I’m thinking we’ll have a regular Friday debate about women’s roles, both in our novels and our military romance novels.

As a woman in uniform, I have a slightly different perspective on life than a civilian woman might (having never been a civilian adult, I’m only guessing). But for me, both as a mom, a soldier and an author, certain things are different for me and one thing is how much time I spend around men as opposed to women. I think this shapes the way I see things and makes me slight more critical of certain subjects.

For example, when I took over my brigade signal office, I had a senior non commissioned officer who wasn’t coming to work. He’d just gotten back from a deployment and when I called him in and wanted to know what he was doing, he said he wanted to take a burden off his wife and take his kids to school.

I have kids. I should have had sympathy right? I didn’t. I spent two deployments by myself, raising two small children on my own, while working and finishing my master’s degree. When I needed to report for Officer Candidate School, not only did I move my entire family to Maine, I drove cross country to do so, by myself.

This is all normal for me, even if it sounds abnormal to you but here’s the thing: most military spouses have gone through something like this. They’ve had to become mommy and daddy and everything in between while their – typically – husbands deploy. I had to figure out how to get the snake out of the kitchen two days after my husband left for Iraq. I had to figure everything out on my own, because he was busy in war and he didn’t have any energy left over to worry about things at home.

Now that I’ve deployed, I understand things that he went through on a whole new level. I never realized how emotionally draining it is to deploy and then to come home and have all these expectations on you.

Part of what I love about a military hero is the different takes we women have put on our fictional military man. But what about the military woman? What about the soldier moms who try to balance life and soccer practice as well as not being ‘as devoted to the job’ as their male counterparts? What about the policy that threatens punitive action for a female soldier who gets pregnant in Iraq?

There is such a diverse experience for women in the military and yet, when we talk about military romance, by and large, we still talk about our male heros. Don’t get me wrong, men make up more than 90% of the military, so it’s only logical that we’d focus on our military men.

But one thing we’ll do here on Fridays is focus on something just for the ladies, both our military women and the women who support our military men. Maybe it will be a bunch of pictures of men with dog tags on their chest. Maybe it will be highlighting a female author who used to or still serves. But I’m thinking, we’ll dedicate Fridays to our military women.

What do you think? And if you agree, can you help me come up with a title?