“ ’Tis not all gold that glisters and every man was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth."
~ Cervantes
I poured cream into my first cup of coffee and, somewhat bleary-eyed, reached for a spoon to stir it. A mug beside our coffee pot holds an eclectic assortment of spoons for this purpose: ceramic from Japan, pottery from Poland, a couple from thrift shops in Virginia and Illinois, others from an antique market in the Netherlands. That morning, I pulled out a silver baby spoon from Texas, engraved with the initials of the spouse club at Sheppard Air Force Base.
None of our three military children were born with silver spoons in their mouths, but they did each receive one soon after they were born. Silver spoons, teethers, cups, and other silver gifts for births and christenings go back a long way. As far back as the middle ages, they were given as symbols of wealth and good fortune. They were also believed to provide protection against disease, probably evidence of silver’s antibacterial properties. When our kids were born, some military spouse clubs still followed the tradition of giving silver baby spoons, at least that’s where a couple of ours came from.
Many of the gifts we received when our children were born, though well used, are long gone. Yet the silver spoons remain. First they fed our babies, and now they’ve joined our mug-full of coffee stirrers, still lovely and still used daily at our house.
I sipped my coffee and looked at the engraved letters on the spoon, considering military life and the lasting gifts our children gained from it.
Some weren’t gifts they really wanted at the time, of course, but they had to take them anyway. The gifts of military life are seldom delivered on a silver platter—or a spoon. Instead, they are hard won treasures, mined from the rocky experience of being the new kid again; smelted in the crucible of tough goodbyes of moves and deployments; hammered out between siblings and parents when family is among the few constants in a lifetime of change.
Living a life marked by many changes is a good way to discover what doesn’t change—faith, family, love, hope—and to learn to navigate by those constants. In military life we learned to ride out the waves of uncertainty by keeping our eyes on a steady horizon. Perhaps those regular doses of change and uncertainty inoculated our children, making them hardy and strong to face the change and uncertainty that is part of every life.
Our children began early to carve out a sense of belonging for themselves wherever they went. We watched each of them grow and cultivate this ability as they forged new places over and over. For parents, this is painful to watch. It never gets easier—for us or our children—but the process proves it is possible. Recognizing the possibility gave them a reason to try again each time, even when they didn’t want to.
Our kids didn’t always feel completely at home in every school or every community where we lived, but they learned to appreciate a sense of home when and where they found it. We all learned that home is less about the place and all about the people who share it.
Pouring my second (or third) cup of coffee, I realized that although I had been focused on the gifts my children gained from military life, I was also thinking about myself. We all lived this life side by side, after all; it’s true that as parents, we learn and gain as much as we teach and give. Military life has given me many gifts, both hard won and well used. Some of them are gifts I hope and believe my children have gained too. Gifts we can all use every day.
Terri Barnes is a writer and book editor and is the author of Spouse Calls: Messages from a Military Life.