Some of the words I dislike the most being said to me. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had people tell me this! The majority of them being family! “You knew what you were signing up for when you married him.”
I know many other wives who have been told this as well. Here is the thing, did we? Did we really know what we were signing up for? Sure some of us had an understanding of the job and the responsibilities and what the life would entail, we understood the assignment, but does that mean we knew or know it all? Absolutely not! Does the fact that you know that your husband or wife will be away for weeks at a time, with little ability to communicate, mean that your feelings, stress, worries, and want of a different life are invalid? Absolutely not!
I knew what I was getting myself into when I married my husband, I knew that bringing children into this world would be a challenge. I knew that life would be a challenge and that we would be making many sacrifices. However, I believe that you never truly know how challenging something is going to be, until you experience it. It’s easy to stand on the sidelines looking from the outside and say, “Well she knew what she was getting into, guess she should’ve married someone else.” The audacity and the cruelty that people bring about nowadays is just unfathomable to me. Unless you have lived this life and have been within the world of a wildland firefighter, you will never truly understand what it is like.
I always thought I was prepared, but this past year has completely opened my eyes to the fact that sometimes you can’t be prepared for what life is going to throw at you. There have been many restless nights, feelings of resentment towards my husband, they are there, but then they are not. Hatred of the job, just everything. I have never felt this way towards the career that my husband chose, but bringing a child into this world has absolutely changed everything!
I’m very proud of my husband and what he does, but it doesn’t mean that this life isn’t hard. It doesn’t mean that I don’t wish we could be a normal family who gets to go camping all summer, that I don’t wish my husband was around more to help me out and to see our son reach his new milestone of the day! I wish for this more than anyone could ever know, but I also love my husband and he wouldn’t be who he is, without being a wildland firefighter.
The fact is us wildfire wives aren’t asking for your sympathy, because yes, we do know the world we married into. We are asking for the acknowledgement that this life includes a lot of sacrifices, and sometimes we just get tired. We get tired of making all the sacrifices for our husbands careers and asking our kids to do the same. We get tired of the rude remarks and the comments, when all we really wanted was just someone to acknowledge the fact that we are kicking ass, but we are exhausted and honestly a little lonely, and sometimes a little empathy goes a long way.
I always wonder what is actually going through a person’s head when they say this? Are they saying things like “oh well, guess your shit out of luck,” “Your problem, not mine.” Like what is their thought process. It’s as if marrying a wildland firefighter invalidates your right to be sad and miss them when they’re gone, or get frustrated at the constant changes and lack of days off. You don’t have to just sit down and be quiet. It is perfectly alright for you to feel sad, to be frustrated, to get angry. It’s okay to be human and to have feelings! We don’t marry our men for their job! We marry them because we found someone who completes us, who we love and want to spend our forever with. It just so happens that they are wildland firefighters, and this is apart of who they are as people! I know for my husband becoming a wildland firefighter saved his life and he wouldn’t be the man he is today without it.
In the end I can tell you ways to be prepared, offer advice, and help, but at the end of the day, you still have to go through all of those challenges to truly understand the life. All you can do is be prepared beforehand to the best that you can be and have some knowledge of what this life is like. Have the knowledge to make a decision whether or not this is the life you want to be in, but in the end, until you are in it and experience all of the things, you will never truly know, nor will you have a true understanding of what it’s like.
The next time someone tells you that you knew what you were signing up for, the best advice I can give is for you to either ignore the comment, or look at them and tell them the truth. That you had an understanding of what it might be like, but you never truly knew. Don’t let someone be demeaning towards you and the partner you have chosen for life.