TJ Hirst

When Vicki Carlson met her high school sweetheart, he was going to be an accountant, and she thought they would get married and have a home. But then he decided to join the Air Force ROTC to pay for his education at University of Minnesota, in Duluth, and their lifestyle surpassed the ordinary one she imagined.

Now, she is married to General Bruce Carlson, the Commander of the Air Force Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, who will be retiring at the end of 2008. In thirty eight years, their family has moved 21 times and lived in a variety of homes, most of which were not their own.

Neither one of them really knew what a military lifestyle involved when they started out. They attended a reception for the new incoming class of pilots. She was standing by the table eating from the shrimp bowl and a man approached her and said hello.

Afterward, she went to find Bruce and said, “What kind of rank is it if he has a bird on his shoulders?”

“Who the heck have you been talking to? That’s a colonel.”

Vicki now laughs about being a naive young spouse, ignorant of the rank system. She admits she didn’t have much understanding of what lay ahead.”You’re thrown into it, but everyone else is doing it. And, you learn to adapt your lifestyle to the career your husband has chosen.”

He graduated pilot training at Vance Air Force Base in Oklahoma in 1971, and they spent a year in Florida, then New Mexico. Bruce was deployed in December 1974 to Nakhon Phanom Royal Thai Air Force Base in Thailand near the close of the Vietnam War. He flew OV-10’s as a forward air controller and instructor pilot, and Vicki moved home to Minnesota to stay with her family.

He returned to the United States in the fall of 1975, and they moved to Bergstrom Air Force Base in Texas and entered one of their family’s most stressful times.

Looking back, now, she realizes it wasn’t easy, but she learned independence.

I learned that I had to take care of those children on my own, wash the cars, do the BBQ, mow the lawn, do all of the medical. I could not depend on Bruce for most of the things in our home. That made me better at standing on my own.

We went all through his career with him coming and going—home for two weeks, gone for two weeks, home for three weeks, gone again. We moved every 18 months to two years, the longest time being three years. If we didn’t have a good strong basis for our family, every time it would have been harder.

As their three children, Bryan, Jani, and Scott grew older, they grew increasingly more helpful, too, and the family drew closer together, despite the many moves and sometimes “crazy circumstances.”

“Never did I think that I was supposed to do anything but to raise our three children,” Vicki says. Her presence established a sense of stability at home, for both her husband and her children. One day she was late getting home when her daughter, Jani, came home from school. Jani said, “Mother, you’re supposed to be home.”

Together the Carlson family created traditions of things they liked to do together like boating, and they also made rules to manage the questions and concerns that come to nearly every military family. As a result, they “had a consistent lifestyle when we had a lifestyle that wasn’t very consistent.”

Whenever they moved, they had a goal to get everything moved in and pictures on the walls within 72 hours. When a military family moves, an active duty spouse may go ahead of the family or a child may stay behind to finish in a particular school. Yet, the Carlsons “always went together” even if it meant sacrificing comfort for the sake of unity. Their eldest son, Bryan, was a senior in high school when they moved from Langley Air Force Base in Virginia to Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho in 1991. Even then, they moved as a family.

Later, when Bryan became an active duty Air Force pilot, himself, and went to South Korea for two years, he wanted to have his entire family around him. According to Vicki, Bryan told his wife, “I can’t do this without you.”

Admittedly, Vicki says that Bruce missed out on some important family opportunities like time at home or family vacations. “He gave all to the military, and he would not be where he is if he hadn’t done that.”

Those hard aspects of the military lifestyle affected each of her children in specific ways and have influenced how they raise their own families. Bryan chose to leave the active duty Air Force and is now in the National Guard. Jani, married a man that plans to stay in Texas, and she doesn’t want to be uprooted. Scott works in an 8-5 job as an Air Force civilian.

Through the years, the Carlsons both became aware of how a commander’s lifestyle impacts other people, and that influences how General Carlson leads.

As Bruce started going up in rank, he had young people working for him with families, and he would say, ‘Go home.’  We can help them by loving our family and seeing it as number one and allowing others to have that, too. It doesn’t mean that he doesn’t demand that they do their job, but when the job is done, ‘Go home’.

Now that the Carlsons know a little better what this lifestyle involves, their priorities have become even clearer. Vicki says,

My first responsibility and my first thought always is my family. If you have put other things as a higher priority than your family, when you leave that base, you have left yourself at that base. If we had not established the firm foundation of our family we would be retiring in November and what would we have? Nothing.

Read Part II of A Four Star Family when this series continues next Wednesday, October 1, here at tjhirst.com.

Try-It With-Me Tuesday, an interactive weekly time and place to foster connections that challenge and encourage the process to become a well-rounded person.

I didn’t pull out a new backpack or sharpen my pencils when my children went back to school, but I did challenge myself to evaluate my routines and identify one or two that need a change and make that change.

Did you try it with me?

I anticipated some of my changes, but once I started evaluating, I was surprised by possibilities I hadn’t imagined. See if you can guess which change from the ones below had that unexpected impact.

Change of Habit. My father-in-law believes exercise should be productive, like working in the yard or walking to the store. I buy into the theory, but in practice, I just can’t raise my heart rate enough even with all the  running up and down the stairs that I do. And while Paul expends a lot of mental energy at work, he doesn’t burn many calories at his desk, in his car or standing at a job site. Both of us are nearing forty. Our metabolisms are changing and our activity level needs to increase.

Ironically, the same day our family hauled loads of firewood inside for our Tulikivi wood stove, Paul unpacked our new elliptical machine. He’s been working out regularly at the YMCA for more than eight months to reduce his risk of developing Type 2 diabetes. Now that we’re both sticking to a routine, we’ve canceled our 8-year-old membership and created daily workouts at home.

What habits are you changing?

