From "Adam @ Home" by Brian Basset

Eat this.  No, don’t!  Eat that.  No, it’s bad for you!  Cleanse your liver!  Fast for a day!  Detox!  With so many diet and health books out there, how do you know what’s good for you?  The once-trusted USDA recommendations are now widely accused of cynically aiding big corporations by making us buy tons of Lucky Charms.

First off, if I’m going to read books about improving my health, I’m liable to engage in a bit of age discrimination: if a diet book is written by a forty-something former slob who had tried other methods before losing 40 pounds on this plan, I’ll look into it.  If the author is an early-twenty-something who could live on Twinkies and still have a slim physique, I’ll probably pass.

Moreover, diet recommendations are often conflicting.  For example, some experts claim soy is a wonder-food, while others say it is largely indigestible by the human body, and still others state that it increases estrogen levels in both males and females.  Wonder-food or not, I don’t want to look like Wonder Woman.

Many temporary “cleansing” diets tout the benefits of fasting for one or more days: detoxified organs, weight loss, better sleep, sharper thinking.  I followed one highly recommended plan, and the only sharp thing about it was my hunger.  Later I read that the human body wasn’t meant to fast, and that any benefits of these plans are purely imagined.  Aha – fasting may sharpen my imagination!

Books about the “Mediterranean diet” extol the virtues of pasta, while others say pasta is terrible for you.  The book French Women Don’t Get Fat seems to say you can eat goose liver cooked in butter and wash it down with a bottle of Bordeaux, and you’re golden.  Been in a bookstore lately?  Sometimes I think these diet books were cynically designed to make us buy the tons of cookbooks that followed them.

Crazy Sexy Diet, a recent best-seller by Kris Carr, doesn’t sound so bad, until I read the subtitle:  “Eat your veggies, ignite your spark, and live like you mean it!”  The author is a cancer survivor and surely a lovely person, but that subtitle is dangerously close to motivational self-help, a topic that makes me look for books about curing hives.  Worse, the book cover further announces, “Including 21 Day Adventure Cleanse.”  Adventure cleanse?  Now there are two words that shouldn’t be used together.  Besides, any cleanse lasting three weeks already has a name: dysentery.

Another cleanse involves Epsom salts and achieves its results much more, uh, suddenly.  If you try this one, you’ll want a day’s supply of magazines in your bathroom.  Worse, its author advises that after going, you count roughly how many little green gallstones are floating in the toilet: if there aren’t hundreds of them, you’re apparently not doing it right.  If I do that cleanse, I’ll never eat chicken piccata again.

Another diet book touts the “100 Mile Diet.”  I wouldn’t try this one in conjunction with any sort of cleanse.

How about allergies?  Whole wheat is widely recommended food, but it reportedly is also the object of most common food allergy in the world.  Even gluten-free products may not completely solve the problem – and besides, gluten-free pizza crust is just gross.  Wheat can be replaced with more exotic grains with unpronounceable names like “kamut” and “quinoa”.  They sound like the name of a volcano, which is not something I want associated with my diet, especially if I’m cleansing.

So:  Italians thrive on pasta, the French put butter on everything, and I’ve never seen man-boobs on soy-eating Japanese men.  Since we Americans are all from somewhere else, maybe we simply need to figure out who our people are, culinarily speaking.  I wonder if I was meant to thrive on Twinkies.

Long before I ever dreamed of getting married, I dreamed of being a teacher. I knew I wanted to inspire kids to challenge themselves. I wanted to motivate the next generation. I wanted to make a mark on the world.

Grand dreams, no? When I look back on my idealistic self, long before I knew anything about retirement accounts or homeowner’s dues or the importance of flossing, I thought it would be so easy to achieve. Just hold onto my dreams and anything is possible.

Not to sound pessimistic, but idealism has taken a back seat to reality on more than one occasion. Early on, I had to quickly learn that NO, I won’t graduate college and land the ideal job I’d been dreaming about (especially with an unimpressive GPA like mine). And once I did have my first teaching job, I quickly understood that teenagers are more interested in their jeans or lipstick or basketball than they are in math. Oh, who am I kidding? They’re more interested in ANYTHING than math.

