It has come to my attention that too few people really understand what it means to be a deployed spouse. There are books and articles spattered here and there, but little is brought to the attention of the mainstream media. A lot of attention is focused on the parents of deployed troops and every once in a while, Dateline does a story on a family of a deployed spouse. However, never do you see anything that spotlights on the lives of spouses without children of deployed troops.
Not that I’m looking for a pity party or anything, but those are the people who are quietly suffering. We have no children to distract us. No children to run up and give us love and hugs for absolutely no reason at all. Curl up in our lap and tell us how much they love us and say, “I miss Daddy/Mommy, too.” No, we come home to empty houses, with empty walls, and houses with no sound. Nothing warm to snuggle up to. No one to talk to. Lots of times, all the spouses with no children or very small children tend to be without jobs or education and tend to pack up and leave for home for the duration of the deployment. Those who decide to stay in the area tend to get isolated because they feel like they have become a burden on their friends with school-age children. The ones with no children who stay usually do so because they are still in school and that usually means they are maybe all of nineteen to twenty-three.
Those of us outside the norm, with professional degrees, no children yet, professional careers, who are older, tend to find ourselves isolated for company. So we older folk and the younger spouses try to make do and try to get through the deployment together as best we can. It’s difficult though because guiding throughout the ropes of life was hard enough for me to learn on my own at that age, much less married and with my husband in a war zone. The military response is commendable, but it won’t solve the problem. Psychologically speaking, I believe I’ve been told we go through a grieving process, only we never get to the closure stage, which I believe is only where healing can begin.
However, when they come back, there is a reunion process that takes place that is supposed to take about a year to cycle through. However, we get less than five months and then we have to go back into the grieving cycle again. So essentially, our psyche becomes a widow twice in one year with the same person. We have death, resurrection, then death again. The weird part is, we never get closure so we are forever in the holding process. The military does their best with what they can; however, they know that the only thing that will make it better is to bring the military member home. No amount of parties or counseling or spa days is going to replace their husband or wife. The only thing that can do to alleviate the pain is more medicine for depression. But with medicine comes side effects that introduce a whole different set of problems. However, I guess it’s better than nothing.
I think the thing that made me want to just punch a wall the most was some “article on life” thing somebody wrote for Good Housekeeping or something where this lady wrote and article about all the trials and tribulations about what a tough week she had when her husband had to go across the country on a business trip for a week. I wanted to cancel my subscription. But I remembered what my therapist kept telling me about everything being relative. And I know, the life of a military spouse is not nearly as bad as someone in Africa whose husband had been kidnapped by a militia. I guess I just feel like our young couples in the military (and our older, childless ones) get left out and the holidays are tough. I don’t watch TV because of all the commercials about what to get “your loved one for the holiday” commercial hoopla. I wonder if America knows what its like to …
