STAYING THE COURSE: 5 DEPLOYMENT TIPS FOR SPOUSES BACK AT HOME
Deployment is, for better or worse, just part of the territory of active duty military life. Unfortunately for military spouses, there is truly no way to fully grasp the challenges of enduring a deployment until you find yourself right in the thick of one.
My name is Caitlin Horn and I am an active duty military spouse, mom of 3, and Manager of Development and Production at Military Brands. My husband, Ben, now a periodontist in the United States Navy, deployed three times from 2009-2012 during his first junior officer fleet tour as a Naval Aviator in VF1-81, the SUNLINERS of NAS Oceana, a Strike Fighter F/A-18 Squadron that was attached to the USS Carl Vinson strike group. In his 42 month fleet tour, he was either on deployment, or away on a detachment for a cumulative 36 of those months.
To say this was a challenging time in our marriage is an understatement, but in the end, I think the frequent separations only made us come out stronger on the other side. While much of that time is such a blur, what I do remember are the things and friends that helped me make it through.
Here are 5 deployment tips that I have gleaned from my own personal experiences:
Tip #1: Invest in Your Career
Full disclosure: when my husband was deploying, we had not yet begun to grow our family. This afforded me the flexibility to throw myself into my career in ways that would otherwise prove very logistically difficult.
At the beginning of his second deployment in the span of that three years, I was working as an external auditor for Deloitte & Touche, LLP, which is the largest professional services firm in the world.
I went in to my employee preferences on the Deloitte portal and purposely bumped my “willingness to travel” percentage all the way up to 100%.
Within just a few weeks, I was staffed on audit engagements all over the country, in a different city almost every week. While the constant back and forth traveling was exhausting, I can appreciate now looking back in hindsight that it helped pass the time.
I would fly out of Norfolk International Airport to my client sites on Sunday evenings, and fly home usually on Thursday or Friday nights just in time for happy hours on the beach with my girl friends back in Virginia Beach, where we were stationed.
Tip #2: Take Time to Travel
Weekends when a spouse is deployed when you do not have children of your own bring on a unique sense of loneliness.
Thankfully, one of the silver linings to having my stint at 100% travel for work meant that my company would pay for me to fly home every weekend, OR to a city where the airfare to get there was the same or cheaper than flying into Norfolk.
Fortunately for me, that was just about everywhere at the time!
I used my free weekends to fly to places such as San Diego to visit my husband's family, West Palm Beach to reunite with my college girl friends for a girls weekend, home to Annapolis to see my family, and more.
Having these trips to look forward to on the weekends helped keep my spirits up because I knew that I had fun plans on the horizon, even if they didn’t include my spouse.
It also allowed me to pour into maintaining my relationships outside of our military circle, which was equally as important to me as preserving our friendships within the military community.
Tip #3: Seek out New Hobbies and Interests
When my spouse was deployed, I also used his time away to take up new hobbies.
I trained for and ran a half marathon with a group of girl friends whose spouses were also deployed, started taking yoga classes for the first time, and even bought a guitar and took a few lessons!
My goal was to be able to play a Jimmy Buffet song for my husband when he returned, but let’s just say I didn’t quite make it that far. It was the thought that counted, though!
Having these hobbies, lessons, and creative outlets scheduled into my calendar gave me something to look forward to on those evenings when I was all by myself and tended to feel down.
Last but not least, taking up these new interests also helped me find another facet of my identity outside of my job that took so much of my time and attention during the week.
Tip #4: Lean on Your Military Network
The spouses club for my husband’s squadron was thankfully an amazing resource for me. It was in this organization that I first met a group of women that I still consider lifelong friends.
It has been over a decade since we endured those three back to back deployments together in Virginia Beach, and we now live dispersed all over the country.
However, we still have a group chat that we use to celebrate every birthday, recognize every milestone, cheer on every career change, and lean on during every challenging time.
An important point I would also like to make is to be open-minded to forming friendships with spouses whose situation at home may look vastly different than yours. For example, when my husband fist deployed, we didn’t have children of our own (yet). We didn’t even have a pet!
However, the spouse in our squadron that I organically grew closest with over those challenging years was my best friend Jessica, who, when I first met her, had an 18 month old and was due with her second child, a baby girl, at any moment.
She also had a 100lb Labrador and two under the age of two during that next deployment, and was living clear across the country from her family and support network back in her hometown of Sacramento, California. From the outside in, we had nothing in common.
Thankfully, that didn’t stop us from becoming fast friends. I grew to look forward to spending my Sundays on those remaining two deployments with Jessica and her children. She welcomed her third child, their son, Luke, during the tour our spouses were on together. We would go to church, the grocery store, playgrounds and more.
My hope is that my presence for her while she was solo parenting for months on end was in some form as helpful to her as it was for me to simply have a family to spend time with, even if it wasn’t my own.
Tip #5: Plan the Homecoming!
Planning my husband’s homecoming was such an exciting way to fill the time on the tail end of his deployment.
Thanks to free resources available to military families such as Operation We Are Here, I was able to plan exciting elements of the homecoming day such as professional photos of our reunion as a surprise for my spouse.
Similar photography companies exist at almost every military installation, where spouses can seek out and secure photo sessions for their service members return, completely for free. This was such a great way to capture the emotions and memories of these special days.
Additionally, I dedicated time to making sure every detail of the weekend following his homecoming was planned. We invited both sets of families to fly in from places such as California, Michigan and Maryland, and hosted a BBQ the weekend he returned with all them as well as all of our closest friends.
Once family left town a few days later, we spent some time decompressing, just the two of us. Having this boundary was a healthy and important part of his reintegration back home into our life.
Try to View the Glass as "Half-Full"
In closing, deployments are a significant part of military life that can be especially challenging for military spouses.
Focusing on your career, taking time to travel, seeking out new hobbies and interests, leaning on your village of fellow spouses and last but not least, planning the homecoming for your spouse can help pass the time while staying positive.
Viewing the glass as “half-full” can help shift one’s perspective, and can allow a spouse to find the silver linings over the course of a deployment and other extended separations.
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