Well, actually the Congressional Military Family Caucus Briefing on mental health issues.
First – don’t ever try to get into the Capital Visitor’s Center with food, water or knitting needles (even circulars) they make you throw them away. If you dislike TSA at the airport, you will detest the Capital Security police – they make the airport folks seem downright polite by comparison. Watching a cop scream at a tourist who obviously couldn’t read English (signage on door only in English) about opening the In door instead of the Out door, which set off an alarm… ridiculous. Welcome to the Nation’s Capital!
The change when I reached the room where the Caucus was held – amazing. Military supporters, and a lot of retired Brass- the kind with stars. I was amazed when (not retired, and in full Blues) General Sutton came up and remembered meeting me at a function months before, she’s a great advocate for the mental health of military families. I have hope that some of the changes she is pushing for will happen and if it doesn’t, it won’t be for lack of enthusiasm on her part!
Kristy Kaufmann started the proceedings, as always telling it very much like it is! Running an FRG during deployment on cupcake sales – that really irked some very distinguished looking gentlemen I was sitting next to. They were pretty shocked when I told them that we couldn’t even sell those cupcakes to other units, just to our personnel. General, it really WAS that different when you were Active, wasn’t it! But Sir, we weren’t in two wars with a smaller military, dragging on for 8 years, back then.
When Kristy showed us Peggy and Monique, and told us their stories, told us about Faye – those Army wives who just broke, who were so tired and so discouraged, that they ended it the only way they thought they could – that really hit the Congress people in the audience, and the rest of us. As the Rep from CA said, we won’t forget Peggy…
BG Sutton talked to us about the future plans for changes in how the mental health community is trying to assist both the serving military and families. I’m hoping that this is really going to happen, the availability of mental health counselors is limited! In OCONUS, we are hearing in one area that the counselor who is supposed to be handling special needs families, is also now tasked with PTSD cases and families as well!
The head of Tri-West – well he’s really got it. They are also partnering with the USO, to help those volunteers when they see someone needing an assist. When I chatted with him after the presentations, he first thanked me for my question – when I asked that they please please put counselors in place who at least spoke our language, who understood the military and how it works. All the degrees in the world don’t help when you are trying to talk to someone about how you are feeling and have to stop in the middle to translate terminology. Hearing from an AirForce spouse about the base civilian mental health worker who tells a pregnant young woman to go to the Company Command and demand that her husband come home from deployment for the birth of their child “because it’s her right and they have to do it”… oh, yeah, that really helped her, didn’t it???? I was told that there is training available, but that he was going to check that everyone is getting that! I told him that my experience with this was back in 2005-6, and he shared with me that they heard it a lot from those of us in the MN Guard who were using their services – we understood that they ramped those psychologists and counselors up in a matter of a couple of weeks when the extension happened, but he apologized so often, I almost felt bad for bringing it up!
The American Red Cross talked to us about the training they are giving their volunteers, the great Give an Hour partnership – there’s something we need to do some research on for our readers, and I promise I will. Any of you who have used this, let us know, ok?
Afterwards, a lot of talking, a lot of connecting, and questions from the TriWest reps about what do we need, ON THE GROUND. Kristy kept saying it, and I think and hope it got through, this is something that we need at the unit level. The top down approach – isn’t going to cut it!
If you haven’t joined the caucus on their Facebook page, do it. I know they are hoping for more conversations with and by US, the military families they want to assist. It’s a great way to connect, let’s help educate those who need to know what our real lives are like.
LAW
Being a military spouse and trying to hold down a job can be a sticky situation, especially in times like these when the economy isn’t doing so well. Throw in an overall lack of job availability with moving every two to three years, and it can be pretty difficult to maintain that second salary for your family.
But this is what a lot of us go through being a military spouse. The blog radio program, Fem 2.0, will be discussing that issue today at 1 p.m. EST. Our very own LeftFace writer, Liberal Army Wife (LAW) will be participating in the discussion, as well as host Katie Stanton, Stephanie Himel-Nelson (Director of New Media for Blue Star Families), and the President of the National Research Center for Women and Families, Diana Zuckerman.
