G.I. MOM!!!

Happy Belated birthday to our next super mom. Aminah is a Staff Sergeant in the United States Air Force and a soon to be mommy of a little boy. She makes ABU's look good!!!

 A little over six years ago I never would have thought that I would be in the military, and pregnant no less. After I joined the military I would see all these pregnant women wearing their maternity BDUs and ABUs (Battle Dress Uniform & Airman Battle Uniform) and I would think to myself that I wouldn’t be one of those women whom I felt were weak and simple, that I’d do my time and have my babies after I got out. Now that I’m pregnant and still in the military I see things so much differently. Yes, there are a handful of women who get pregnant for the wrong reasons (mainly to avoid deployments and to separate), but there are the women who feel like it’s their time to become mothers and/or want to grow their families. The women who do everything they can for their unborn children are the strongest women in my opinion. We are working women who have to make choices and difficult decisions, we have to make wills as 20 & 30-somethings just in case something happens to us when we get deployed, we still have to wake up at the crack of dawn and work 8-12 hours a day. The thing that keeps me going, though, is this tiny little person inside of me who is going to depend on me for his every need for the next 18 years. Sitting at my desk at work is exhausting; sometimes I find it hard to keep my eyes open, but when I feel those kicks and punches and weird little flips I somehow become energized.

I don’t know if how I feel differs from a non-military mother-to-be, but I know my experiences are definitely different. I still PT 3-5 times a week (I have mandatory PT at least 3 times), maybe not as intense as I used to PT, but I still want to keep my baby and myself healthy. I still work weekend duty. Oh, and the first trimester was ridiculous. I was always tired and nauseous and I had to sit at that desk for 8 hours a day and deal with it (although my supervisors were very understanding when things got really bad and I had to go home early). Not only did I usually have to deal with the symptoms, but also I was running a training program while writing the materials for it, so I had to be at work all the time. Luckily the program tapered off along with my first trimester symptoms.

The biggest thing I’m dealing with right now is the fear of the future of my career in conjunction with being a mother. We only get 6 months with our babies before we start getting tasked with deployments again and sometimes we already know what’s going to happen as soon as we return to work. That’s not something to look forward to. Things like that can really ruin plans we have for our little ones, such as breast feeding and getting them acclimated with us without any physical interruptions and disappearances. That’s probably the biggest thing any military mom has to deal with. All in all, military mothers have to be strong women to deal with some of the things that pop up, but military mothers also have the strongest network of military as well as non-military women to rely on, which is beyond necessary when raising a military child.