Change of Schedule. My mother always said that her father always said, “An ounce of morning is worth a pound of afternoon.”

After my young babies grew up and learned to sleep late, I eased back on getting up early myself. Now, everyone in our house has shifted to an earlier schedule, again, and we’re praying that my mom is right.

That’s the reason for the elliptical at home—to get our exercise in before the day begins, and that’s 4:50 a.m. for me! Can I keep it up? I hope so. I would have to be up by 5:30 anyway, and I don’t know how I would wake up otherwise.

Is your schedule changing with the change of seasons?

Change of Tradition. Something else we’ve been doing for the last eight years, too, has been to sit in the exact same church pew every Sunday. We sit in the back 1/3 of our chapel on the left-hand side. When we first sat there, the door was a close escape for a our crying one-year-old. Now, I’m distracted from my real purpose in being there.

No, we didn’t cancel that membership, but we did need a change. This past Sunday we sat on the right-hand side of the chapel in the third row from the front. I received some looks and comments, probably stunning a few people, but we loved the move. My daughter said, “I feel closer to the meeting and more a  part of it.”

Have any of your traditions diminished in meaning? How have you changed them?

To be honest, the few that I included only prompted a large evaluation of all my goals, especially my writing goals. I have written at this website for nine months. Today is post #235. Consistent posting is a routine that develops my writing, but I keep wondering if I am just toiling or if this is a productive use of my writing time. I’ve opened the door to another pondering process, and I’m wondering where that will lead.

When is a routine leading somewhere and when does it just become repetitious?

Join in by trying the challenges with me, commenting, linking, or suggesting a challenge. If you want to write a post on your blog about what happened when you took the challenge, I will publish your link. Just link to my website in your post and send me your link. Feel free to use the TIWMT image in your post.

When I was a teenager, I pulled an avocado green paperback book off the bookshelf where my dad stored his dusty college textbooks. The copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie seemed helpful in my quest for social confidence. Since it was a book no teenager would want to be caught reading. I hid it under my clean laundry until I reached my room where I could read it secretly without teasing.

The anecdotes were old-fashioned ones about adults talking at cocktail or bridge parties. Many examples were about business people trying to win over clients. Yet, the ideas and principles seemed like something I could still learn and use:

• encourage others to talk about themselves by asking them questions
• be interested in what interests the other person
• give sincere appreciation and praise.

The author outlined little exercises to try, and I did those. In fact, the place I had the most success trying these was with the people my parents often invited over for dinner. We seemed to always have strangers to dinner who were just traveling through and missionaries from our church.

I would usually begin by asking about the place where that person lived, finding a genuinely interesting aspect about that place and then looking for a common connection.  I discovered that if I could get a one-on-one conversation started in this new way, then I could connect with someone in most any group so that I would feel comfortable and confident in social settings.

I trace that tidbit of my personal story to why I like to interview and write stories about people. When I ask them questions about themselves, I learn more about life listening to how they approached their own experiences.

One day at our church I sat next to a woman who was visiting her mother-in-law. Our conversation started a friendship that continues whenever she “comes home” to visit Brainerd, Minnesota. That’s the simple way I met Vicki Carlson, the wife of an Air Force four-star general, the subject of my next Everyday Biography.

She insists that she is a “nobody” and wonders what story she has to tell, but our interviews have been  delightful conversations about raising a family in a military lifestyle, supporting her husband in a demanding career, and learning to overcome life’s challenges with the Lord’s help. This new series, which I have yet to name, begins this Wednesday.

Frequently, I make decisions as a mom based on a principle. Inevitably, though, when I state that decision and hold my children accountable for it, they push back with pressure.

When they were younger, they might throw a tantrum. Now that they are older, they either complain or resist. That pressure is uncomfortable for me and often makes me doubt my decisions. I ask myself, “If it is right, then why does it feel so bad or why are things not working out?”

I agonize, but most often, I stick to my decision, tracing it back to a true principle, not a personal preference. I’ve been surprised to discover the same situation when I’ve been a leader of adults. Now,  as a teacher of youth, I’m learning that this may just be a natural reaction for all of us.

We studied the Beatitudes in Matthew 5 in our early morning religion class. We read some descriptions of each and then I asked the high school students to make a visual image depicting each Beatitude. Here’s my daughter’s picture for “Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (Matt 5:10)

My neighbor and I took a walk just before dinner this week, and we compared what we’ve been feeding our families. I coveted her dinners-for-two menu of salmon and rice and wondered if we would ever be able to eat adult food again.

I had been to the grocery store and once again stocked our pantry with cold cereal, snacks, and fun foods to take for school lunch. “I probably spend 90% of my food budget on filler foods and maybe just 10% for the real food,” I said.

That’s not really true, but those fillers do seem to take up more space, not only in the pantry but also in our diet—and ultimately fill up other places.

In this month’s issue of Real Simple different families share how they balance the dinner hour in their home. For me, the question is not so much balancing schedules but balancing expectations, nutritional needs and taste preference in our family.

I took a chance on the Wheat Berry Salad with Bacon, hoping to find the balance between fiber, flavor and fun. The recipe was easy, made good use of the wheat in my pantry and wasn’t sneered at by the commentators in my house. I made it my own by replacing the flat-leaf parsley with fresh thyme from my garden and adding a chopped fresh pear.

Everyone ate it, but it tasted the best when I lunched on the leftovers on the screen porch by myself. With the sun shining on me for one of the last of our warm summer days, I imagined that this would be the way I would eat if I just cooked for myself. Fruits, vegetables, grains, a little meat for flavor. I would be satisfied.

Somehow, though, the meal just didn’t seem complete without sneaking that Little Debbie Fudge Round from the stash of lunch desserts.

How do you balance the varying nutritional needs and taste preferences of your family?