But today I’m not talking about teaching, I’m talking about wifing. Is that a word? It is now, because I said so. Wifing – v. The act of being a wife. Wifing has no set of instructions. Wifing has many sources of information that quite often conflict each other. Wifing can be done well or poorly, depending on who is the recipient of the wifing actions.

The wife I thought I’d be was one who had her goals in mind and held tightly to them. I saw myself as a woman who would assert her position in a relationship and demand equal respect (and get it too!) I imagined a husband who was the strong silent type. In retrospect, that description sounds more like a bodyguard than a husband.

Once I got married (and even before, when I was engaged), what I found was a partner who told me that I’d have to give up some very important things if we were going to be together. This wasn’t an ultimatum – it was just the beginning of our lives together which would have to include some uncomfortable compromise on both of our parts.  Because of his job as a pastor, we’d probably have to move often. We’d have to give up some privacy, acting as the leaders of our congregation. And, I’d have to rethink my position on my current religious beliefs.

I. WAS. SHOCKED. Why should I have to change so much about myself? Why didn’t he love me for who I was? I’m a strong woman! Can’t I just be who I am??? I held out hope that he’d change his mind, maybe soften a  bit over time.

Over time, he softened. But, so did I. I realized that the few things I’d given up hadn’t really been given up at all – they’d been replaced with something BETTER. My marriage, my family, my home: none of it would be a part of who I am now if I’d held tightly to the “dreams” I had as an idealistic, immature young woman. I wanted to be a good wife, and I knew that in order to do that I’d have to adjust my expectations about marriage. I’d have to quit romanticizing my relationship into one where my partner agreed with everything I said, one where he never had a bad day and he was always interested in listening to my problems when I’d had one. I had to quit resenting my husband for holding onto his own identity as tightly as I’d been holding onto mine. Finally, we both realized that we both had our own goals which might not mesh with each other’s, but if we worked together we could find some common ground.

In some ways, this crushed me. I felt like I’d given up on myself. I started to believe that I was a fraud. I felt like I was becoming a person who wasn’t my true authentic self. Who was I if I wasn’t myself?

But, you know what I realized, 13 years and 5 kids later? I’m still myself. I might be a different version of myself than I ever thought I’d be, but I think I’m still doing a pretty good job at wifing. Every day is a new challenge and sometimes I feel some of the old spunky self coming out. Other days I handle a problem with the skills I’ve only learned since humbling myself as one half of a whole relationship. The new me is still a work in progress. So far, so good.

Gretchen, a.k.a. Texan Mama, is the author of Who Put Me In Charge of These People??? She lives in the DFW area and spends her days carpooling, changing diapers, burning dinner, and blogging. She keeps her sanity through photography and the occasional nap.

What a difference a decade makes.

Since September 11, 2001, military men and women have been appreciated as patriotic heroes.  It’s been years since I left the service, but twice in the last two months I’ve had someone stick out a hand and say, quite sincerely, “Hey, thank you for serving our country.”

Rewind to September, 1991: I was fresh out of Navy flight school and attending my first convention of the Tailhook Association in Las Vegas.  The informal association had one requirement for membership: an arrested landing on an aircraft carrier.  I was still six months from meeting that requirement, but recent graduates like me were allowed to attend as prospective members.  There we caught up with friends from around the country, visited with defense contractors about new products in the pipeline, and had a wonderful, rare opportunity to ask pointed questions to a panel of top Navy brass about policies and programs.

The annual Tailhook Conventions were also known for their evening parties, where huge crowds of officers and guests mingled among the hotel suites.  In the hallway a long “gauntlet” of men formed along the walls, and any woman passing through the hall was patted and pinched along the way by the rowdy mob.  When I walked up and asked what was happening, an older officer explained the tradition.  After a few minutes I noticed that some women coming out of the gauntlet hadn’t enjoyed the experience, and I returned outside to visit friends on the patio.

What happens in Vegas doesn’t always stay there.

