But rank shouldn't matter when it comes to how many kids you have!

Right? There's this one wife at this post who's always "raising awareness" (aka, making us all look like straight up dog crap) of how hard it is for military families to afford to live. It's always about things like affording a house on the local economy, or the cost of daycare. Now, this would be well and good if this woman had a normal family, but she doesn't. Her number of children requires two hands to count, and exceeds her husband's rank by two. Her husband is also on the lower end of the rank spectrum, and therefore, not receiving a lot of housing allowance. They are not a normal case.

Myself, along with a few other wives, asked her to stop muckraking because it's really painting us in a negative light, and in this city with less than a 10% military population, we are not a well understood group, and people believe what they read in the media. People like her, are the reason we get asked things like how we managed financially when our husbands were deployed, and why we have no desire to live on post when it's too expensive for military families to live off post. (Honestly, anyone Thak's rank or higher gets more for their money off post than on.) This woman acts like she speaks for all of us, and she is absolutely destitute due to her own decisions (to have too many children), and it's making us all look bad. We asked her to stop, and being that it's never been my forte to win popularity contests, I volunteered to tell her what we were all thinking. I did it very tactfully, and funny enough, it was a popular thing to do, but that's not what I was going for. I told her that while I'm not about to tell someone how many kids to have or not have, it's her and her husband's responsibility to figure out how to afford them. It's not the Army's fault that they're barely scraping by with that many kids, and it's surely not the Army's job to compensate them for their decision to keep on having babies, come what may. I also explained that her family is not representative of most of us. Most of us have three or fewer children, and a great many of us have higher ranking husbands. She certainly does not speak for the majority as she portrays. In fact, she speaks only for herself, and needs to stop "speaking out on behalf of military families" if this is the type of stuff she's going to talk about, because it's nowhere near universal. (Seriously, it was the bitchiest thing I've said to anyone's face in years, and people loved it. What?)

Wouldn't you know, she said, "That's your opinion. Rank doesn't matter when it comes to how many kids to have." With that, myself and the other senior wives just shook our heads and gave up on it because there was no hope. It was ridiculous. Does RANK itself matter? Well, no. The look of the insignia on your husband's uniform means little. The pay that comes with it, on the other hand, makes a huge difference in how many kids you can really afford. My go-to formula (and a lot of other people's, too) is that if you keep your number of kids to 1/2-1/3 your husband's pay grade, you'll be fine. Everyone I know who exceeds 1/2 their husband's pay grade in children, struggles really hard. (In other words, a Staff Sergeant is an E6, and should have no more than 3. A First Sergeant is an E8, and could do 4. Etc.) Again, though, I'm not telling people how many kids they should have. I am, however, saying that it is their responsibility, and nobody else's, to figure out how many they can afford, and then stick to that. Having a ridiculous number of children, and expecting the Army to compensate you for that is ridiculous.

Kids are expensive. We added it up, and just on lesson fees alone, we spend almost $800 a year on Erin's extracurricular activities. That doesn't count equipment, what it costs driving her back and forth, recital fees, or anything else. It also doesn't count all the donations we end up making to the school she attends because local public school is not a viable option here. School age children are expensive. What if you have more kids than you can afford these things for? What happens to them? They go to whatever school they're zoned for even if it sucks, and don't get to do any extracurriculars? That's one hell of a gamble to take. These two things can make the difference between a kid getting into college, and not getting into college. Every admissions officer will tell you they look at extracurricular activities, and obviously grades are important, so a kid has to be at a school where they're going to reach their full potential. If you can't afford to make adjustments, and give this to your kids, then why did you have them? Sure, babies are cute, and who doesn't love toddlers, but ultimately, isn't the goal to bring up a productive and successful generation of adults? It starts early. Some argue that Erin is spoiled because we pulled her out of public school when it didn't work out for her, rather than "teaching her to deal with situations as they exist", but I say we're giving her an opportunity to succeed, rather than making her flounder. She has multiple learning disabilities. Her life is an exercise in dealing with situations as they exist. The least we can do is let her do it in a school where she won't be bullied, and will be taught in the ways that are best for her. If we had seven kids, we couldn't afford this, and Erin would be completely screwed.

So does rank matter? I don't know. Does it? All I know is that I'm pretty sure my kids are glad that their daddy has enough to allow us the freedom to get them what they need.