Spouses of Guards and Reservists – Hope Springs Eternal

Her reservist spouse is gone again, and being a single mom has been tough. Anything can be a crisis, from not being able to locate her daughter’s headband for her cheerleading uniform ten minutes before the game, to events that threaten her life. Example: You’ve been diagnosed with stress-related singles and after a week of home confinement, you’re out in your car to run some errands with one of your teenage daughters who just got into a fight with her sister over whose boyfriend is the biggest jerk . .

When you stop at a traffic light on the way home, it starts pouring rain and you tell your daughter that you better go home because people go crazy with the weather. At that very moment, a pizza delivery vehicle hits the car behind you, causing a chain collision with you in the middle. After hours in the ER, you discover that you “just” have whiplash and a wrecked car.

Talk about having a really bad day. And where is your wife? in Kuwait.

That was the situation recently faced by Brian Myatt of Clovis, CA, who works the night shift as an airline mechanic while his wife, SFC Lisa Myatt of the 1106th AVCRAD is deployed to the Middle East. So overall, how are you handling it all?

“There’s always some crisis going on, and all I can do is take them one at a time and deal with them the best I can,” says Brian Myatt. With the help and support of his mother, his daughter’s godmother, and his wife’s unit family support group, Brian solves problems as they arise.

As far as Guard/Reservist spouses go, Brian is a bit unusual due to his gender, but not his attitude. Tylitha Paden, wife of SFC Terrance L. Paden of the New Mexico National Guard, says that while her husband was stationed in Iraq, the Albuquerque beauty salon he owns, in addition to “talking to God, working to not have to think , and Friday nights at the movies,” helped her cope. Annie S. Williams of Madison, AL, wife of Maj. Michael D. Williams, who spent 10 months in Kuwait, also credits her daughter’s prayers and interests with keeping her stable and busy: “I filled my time with activities extracurricular activities…gymnastics, dance, Kindermusik, piano, children’s choir”.

its for hope

If there is something that characterizes the balanced pairs of guards and reservists, it is hope. These are people whose emotional focus is the size of an email inbox, for whom “you’ve got mail” is the sweetest music in the world. Communication, as the oldest definition of faith, becomes for them “the assurance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

Hope alone is not enough. But the rest of the letters in the HOPE acronym demonstrate how these spouses — and the experts who analyze such spouses — can advise others on how to flourish during a fellow guard or reservist’s deployment.

O is for Order

For Williams, life is more manageable when it’s ordered. While many spouses use a calendar to count down the days until the deployment ends, Williams soon abandoned it because “time just seemed to pass more slowly.” But she kept the memory of her husband alive in her daughter’s mind by constantly sending and receiving pictures, talking on the phone and watching videos of past family events where her husband and her daughter interacted.

In the absence of presence, so to speak, sometimes something as crazy and simple as numbering letters can be comforting. “You can’t control what happens where your husband is,” says “Ask April” advice columnist April Masini of deployed spouses, “but you can keep him in your life and yourself in his if you write to him regularly, whether hear from him or not, and numbering his envelopes and letters so he knows if he missed one or not.

For Myatt and Williams, who is an elementary school teacher, keeping order often meant staying ahead of chaos. Each had previously relied on their spouses to help get the kids to school and extracurricular activities while maintaining full-time employment. Rearranging schedules and enlisting the help of friends and family worked for them, but others weren’t so lucky. While many studies examine the career and financial cost of deploying a guardsman or reservist, “what is often overlooked is how many spouses compromise their own jobs and careers to support their military spouse,” says the Dr. James A. Martin, Colonel. US Army (retired), Bryn Mawr College professor and senior social work officer in the Persian Gulf Theater of Operations during the first Gulf War. “Child care requirements when a spouse deploys is an example where civilian employers need to be more understanding.”

P is for proactive

There’s no question about it: having a spouse deployed is stressful. Myatt’s shingles and Paden’s persistent skin rash join what experts say are other symptoms of separation anxiety including loss of appetite or constant eating, unexplained weight gain or loss, stomach pains and interruption of sleep patterns. An axiomatic part of guard and reserve deployment is financial and professional uncertainty, with accompanying distressing repercussions when, statistically, a third of deployed personnel must receive a pay cut to meet their long-term service obligations and out of home.