From the Fem 2.0 Website:
Military families are just like other families. Soldiers and their spouses are often are dealing with same work/life issues as everyone else, like wage gaps, caregiving, sick leave and more. But imagine dealing with these issues when you and/or your spouse are stationed overseas and serving in often dangerous situations for months or years at a time. Imagine being separated from your loved ones and still being expected to handle the day-to-day. Imagine being uprooted with little to no warning and moving to an unknown city or country, over and over again, and still having to provide for yourself and your family. Three experts who are passionate about military families and the difficulties they face will tell the whole story on what life is really like, how this kind of living affects men, women and children, and what can be done to help.
The program is titled Work/Life and the Military — What It’s Really Like to Work and Serve. You can follow that link to visit the site and tune in.
But in case you missed it, how does this effect you as a military spouse? What have your struggles been? What has worked for you and what hasn’t?
I’ve copied and pasted the article, hopefully to make it easier for you all to read and comment. A group of us have discussed this letter quite a bit and thought it would be great to get more input and feedback. We can’t wait to hear what your take is on this. So, without further adieu:
How to Leave a Soldier, by Courtney Cook, reposted from Salon.com:
You’d be surprised how easy it is to leave a soldier on deployment. You can do it with a letter. (He can’t argue with you. He doesn’t have a phone.) If you lay the groundwork early, saying to the soldier before he leaves, “This will be the end of us, we might as well admit it,” it’s that much easier. The letter won’t even come as a shock.
And if you have children with that soldier? You can handle all that with a letter, too. He’ll write it — because he cares about the kids, because he wants to work with you to do what’s best for them even though you’re leaving him — and you’ll give it to them. Here again, you will avoid a nasty confrontation. Who will they cry to? You? You’re just the teary-eyed bearer of the letter. Him? The one who’s sweating it out in the desert?
There will be no moving truck, no boxes, no house torn asunder. The soldier is peeing in a bucket as you pack. He doesn’t care who gets the couch.
I can chart the entire history of my first marriage along the lines of U.S. military engagements. I fell in love with my ex-husband in no small part because he was a soldier. He was a Dartmouth senior on a ROTC scholarship, and his heroes were George Patton and Ulysses S. Grant. He could use words like “valor” and “courage” without irony. I liked the way he carried himself — taller it seemed, and with honor.
He was from Oklahoma, I was from Wyoming, and Dartmouth was a culture shock for both of us. We were public high school kids who’d grown up driving pickup trucks and going to church on Sunday. We came from families who ate hot breakfasts together and said prayers over dinner. I was a wide-eyed freshman, experiencing Virginia Woolf and Henry David Thoreau for the first time. John was slightly more worldly. He was in a coed fraternity and owned a motorcycle — things that raised eyebrows at the weekly Campus Crusade for Christ meetings we both attended. I didn’t pay attention to their warnings.
Seven months later I was pregnant, married (in that order) and living in a motel room outside of Fort Knox, Ky. John, a newly minted second lieutenant, Armor Branch, had been activated the day after his graduation as part of Operation Desert Shield. I was traumatized, having moved overnight from the campus and freedom I had only just started to enjoy, but even then full of the resolve that would take me back to Dartmouth full-time, baby in tow. It helped that the other lieutenants in the Armor Officer Basic Course spent a lot of time with us in our married officer’s quarters. They were great, smart, handsome guys — the Channing Tatums and Jake Gyllenhaals of their day — as committed to winning their squadron intramural football league as they were to the complexities of tank gunnery and platoon leadership. Since they’d left their sweethearts at home, my unborn baby and I were the local version of what they were fighting for. Soon I too was caught up in the romance that comes with men who go off to war, seduced by the heady mix of youth, strength, risk and passion that makes loving a soldier so beautifully intense. It’s the same brew that fuels the drumbeat sexuality in contemporary war movies like “Jarhead” and “Atonement,” last December’s “Brothers,” and, one would presume, the upcoming “Dear John.” It’s a glory we can’t get enough of — until it’s gone.
