How your spouse feels about your preparedness efforts

By Joseph Parish

Years ago as I began to store up on food my family looked at me with strange glances. They really thought I had lost my marbles. Along came Y2K and as I increased my preparedness efforts the looks increased drastically. The going joke in the home was that the food being stored was my children’s inheritance. (Think about that statement for a few minutes and you will see the true value in it).

As the years past by and the current events began to unfold I started to witness a change in my spouses attitude towards preparedness. She began to take the concept more serious and even encouraged me in my efforts. She has contributes greatly towards the food room organization.

We both now try to learn as much as we can in the event that a disaster occurs. She has encouraged me to get involved with various classes for survival such as those which are offered by FEMA or CERTS. We both had taken several first aid and CPR classes in the past and encourage participation in such classes. In fact I eventually became a Red Cross Instructor in the classes.

You may be asking how one would go about converting a non-believing husband or wife into a viable partner in survival preparing. The first thing you will need to do is convince your partner that it is one of those necessary things. They have to see with their own eyes what changes are occurring in the world today. They must see the changes as they are occurring by watching the evening news broadcasts on television, listening to the morning radio talk shows or merely by glancing at the daily newspaper. This I feel is the way that most spouses come to realize the importance of emergency preparations.

Being in the military with me my spouse has always been a bit on the prepared side. When we resided overseas it was necessary for her to maintain a ready bag in the event that she had to be evacuated from the area where I was located. She had to keep specific documents in a secure place and updated at all times in the event they were required.

There are some features of our life that we have always worked on even before we seriously considered the need for survive preps. Such a thing was food canning. We did this many years ago mostly out of curiosity as we wanted to experiment with it. The same for things such as wine making, making sodas at home and other useful skills. With today’s world the way it is we certainly appreciate learning these things many years ago.

It took a little longer for her to realize the value of my bug out bags as I always tend to pack a bit too much in them. She couldn’t figure out why I needed so many things in the first place. Her family would always go camping using tents, etc so they basically roughed it when they went into the wild. Me on the other hand like the benefits of 12 volt coffee pots and 12 volt frying pans. I had plenty of tent sleeping in the military and really would prefer to spend my evenings in a motor home or conversion van if necessary. Roughing it for me is certainly a last resort.

In conclusion, I would have to say that in order to convince your spouse of the need for preparations you must first get her to realize that a problem first exists. Laughingly, with tongue in cheek I suggest you place the morning newspaper in front of him or her as they eat their breakfast – they will quickly see the value of being ready.

Copyright @ 2009 Joseph Parish

Original: http://survival-training.blogspot.com/2009/03/how-your-spouse-feels-about-your.html