His long hours and absent mindedness are enough to set me over the edge! Learning to adapt and overcome the recruiting obstacles is still a work in progress. I continue to  have my headstrong days where my hubby just bites his tongue and snickers under his breath.  As a military spouse we sacrifice so much for our husbands-planning a wedding in a week so you can move across the country with him, putting college on hold, careers, deployments, moving every 2 years, dealing with kids and the stomach flu while your pregnant and then get it too- but he is in Bahrain, etc. But it is a sacrifice I am willing to live with, because it is for the man I LOVE and ADORE.  People that are not associated with the military will ask me sometimes, " How do you cope? I don't think I could ever manage that type of lifestyle." And my reply to them is," I improvise, adapt, and overcome."