———
Desert Storm ended just 11 days after the birth of our son, but within weeks John and I were facing a wrenching tragedy. My husband’s brother, a U.S. Navy pilot, was killed in a training accident leaving behind my new sister-in-law, and their daughter and baby son. My husband had to drop out of training to be at his own brother’s funeral. I spent most of the memorial service watching my dead brother-in-law’s children play in the nursery. I was still learning how to breast-feed.
Just two years later, at Christmas, John deployed to Somalia. I was commuting between Fort Drum, N.Y., and Dartmouth, finishing up my senior year, writing an honors thesis — most of which I wrote with my 2-year-old son on my lap. One hundred and fifty inches of snow fell at Drum that winter. I wore my husband’s sweat shirts and shoveled pathways and researched medieval literature. My husband went on armed reconnaissance missions. There were no phones in the desert. Letters took weeks and weeks to arrive.
He made it home in time to be at my graduation, but a year and a half later he deployed again, this time to the U.S. peacekeeping mission in Haiti. I was pregnant again, and morning sick, living full time at Fort Drum, gagging while I struggled to make simple meals for our 3-year old. I was grateful to the other wives in my husband’s unit who took time to introduce themselves and lend a hand, but upstate New York was a cold place for a 23-year-old bookish mother of two to be alone.
John’s next assignment was Korea, an unaccompanied tour, which meant that we could not go with him. It began when our new baby daughter was 6 weeks old. While he was there we could only afford to talk by phone once or twice a month; there were no digital wonders like e-mail and video chat then. When my husband came back it felt odd to see him holding our daughter. It was as though she was in the arms of a handsome stranger. It felt odd to have him sleeping in what had become my bed.
We decided enough was enough. John would go on reserve status. We would put each other through grad school and get jobs in the private sector. For a while it worked. We were a couple again. We cooked and ate dinner together, took our kids trick-or-treating at Halloween. At night we sat close and watched movies. When our son decided to whistle “Oh My Darlin’” for the school talent show, John was there.
Then came 9/11. My husband, like so many others, saw the attacks as a call to action. He went back on active duty and volunteered for a tour in Egypt. Our children were old enough to miss their father now. I put a calendar up in the kitchen so we could check off the days, took them both for cupcakes to cheer them up as we walked home from kindergarten. A part of me was proud of how brave we were all being. The other part was weary with being brave. I took a job at an independent bookstore and started spending time with the young, funny, book-reading guys I met there. When John came back things were awkward. I couldn’t stop myself from being angry, couldn’t help feeling abandoned.
Orders to Iraq were inevitable, and it was a real war this time, not just another peacekeeping mission. I knew from experience what my life would again look like: the inadequate, sporadic phone calls, the grinding frustration of single parenting, the loneliness of being both partnered and partnerless. What I was unprepared for was photos of suicide bombings in the Times, television ticker headlines that nagged at me wherever I went, and worse beyond all imagining, the way the war dragged on and on and on.
My life and my kids’ lives became still more challenging. I’d just started a career-track teaching position. Our son was starting junior high and playing football. I wasn’t the parent he wanted around for advice. Our daughter was riding the school bus for the first time by herself. She started getting stomachaches and having nightmares. It was too early in the war to expect phone calls or many letters, and around that absence the children kept an awkward silence that I could not break no matter how I tried. I felt helpless, haunted by the image of two uniformed soldiers ringing my doorbell to tell me the same thing they’d told my sister-in-law — that my husband was dead. Killed in action. It was a phrase that rattled around in my head. I felt angry that I had to be afraid. Guilty for being angry.
Meanwhile I was just 30 years old, working with teenage students, surfing all of their exuberant, sexy, rowdy energy. I was teaching the great literary love stories in class, and coaching Ultimate Frisbee in the exhilarating spring air. On weekends my book-reading friends from the bookstore stopped by. We made dinners together, spent evenings talking and laughing. I liked it that we had so many things to talk about. I liked it that they were near.
