The Long Way Home

by Scott, Jessica

  Front Leaning Rest Position, Move!

  March 27, 2011

  SO MY KIDS HAVE listening issues. Kind of like the Vikings from How to Train Your Dragon with less self-sufficiency. My own yelling at them in return for this misbehavior has created, yeah, you guessed it, more yelling. And a whole lot less discipline than I’d like.

  So the other day, I had kind of an Aha! moment. I put my four year old at Parade Rest. For those of you not familiar with the military, I made her stand still, put her hands in the small of her back and spread her feet shoulder-width apart. Then came the hard part: I made her look at me while I gave her instructions.

  It took about five times as long as it would have had I just yelled. I had to make her repeat this process about six times before she actually did what she was told. But, and here’s where I think it might be worthwhile to continue this little experiment: so far, I’ve decided that if they continue not listening, I'm going to add to their requirements. Their corrective training will last one minute for each year of age, something similar to time-out guidelines. They think it’s fun until they get to the last minute of Front, Back, Goes where I make them do push-ups for fifteen seconds, followed by holding their head, arms, and legs off the ground followed by running in place.

  This might seem a little extreme but honestly, they’re paying attention to me this weekend. They’re not ignoring me and even my little one, who sometimes seems to have static in her head, seems to be listening better. She’s able to repeat back to me what I want her to do and she’s doing things a little better on her own.

  So maybe this is taking the Army home a little too much but you know what? If it works and they start thinking about consequences for their actions, it’s a good thing. And you know, if it keeps me from yelling, then it’s a very good thing.

  I’ll let you know how this works out.

  Mom Saves the Book

  April 5, 2011

  I THINK I GET a Cool Mom prize today. Not for building my kids a swing set or actually making them homemade cookies.

  No, today I saved a book.

  Today started like any other day. I got the girls up at 5am. Got them out the door by 5:40 and off to daycare. As we’re pulling down the road, my oldest says “Mommy, I lost my library book!”

  And I’m confused because just yesterday, I took all the library books back, so we wouldn’t be late bringing them back. And therein lies the problem.

  Apparently, my oldest was doing what she was supposed to—oddly enough—and she’d kept all of the library books together, unbeknownst to me. So when I gathered all the town library books up, I didn’t think to look and see if one of them belonged to the school.

  One did.

  And my oldest was highly upset about this. As I dropped her off, I assured her I would find her book or we would replace it so she could keep getting books out of her school library (as an aside, I love that my girls’ favorite places to go are the library and the bookstore).

  So I managed to get the book back from the local library (thank you, Harker Heights Library for letting me in before you opened) and returned the book just in time for my oldest’s library time.

  And when she waved at me through the window and said “Thanks, Mommy,” it was all the coolness in the world. I’d managed to save the day—or at least one library book.

  My News: Essays Appearing in Torn: True Stories of Kids, Career and Modern Motherhood

  April 8, 2011

  I WAS CONTACTED SEVERAL months ago regarding submissions for a collaborative project about working mothers. Samantha Parent Walravens asked if I would be willing to contribute to show one aspect of being a military mother. Below is the video trailer for this phenomenal project featuring mothers writers from all walks of life.

  What truly surprised me about watching the trailer was seeing my own children against the backdrop of my words written while I was deployed in 2009. It hit me kind of hard just how tough that year and the following year was.

  I hope you’ll like the trailer.

  Torn: True Stories of Kids, Career and Modern Motherhood is available May 1st.

  A Commander’s Thoughts on the “Shutdown”

  April 9, 2011

  THIS POST WILL NOT blast any elected officials. This post will not talk about Congress or any of my own political opinions. Instead, I’m going to talk about how the potential shutdown that was narrowly averted last night would have impacted my soldiers.

  As a company commander, I wear a lot of hats. I’m a counselor. I’m a teacher. I’m a financial advisor (in that I have to ask my soldiers why an E1 has a $250 monthly cell phone bill). I’m a manager of the calendar. I’m the gal who says “No, you may not take your platoon bowling,” or “Yes, you may take your platoon bowling.” I’m a marriage counselor. I am judge and jury.

  But as the impending shutdown loomed closer last night, I was worried. As a commander, I had ordered my soldiers to report to work on Monday, regardless of whether or not their paychecks would arrive the following Friday. As a commander, I was suddenly fielding questions from my formation like “Will my child support payments be made” and when I said no, watching panic take hold. I was planning how we were going to get anything done when my soldiers had to bring their children to work because, well, if you had to choose between daycare and food, you’d probably choose food. I was planning carpool routes, because if you had to choose between gas and food, you’d probably choose food.