Two weeks later, we learned that a female aviator who, like the rest of us, attended the evening parties in civilian clothes, had complained to her commanding officer about having received the same treatment as the civilian women in the Gauntlet by some men she hadn’t seen and couldn’t identify.  When her boss told her that there wasn’t much that could be done about it, she went to the news media to seek revenge.  What ensued was a witch hunt driven by elements of the Washington establishment willing to claim that all of Naval Aviation was rotten, arrogant, and out of control after the recent Gulf War, and fueled by a news establishment that loved a good scandal.  Every aviator who had attended the convention was subjected to extensive interviews and pressured to identify people who had groped women in the Gauntlet.  When no one could claim to have seen whose hands did what in the packed hallway, cries of “Cover-up!” were uttered.  Someone wanted a pound of flesh.

By the next summer, when I was flying important missions in the Persian Gulf, we were required to park the jets for a very insulting day of sensitivity training, and back at home base that fall, we were subjected to a repeat round of interviews.

Having found no serious offenders, DoD threw the book at a few men who had admitted to pinching or patting women in the hallway themselves.  Those aviators, one of them a friend of mine, were issued letters of reprimand that would short-circuit their careers by preventing further promotions.  The top Navy leadership did nothing to stop the process, apparently relieved that their own careers were saved by their ordering the sensitivity training.

While it was clear that someone had behaved badly and deserved punishment, it was equally clear that the witch hunters were doing far more harm to the Navy than the witches had, and didn’t care.  I myself hadn’t planned to stay in for a whole career, but I’m sure some of the reprimanded officers had.  Next time you graciously thank a former serviceman from my era, there’s a slight chance he’s someone who would like to be still serving.

While I sit in a coffee shop, searching my mind to find good words, a good friend sits sweating in a tent in Afghanistan, searching intelligence data to find bad guys.  We are at war, but I haven’t been called back up, gasoline isn’t rationed, and we’re not asked to buy war bonds.  If I didn’t have a close friend “over there,” I could easily forget that we’re at war at all.

When I need perspective, I look back seven decades to a war whose presence was felt much more closely by most folks back home.  To people who consider the recent war in Iraq unnecessary, the loss of some 4,000 soldiers there was an outrage.  In 1945 (when our nation’s population was half what it is today), the loss of 6,800 men in 36 days to take the tiny but crucial island of Iwo Jima was merely a sobering reminder to a war-weary nation that the victory hadn’t been won just yet.

My great uncle was a sailor in the Pacific during the desperate early months of World War II.  The cruiser USS Houston (pictures above) was part of a small flotilla of Allied ships, known somewhat euphemistically as “the Asiatic Fleet,” trying to hold the line against an onslaught by numerically superior Japanese forces while the U.S gathered its strength.  Houston became known as “The Galloping Ghost of the Java Coast” after several false reports of her destruction by the enemy in the skirmishes they fought.

Fate caught up with her in February 1942 when the two entire fleets met.  In his book The Ghost That Died at Sunda Strait, author Walter G. Winslow describes the Battle of Sunda Strait as one of those epic, old-school slugfests in which the opposing fleets sailed by each other in two lines and blasted away with artillery broadsides as fast as they could reload.  One by one, crippled ships limped out of line, typically on fire from stem to stern, then rolled over and sank, with terrible loss of life.  As a machinist’s mate deep in the Houston’s engine room, Uncle Don knew that if his ship sank he would have little chance to escape.  She did, and he didn’t.

On Memorial Day 1942 the citizens of Houston, Texas held a service in honor of the ship and her crew, and President Roosevelt sent the city a message, which I have excerpted below:

“On this Memorial Day all America joins with you who are gathered in proud tribute to a great ship and a gallant company of American officers and men.  That fighting ship and those fighting Americans shall live forever in our hearts….

“The officers and men of the USS Houston have placed all of us in their debt by winning a part of the victory which is our common goal.  Reverently, and with all humility, we acknowledge this debt.  To those officers and men, wherever they may be, we give our solemn pledge that the debt will be paid in full.”

It is fitting that every Memorial Day we acknowledge the debt we owe, both to those who have paid the ultimate price and to those who are out there, prepared to do so if necessary.  Not only is freedom not free, it is terribly expensive – but worth the cost.  Thanks, Uncle Don.