My husband was a world away from me. After 12 years of distance it felt as though he always would be. I was worn out with waiting. So I left him.
———
I don’t think, actually, that the romance of the war hero is a lie, that the courage and strength that blaze out of our soldiers’ eyes is fool’s gold, nor that we are wrong to fall in love with them for the beauty of it. I believe, with President Obama, that force is sometimes necessary and that to believe so is not cynical, but rational. Since I believe this, I believe in the good and noble soldier. But the truth about what loving and partnering with this soldier is like over a long period of time is tougher. Loyalty and sympathy to my husband I had plenty of. Affection has abode to this day. Erotic love was different for me. More fragile.
The wounds did heal pretty clean. John is a lieutenant colonel now, and while we were once good, we are now better. He lives in Stuttgart, Germany, with his new wife and twin baby daughters, and we e-mail and call each other often. He tells me about taking our kids and the babies to Paris and Frankfurt. I send him photos of our daughter’s field hockey games. When our son graduated high school last June we stood side by side.
I am married to a lithe, blue-eyed Marxist whose dissertation was on U.S. imperialism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a man who participated in war protests in Santa Cruz, Calif., during the winter I lived at Fort Knox. He has two children of his own — bright, intense redheads, close in age to mine. I live with him in a tiny apartment in Manhattan, and when we can, we commute together to work. On weekends if we are not at a museum or movie together, we are at home right up next to each other.
Yet I didn’t escape what it feels like to love a soldier.
Last July my son, the baby that was born to television coverage of Operation Desert Storm, said goodbye to his high school friends, shaved his head and enrolled in the United States Naval Academy. I am deeply proud of him, but it was my ex-husband who stood with my son on Induction Day. I could not bear to be there, could not watch the child of my body step away from the safe, civilian world I’d tried to so desperately to create for myself and him.
At the end of the day, my children’s father called me to tell me that our son was already standing straighter and taller in his new uniform, that he’d handled the equipment issue, medical tests, immunizations and drills without any trouble.
“He will be OK,” his Dad said. “It will be the making of him.”
I believe my former soldier, but I’m afraid of what it’s going to feel like to love my new one.
After weeks of hearing speeches, studies, promises and the rest of the “we understand and we are trying to figure out what to help you with” types of blah blah… there is some real, honest to pete, concrete good stuff!
Sittercity, a network of all types of “sitters”, baby, elder care, dogs, house, as well as tutors and nannies, has a corporate site, and DoD is paying for all memberships for the military, including Guard and Reserve. The article on Defense.gov goes on to say:
The paid membership enables military families entry to a custom-built Defense Department Web site portal where they can match up caregivers to their situation; gain instant access to caregiver profiles that include background checks, references and reviews; and find military-certified care providers as well as caregivers who are military-subsidized and authorized access to a military installation.
Now, they won’t pay the sitter/nanny/tutor, but the work of background checks, and references, has been done. I love the part about subsidized (think, discounts or emergency care!) and access to an installation (if you live on a post that checks ID, that’s important)
Here’s where you go to sign up. Hey, DoD, I think you got one right here!
So, dear readers, if you use this site, would you let us know how it went? thanks!
LAW
The other day, while nursing and surfing, I came across a live feed of First Lady Michelle Obama’s address to the Joint Armed Forces Officers’ Wives** Luncheon ,where she eloquently spoke and announced budgetary and policy changes for the coming year.
After Mrs. Obama’s speech, a Coastie Wife stood to thank her for speaking. Granted she was nervous. Very nervous. “We are all in awe of you.” she said to the First Lady.
Huh?
Don’t get me wrong. I love me some Mrs. Obama. She is fantastic. She is tall. Really tall. I remember this because I got to meet her at one of the Obama campaign’s military family events, one of a handful of milspouses in the 200ish audience. The rest of the crowd was made up of local officials and big donors and at the end of her speech, I was shoved out of the way by two adoring fans. It pretty much sucked, to be honest, but it was politics. It is always politics.