  If you think I’m exaggerating about the severe impact the shutdown would have had on our soldier’s lives, think again. The recession has not impacted the military like the rest of society but that doesn’t mean my troops are living flush. Many are living hand to mouth, paycheck to paycheck. Bad financial decisions—like the $250 a month cell phone bill—or a car note for 24% interest mean that a half paycheck or worse, no paycheck, would force dozens of soldiers from the edge of financial stability into dire straits. It wouldn’t matter if they received the backpay after Congress finally got its act together. In the day of already maxed out credit cards, they wouldn’t have any liquidity to be able to afford food.

  Before you say it: Yes, we’ve done budgeting classes. Yes, we’ve brought Financial Peace into the company and had certain soldiers attend the training designed to teach them about making sacrifices. But when you’re an E2 with two kids and a spouse who doesn’t work because the cost of daycare would eat up any benefit working might have, getting ahead of day-to-day life can seem damn near impossible.

  Some of our soldiers haven’t made the best money choices. But many simply cannot afford to live by todays’ standards. Most are doing the very best they can because their security clearances depend on their financial responsibility. But if the government had shut down, then the thin edge between them and their financial doom would have disintegrated overnight.

  So the budget battle for me was not about abortion or NPR. For me, it was about forcing the government to make the same choices my soldiers would have had to make: the difference between wants and needs. At the end of this, I don’t know if Congress learned anything at all. At the end of this, I’m glad that our soldiers overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan didn’t have to lie awake at night and wonder how their loved ones back home were going to balance the checkbook come next payday.

  And at the end of this all, I wish everyone would learn the differences between financial wants and needs. But I think I speak for every company commander out there when I say thank heavens Congress didn’t force our soldiers to learn that painful lesson in the middle of three wars.

  The Talk

  April 15, 2011

  SO YESTERDAY I RAN into one of the parents of girls who attend daycare with my daughters. She told me that her daughter was groped by one of the little boys. Now before you’re thinking I’m overreacting, we’re talking down the front of the pants touching skin, not a harmless game of grab-ass.

  The kids are six.

  Okay, so I don’t think we’re dealing with a bu
dding sex offender; however, I do think it’s further evidence that today’s kids are exposed to way too much sex and violence at way too young an age. And it really doesn’t matter how he meant it—what matters is that the little girl is now having problems going to the rest room by herself and experiencing nightmares.

  So after talking with the mom, and this not being the first time one of my girls has been around or involved in something I would consider inappropriate, I decided it was time for The Talk.

  Honestly, I never really thought about having The Talk until my girls were older. Third or fourth grade, maybe even fifth. But given that both girls are exposed to so much at school and at daycare, I decided it was time to arm them with information rather than pretend nothing like that would ever happen to my kid.

  But deciding to have The Talk and actually doing it are two entirely different things. I picked a logical starting point for me: I went to the bookstore and a very helpful clerk pointed me to the section in the kids’ area called “helping stressed out parents talk about uncomfortable stuff’.” Need- less to say, I bought every book I could find about girls and boys and babies. I honestly figured that since my girls were asking where babies come from, this might be a good place to start.

  And so we started. We started with the book called What’s the Big Secret?: Talking about Sex with Girls and Boys. We went through the book, learning the proper names for everything (I skipped the page explaining about self-touching. Really not ready for that conversation). Typical of my Army training days, I conducted a check on learning. When I asked my four year old what a girl’s privates were called, she says “Gehina.” I fell out laughing.

  Therein lay the key to making this a little less awkward and a lot easier to discuss. My girls giggled at the diagram of the boy parts and asked questions about the girl parts. And we talked about how the boys and the girls made babies. I reinforced the part about no babies for at least twenty more years for both girls. And at the end of it all, we talked about what to do if anyone touched them where they were not comfortable.

  It wasn’t so bad. It was kind of like childbirth: the lead up and anticipation of the whole thing were way worse than the actual event. It won’t be the last time we talk about it, but hopefully we started off on the right foot.

  Because if I don’t talk to my kids about it, someone else will and heaven only knows what they’d be told.

  A Commander’s Thoughts on DADT Repeal

  April 27, 2011

  Yesterday, I gave my first briefing to my company about the upcoming repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. It was interesting to watch the body language and faces of some of my soldiers. Some are deeply uncomfortable with the idea of serving with openly Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual soldiers. But guess what?

  I don’t really care.

  As a commander, my responsibility is to uphold good order and discipline in my formation. I have lots of other responsibilities and implied tasks that go along with the title of commander, most of which I will blog about long after I am out of command (because seriously, you can’t make this stuff up). But as a commander, my job is to ensure that all soldiers are treated with dignity and respect.

  As I told my formation, I’m reasonably certain there are a few who don’t like serving with African-Americans. There are probably more than a few who have a problem having a female commanding officer. And some of those views may very well be entrenched in their religious upbringing. Religious or moral objections to someone because of who they choose to love is not a reason to not be able to serve with them.

  The Army has gone through this before. When we desegregated. When we dissolved the WACs. This is just another change and I promise, is not a harbinger of the apocalypse, no matter what talking heads may say. I know of many GLB soldiers and former soldiers who, guess what, were soldiers just like me and you. They wore the uniform. They came to work. And you know what, folks probably suspected they were GLB.