And then there is the cost of marriages and relationships. Dr. Walter Schumm, a retired Army Reserve colonel who is now a professor of family studies at Kansas State University, says “there isn’t a lot of research on marital satisfaction as a function of deployment,” but he debunks the myth that only weak marriages crumble under a scenario like the one he saw in Desert Storm. He cites a study that showed a 21% divorce rate and an additional 6% of stable marriages at risk during deployment.

For those who seem to be coping well with deployment, Schumm cites a recent study at Fort Riley and Fort Leavenworth showing that spouses’ frustration was directed “more at the circumstances than at their soldier,” noting that “they were not campers.” happy but they weren’t blaming their husbands directly for it. However, “sometimes couples fight a lot before deployment almost as a way of making it easier to break up,” she says. He warns that such emotional outbursts are sometimes irretrievable, and recounts harrowing anecdotes of wives angry with the uncertainty of their husbands’ displays of hurtful things said or done, with tragic results.

The good news from Schumm is that while prolonged separations are more stressful, repeated deployments can have a positive impact. “Spouses learn to cope from experience (number of deployments) but don’t like their spouse being away for so long (number of months).”

Experts are unanimous about the salutary effect of connection as the one essential element in keeping the household fires of mental health burning during deployment: staying in touch with spouse, family, religious clubs and groups, anyone who be positive. and a helpful influence. For those close to bases and/or large communities, such help is plentiful. But even those in rural areas can benefit from programs like “Operation Military Kids,” which partners with organizations like 4-H, Boys and Girls Clubs and local outreach services around the country to meet the needs of children of deployed Guardsmen and reservists. that might otherwise “fall through the cracks”.

In addition to the support of the local community, there is a strong virtual community in cyberspace. “Just do a Google search for ‘military husband,'” advises Martin. “There are a lot of military spouses who support each other in this internet community.”

Proactivity may require creativity. When her husband was first deployed, Tylitha Paden couldn’t find yellow ribbons, so she made some for cars, an action that led her to new friends and supporters who also wanted ribbons. She capitalized on her experience with her husband’s multiple deployments by sending out ads offering help for spouses of deployed soldiers through local Churches of Christ in her area and creating her own support group. throughout the city. She felt lonely (“after 24 years of marriage, I felt like my other half was gone, and he was,” Paden says), so she sent packages abroad to men and women serving overseas who also felt lonely. alone.

E is for Expectations

One of the most difficult facets of hope to deal with is the element of expectation. For some Guardsmen and Reservists who may have arrogantly signed up for what they thought was occasional weekend military duty with the potential for short-term domestic deployment, taking orders for Iraq was something they hadn’t. mentally signed. The wake-up call was the rollout, which also shook the spouses to the bone.

However, knowing what to expect can be an advantage, says Dr. Z. Benjamin Blanding, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and clinical psychologist and director of the Rowan University Counseling Center. He calls deployment and return the “two extreme transitional life events” that are the points of greatest critical stress. Knowing that most people manage the time between these events pretty well, Blanding says, can ease the last event; after all, if his spouse has already been mobilized and the time of separation is the easiest of the three, then he can focus on the -highlight meeting time.

Deployment is also the time when a spouse can give the soldier a mental and emotional “free pass,” according to columnist Macini. “Remember that you don’t really know what’s going on in there, and he may be stressed about things he’s not telling you. It’s probably not about you.”

The delicate balance between necessity and independence is difficult to maintain. Annie Williams advises, “You have to have faith. You have to keep things going for yourself, your kids, and make your spouse proud. It’s a fine line because you don’t want your spouse to think he or she isn’t necessary.” . On the other hand, you don’t want your spouse to worry…you want him or her to know that he or she can count on you to get the job done around the house.”

In the long run, being realistic in your expectations of yourself can be the key to success. “If his military spouse is overseas, he’s a single parent right now,” says author Mickey Michaels, author of Success Divorce & Single Parenting. “Don’t try to be June Cleaver. She never had to deal with the problems you do.”

It was all worth it

“Pretty much everywhere I go and people find out my wife is deployed, the first thing they say is, ‘Well, God bless her, do you need anything?'” Myatt says as he reflects on car accidents. , adolescent problems and deployment.

“I’m so proud of my wife. She’s a wonderful American mother, wife, and soldier. She could have retired, but she chose to go to Kuwait and she’s probably going to be sent to Iraq or Afghanistan this year. She’s what an American is about. A soldier, leaving aside his personal needs… to serve his country and carry out a mission that brings freedom to a part of the world that has never known what true freedom is.”