Whenever I see milspouses fawning over the Frist Lady and her interest in military families, I’m a little jaded. We are in awe of her? We shouldn’t be. Of course she may have a genuine interest in military families, but let’s not forget, it’s politics. Let’s behave politically. We should tell her to stop it with the photo-ops and endless studies and ask her to keep getting it done. We shouldn’t back away from the brutal truth and stories from these deployments – all too often I see and hear milspouses demure when the Presidential light shines. “It’s really bad,” we say, with a smile on our face. We are in awe of you.
I don’t mean to sound cynical, though I understand that I may. Laura Bush, let alone Shrub, didn’t do jack for military families while they were in office. But being awe-struck gets you an autograph, not policy oomph and muscle. Always, always, we need to keep the pressure on, to keep pushing for our real voices to be heard.
**Officers Wives? Wives?! I can not wait for DADT to fall. I will be among the first to welcome spouses, gay and straight, at one of these events. I want to be at that table.
Update: Oops…I’m supposed to have a question to throw out there for these Thursday Thoughts…I’m not looking for a “Michelle Obama, love her or hate her” debate, I’m looking for some honest feedback on whether her “focus on military families” is actually effective. It has had zero effect on my military experience – what about you?
This is cross-posted from my personal blog… I’e been urged by my cowriters here to post it, so, without further adeiu… here it is:
As I sit here at my desk contemplating the weeks and days ahead, the unknowing, the questions, the constant state of “I don’t know” in our lives… I am struck by the general calm I have about all of it. Do I get annoyed? Sure (who doesn’t?). Do I get frustrated at times or angry? Yep. But it is almost always fleeting. It comes and it goes and that is it. The emotional outbursts are few and far between, there have been few, if any, tears shed over the uncertainty of Swiss’s return. I just put my head down and keep going, only halting to bitch on occasion, then the head goes back down and I keep on trucking. This, in a nutshell, has been the majority of the deployment.
I certainly don’t contend that I am special or different from any other MilSpouse for the way I’ve gotten through this. Not a chance. I know what I’m doing is just par for the course. But what I do contend is that this deployment, this Army life, this war has changed me. It has made me different. I cope differently, I react differently, I move on more quickly, I respond to situations differently, I sigh and regroup and keep going because I’ve come to terms with the fact that I have little to no say in all of this.
Now, I wouldn’t call myself high-maintenance or anything pre-deployment. But I was the sort of weepy kind, the one who tended to mentally obsess over every detail, the kind that would get at least a knot in my stomach with every new curve ball the Army sent out way. I cried every time Swiss left (he lived in another state while we were dating). I cried even thinking about the deployment or the PCS or well, anything (part of which is normal pre-deployment-anticipatory-grief stuff). But suffice it to say, I let the Army’s changes to our life highly dictate my mood, emotions, outlook. I couldn’t figure out how to avoid it. The prospect of extra days away from Swiss left me a blubbering mess. Just thinking about the deployment, the possible changes that could come, the Army jerking us around, the uncertainty of it all resulted in me constantly dancing around the edges of full on tears and anguish and nearly consuming frustration. Gaw, that does make me sound high maintenance. (I will say that only a few people actually had to deal with this, so maybe that helps?)
The point is that this deployment, this 12+ months of suck that is slowly drawing to a close, this THING that took over our life… it has changed me. It has changed how I deal and cope and I sort of find this fascinating. At 30/31 you would think that these things, how you ‘deal’, are set in stone… that things like this only further cement your way of dealing with it all. I guess I thought that this experience would only hone my skill set, not give me a new one. I was wrong. Which is refreshing. I’m glad that I learned something in all of this, that I got better at things, that something good came out of this. Though I suppose your definition of “good” would have a lot to do with it.
I remember when Swiss and I were dating, and I would cry every time he had to leave and he wouldn’t. He told me he didn’t really get it, because we both knew he was coming back eventually. He said that he’d just had to say so many bigger, worse goodbyes… that I would understand after the deployment. And boy, was he right. I look back on some of those times and feel positively silly. But at the time, that was the worst thing I’d experienced. Now? I’ve dealt with so much worse, I feel like if I were to go back and relive those moments, I would have handled them SO differently.
