You may think I’m a bit daft to say that to you all. It is really good advice though.

When our spouses are home we all want to spend time with them. There is nothing wrong with that at all - we should want to spend time with them. It is always great to have them home and go for day trips, short vacations and so on. We need that time to keep our marriages strong.

But, we need to remember our girlfriends. Our girlfriends are the ones who will be there when our spouses are deployed. When your 5 year old wakes you up at 3 AM with projectile vomiting, high fever and you know you need to make an ER run, but you have a 2 year old asleep; your girlfriend is the one who will come over to stay with your 2 year old, or be with you as you head to the ER with both kids in tow. She will be there when we go into labor and our spouse is deployed.

Our girlfriends are the ones who will be there when we have not heard from our spouse, we are worried for their safety and we don’t want to go off the deep end. She’ll be there to calm us down and make us laugh.

Our girlfriends are the ones we can email daily to tell them nothing much is going on here or tell her everything that is going on at home. She’s the one you can call to have someone speak to you in complete sentences when all you hear is “toddler speak”. They listen to us on phone calls when we say we are ready to kill the kid because he dunked the cat in the toilet, or she painted a lovely scene on her bedroom wall - in Sharpie pens! She can laugh at those and say, yeah I remember when mine…

If we ignore our girlfriends while our spouse is home, we run the chance of hurting her feelings, or distancing her. We need to keep those relationships cultivated so that we don’t ignore her while the spouse is home and then all of a sudden our spouse is gone and we expect her to coming running when we need it. It doesn’t work that way. It is a give and take relationship the same as a marriage. You couldn’t expect to ignore your spouse and stay married for 50 years. The same thing with our girlfriends.

Even if you only email each other several times a week, or call once every couple of weeks. Take time to go for a cup of coffee together sometime while the kids are in school. If your kids aren’t in school, meet at the park with all the kids and let them play while you chat. You can find ways to keep that relationship in tact while your spouse is home.

In the end you will both be happier and you will have some wonderful memories years down the road. There will be plenty of times you will think back and laugh at some of your “Lucy & Ethel” moments together, some of the things you thought you would never get through without her help, or times that she just knew you needed a shoulder when you didn’t even know you needed it.

So, here’s to all the girlfriends; may you have many, may you share the sorrows, and may you share the joys. If they are a really good friend they will stay one. As an ornament one of my girlfriends gave me says - “You’ll always be my friend because you know too much”!