Compounding my feelings of inadequacy, I also struggled with writing patrol orders, like a lot of other women. I couldn't write a simple sentence with a subject, a verb, and an object—the declarative style that made it easier for a Marine to follow an order. Instead, my sentences tended toward literary.
I had excelled in my writing efforts in college, but there, my professors wanted prose. I could do prose. Oddly, the Marine Corps didn't seem to like flowery sentences. Looking back, it seems a simple thing for a leader or mentor to say, “Hey. If you can write complex sentences, you can write simple sentences. Here's how to do it, but let's also talk about why you need to do it.” But there was, of course, a less simple explanation: I had grown up couching my demands in pleasing-sounding, kowtowing language to avoid sounding like a bitch. Giving orders is not polite. Young girls are trained to be polite and unassuming—there's no Boy Scout badge for that.
So, my leaders took one of my best skills and turned it into a failure. It set me on a downward spiral that reduced my confidence in my ability to do anything other than an easy job as a lieutenant. My parents did not raise me this way.
I grew up in Aberdeen, Maryland, surrounded by the military. I came from a family with a proud military history. My dad's father had been in the Army—a career soldier. He enlisted and served in World War II and the Korean War, and then he became a warrant officer. He retired while he and my grandmother were stationed at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. My mom's dad was also in the Army. After completing his tour, he became a civil servant and continued to work with the Army at El Paso, developing missiles.
My mom was raised in Texas, but her mother was British, so when she was a kid they spent a lot of time going back and forth from the States to England. That's probably part of the reason why mom was so independent: it took a lot of confidence to be the odd kid out. She and my dad met when she was a single parent in El Paso, working at the Taco Box. My dad was in the Reserve Officer Training Corps while at college, and, after he earned his commission, my parents got married. After he completed his tour in Texas, they moved to Maryland when my sister and I were little. But then he was assigned to Germany for a three-year tour. Mom packed up the rest of the family after he had been there for a year, and we all moved to Germany. Before we left, she had to give up her job as the manager of a retail store to go be with my dad. She was miserable in Germany. It was difficult for military spouses to get employment overseas. Only so many wives can work at the commissary or the post exchange, and that didn't suit her interests, anyway. She became a secretary, but she hated sitting behind a desk all day. After a while, she didn't know who she was anymore.
So, my mom put her foot down. We moved back to Maryland, and my mom said, “I'm not moving around again.” Mom went back to work and quickly moved up through the retail-clothing ranks. She worked as the manager at the Limited, which, during the 1980s, was a big deal. It was one of the cool mall stores—like the Gap—back when teenagers were mall rats, and Valley Girls inspired the nation's style. Mom eventually became the manager at Macy's, which also used to be a big deal. Dad went to grad school in Virginia, but she said, “I'm staying here.” So he came home on the weekends. They eventually bought a house in Aberdeen where he was stationed for a while, and then he did a one-year unaccompanied tour in Korea. “Unaccompanied” means the military won't let your family go with you. He did a year at Fort Drum in New York, and, again, she would see him on the weekends.
We never moved out of the house.
I probably got a lot of my independence and my willingness to speak my mind from her. She made it clear to my dad that she considered her career to be as important as his, and she sometimes even earned more money than he did. My parents would discuss things and make decisions together as equal partners. And although it had to be pretty darn miserable to drive six hours home on Friday night from upstate New York to Maryland, and then turn around and do it again on Sunday, my dad understood that my mom needed to work and be successful to feel fulfilled. She had to be more than a wife and a mom.
Sometimes it hurt that my mom worked so much. Because of their work schedules, neither she nor my dad could attend my sporting events, and she had to work a lot on the weekends because the mall was open from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. But when she was home, she made it fun. She was a master cook, and we spent hours in the kitchen, talking, while she made incredible dinners. My favorite? She would make homemade tortilla chips and incredibly delectable queso dip. It's a wonder that I made the weight requirement to join the Marine Corps.
Mom's career also meant that my sister, Stacy, and I spent a lot of time by ourselves when we were kids. Back in the 1980s, they called us “latchkey kids.” It was this “social ill” that made all the big news programs and magazines. We didn't really do after-school programs or childcare