Now I feel like I approach these dramas and uncertainties and fears with a new found toughness and determination. I’m wiser and have much, much better perspective (something I will admit I was greatly lacking). I am more rational and matter-of-fact… I’ve truly learned how to deal with the things I can’t change (this is a skill I thought I had years ago, but never really grasped). I have new found tenacity and calmness, two things that when paired together render you practically fearless. I know that whatever it is, it could be worse. I know that I really can handle all the crap life throws at us. With strength and grace and poise. And that is pretty awesome. So thank you Army, for making me stronger (Army Strong?! *groan*) and tougher and for the one good thing that has come out of this deployment.
But we don’t have to do it again, mmmkay?
So, the numbers for the 2011 fiscal budget are starting to come out and here are many opinions about the budgetary allocations to the military. Here are the breakdowns (via here and here)
-For all military: Pay raises of 1.4%. - This is likely the most controversial item as this is the lowest raise in the history of our all volunteer military (1973). Some suspect it is merely a reflection of our economic times/situation, others have a more sinister take on it (something along the lines of Obama being anti-military, not appreciating what they are doing, undervaluing the American soldier, etc). What do you think? Is this too low? Is it appropriate given our overall economic status? And FYI- the previous lowest raise was 2% in 1988.
-For all military, housing allowances (BAH): An average 4.2% increase overall.
-For military family support: $8.8 billion in funding (a 3% increase). This money is allocated to counseling and support of both active-duty and reserve-component families.
-Defense Department medical program: $30.9 bilion (5.8% increase). “$669 million would be devoted to treatment for traumatic brain injury and other mental health issues, while $250 million would go to fund continued research on mental health issues among service members.” according to the Military Times article.
-Military child care service availability: $1.36 billion. This number is up $87 million over the 2010 budget. Funding will go towards maintaining the high level of care and youth activity programs.
-Counseling and assistance services: $1.9 billion to expand availability, up $37 million from the previous year.
-Spouse career and education programs: $84 million to programs, tuition assistance and internship programs. This is up $12 million fro 2010.
Obviously the overarching theme to these budgetary requests are upping the accessibility and quality of care available to military families. First Lady Obama is attributing this to the administration’s ongoing goal to care for the troops and their families. So here are the questions to you readers: Is this enough? Is funding the issue or is access? Will funding help access? What do you think about the lowest pay raise in recent history? How will this effect you and your family? What would you like to see different?
Borders is giving away a Sony Reader (kind of like the Kindle from Amazon.com) to one lucky Active Duty member of the military, via my blog. Spouses are eligible to enter for their loved one (they do not have to be currently deployed), and with Valentines Day right around the corner, this is a fabulous gift.
The Rules for Entry are as follows:
- Go here: http://myarmywifelife.com/sony-reader-giveaway/
- You or your spouse must currently be Active Duty (as mentioned above). An AKO account email address must be provided by the winner so that Borders may email the individual to let them know when the Sony Reader will be shipped. You are more than welcome to enter for your spouse.
- Please answer the following question in your comment: Will EBooks and Readers change the way you shop for books?
- To make it totally fair to everyone, winners will be selected at random via Random.org.
- Winners will be announced on Wednesday, January 27th [two weeks from now] so check back then!
Good luck!
The Life behind the Camo Curtain interview on Wired.com is, as is the case with Lily Burana, both a laugh, and a thoughtful insight into a very complex lady. Me, Yeah, I’m a fan, a HUGE Fan of Lily’s. She gives the civilian world a glimpse at a life that may not be the norm for milspouses, but she sure does hit on a lot of the points that we all share in common. The sit by the phone, the split personality that we adopt… So enjoy a laugh and a “hmmm” moment, courtesy of Nathan Hodge at Wired.com and Miss Lily.
Lily got Wired.