  And professionals didn’t care. Did you do your job? Were you part of the team? Could they count on you? That, at the end of the day, is what professional soldiers care about.

  Will there be incidents when the repeal finally comes? Sure. Will commanders spend a lot of time on the phone with the IG and JAG trying to figure out what the right answer is? Sure. Will commanders get to sort through GLB family drama just like we already deal with straight couples family drama? Yep. But at the end of it, we are all soldiers.

  Diversity makes our Army and our nation stronger. And there is nothing contrary to good order and discipline in the repeal of DADT.

  But of course, that is just one commander’s opinion and as always, I only speak for myself. My positions do not reflect DOD policy.

  The Tipping Point: The Law of the Few

  April 30, 2011

  SO I JUST FINISHED Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. It’s a book that’s been on my to be read list for a long time but I just made it a point to read it because, well, I had a professional reading assignment due for my battalion commander and I couldn’t very well yell at my lieutenants if my own assignment wasn’t done.

  But that aside, I really enjoyed it and it got me thinking. For those of you who don’t know, The Tipping Point is a book about epidemics, both good ones, like word of mouth for a book such as The Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood or bad ones, like crime or AIDS. In it, Gladwell establishes three rules of epidemics: 1. The Law of the Few, 2. Stickiness, 3. The Power of Context

  The laws are actually very simple but the insight provided in them are incredibly profound. While I did my professional assignment on how to implement some of the things I learned for the Army and, specifically, my own company, I also started thinking about it in the context of books, specifically, the genre fiction community. Today, I’m going to talk about the Law of the Few in the context of the publishing community.

  The Law of the Few is basically that 80% of the work is done by 20% of the population. In disease epidemics, it is only a few people who are the cause of the viral spread at the heart of epidemics. In HIV/AIDS, Gladwell argues, there was a single flight attendant who was particularly promiscuous and from her sexual engagements, HIV/AIDs tipped. The Law of the Few revolves around the idea that the FEW are Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen.

  When looking at this from a book-selling perspective, authors and publishers alike are constantly looking for that elusive word of mouth that catches fire and goes viral. It was how I’d heard of the Hunger Games, through word of mouth. More than one person mentioned them to me and the title stuck in my head until I finally downloaded a sample. That first chapter stuck in my head until I had to read about the girl who tolerated her sister’s cat out of love even though the cat was one more mouth to feed.

  And once I’d read them, I told and continue to tell everyone about the amazing power of those books.

  But who are the Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen of the romance world? And more, who are those people who connect the romance reading world to the outside reading world?

  Connectors, according to Gladwell, are the people who just seem to know everyone. They are not people who you seek out but rather, those people who seek you out because they genuinely want to know you. It is not a rapid accumulation of people but rather a genuine desire to be connected to people. So who in the romance world seems to know everyone? Agents are invariably well connected but agents are generally interested in starting word of mouth for their own clients. That is not wrong, that is what they’re supposed to do. But outside of agents, who are those people who know everyone and who, when they hear about something, they’re the people who are going to share what they know with you? If they hear about a fabulous new book, they are the people who will hear about it first, simply by virtue of knowing so many people?

  Mavens are different from connectors. Mavens have a passion about a particular thing and they genuinely want to help you know about that particular thing, too. There are car people, fishing people, people who are passionate about soap. Who are th
e mavens in the writing community, who are so passionate about books they can tell you about the best books, the best technique to fix a broken chapter, or the key behind a successful trend? I’m not only talking about bloggers and rapid readers on Goodreads. I’m talking about the member of your RWA chapter who is passionate about what he or she does and seems to just know when trends are kicking off or ending. Who are the people who just “know” everything about books and who you can listen to for hours because they are so passionate about what they do?

  Salesmen are those people who have that elusive influence that advertisers so desperately pursue. Salesmen are people who have the same passion about what they do but who transform that passion into influence. You listen to them and you find yourself willing to buy whatever it is they are selling, whether it’s a new pair of shoes or life insurance you don’t need. Salesmen have the unconscious ability to influence us and there are very few in our society who can resist the power of influence of these salesmen.

  For a book to go viral, as with any epidemic, it has to have access to all three of these few. A Connector must read the book and tell you about it. A Maven you listen to must grant the book his or her approval for you to believe that yes, it really is worth reading. And a salesman will be so excited about the book, you’ll buy it that very day. It is more than just the Law of the Few that causes books to go viral; however, it has a better chance to do so if it is located closely to Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen.

  Reaction to Bin Laden’s Death

  May 2, 2011

  I HEARD IT ON Twitter first. At 2125, I was plugged into the sudden announcement by the president. So I got up and turned the TV on. Given that military forces upgraded the threat con level yesterday, I figured this was what it would be about.