Navy Wife Urges Spouses to Support Each Other

March 9, 2010

Vivian, a Navy veteran and spouse, regularly writes guest blogs for Family Matters and shares her experiences as a spouse of a deployed sailor and a mother of two. Her husband, a Navy lieutenant, is deployed to Iraq and she has two boys who, she says, “enjoy peanut butter, trucks and air shows.”

In this blog, Vivian writes about her experiences with “one-uppers” within the military spouse community and urges spouses to support each other through the ups and downs of military life, not “one up” them.

“One-uppers.”  Everyone knows one.  If you had a 24-hour labor to have your child, she had 36 … and did it in the snow or a tunnel, and chose natural child birth of course.   Any funny story is immediately topped by an even funnier one, a tale of woe by an even more woeful account.

Sometimes I feel the same phenomenon happens within our military spouse community, albeit in a slightly different way.   I feel like there can sometimes be the tiniest, itty-bittiest, teensy-weensie capacity to hear the tale of someone else’s woes and then jump to mention how much harder we had it ourselves.  Or, conversely, that someone shouldn’t be upset about a situation because they have it so much better than “insert branch here.”

This individual augmentee experience has been completely different than any other deployment our family has faced.  For one, there are more of us.  Logistically, there is just more to do.  The little people outnumber me and feeding, clothing, and keeping everyone alive and healthy has just gotten exponentially harder as they develop into, well, little people.

Additionally, instead of being attached to a squadron, or even a boat (alright, ship), we are kind of the “in-between” kids,  free floating between commands.  While we have a deployment specialist checking in on us, I do miss the camaraderie and support I felt at smaller commands, knowing the spouses whose husbands and wives were working with my own, and our ability to share the whole experience in that added way.

Still, I find myself hesitant to express any feelings I’ve had about being overwhelmed with the situation, especially to other military spouse friends, because I immediately think, “Well, the Army has had these 12-month deployments forever” or “I see her doing all this and more with a full-time job” and any number of other branch comparisons or other metrics that we use to tell ourselves where we fit in on the pain scale.

In essence, I feel bad for feeling sorry for myself when I think of what others go through.  National Guard and Reserve families have to deal with sometimes not living near military communities or perhaps not knowing whether their servicemembers will have a job when they return from deployment.

My children haven’t experienced trouble with switching schools because of a move, and we haven’t had to deal with not being able to sell our house because of a change-of-duty station either, like some of our friends.

Also, I actually get to communicate on an almost regular basis with my husband when there are so many who are deployed overseas who don’t have the same access. 

What I’m saying is, our family has been lucky in a number of ways so the Pollyanna in me tends to come out and look at the bright side whenever possible.  When someone intones that I have a lot on my plate, I’m likely to come back with something positive like, “Well, I have a lot of support” or think to myself that even though things might be hectic at any given point in time, I really do love my life and am thankful for everyone and everything in it.

However, one of the issues I do struggle with is the constant competition that suggests if someone else has it worse, then my experience as a military spouse isn’t valid or doesn’t count for as much. As if someone, somewhere (in uniform, of course!) is holding a scorecard, measuring our deployment lengths, our job search stories, or operations tempo requirements in an effort to gauge who has the real credibility as a military spouse.

I do think there is the tendency to sometimes think we have to absolutely trump everyone else’s misery in order to feel like we experienced the “real” military spouse experience.  Not only that, but we want to make sure other spouses know of our challenges so that they understand how hard core we are, that we are bona fide survivors who carry the weight of our deployments in our knowing glances, perhaps never realizing that we are much harder on each other than we should be.  Kind of like how an experienced Mom looks at the new Mom of one, laughing to herself about how much easier she had it back then. 

However, I don’t think this kind of one-upping, done for whatever reason, is at all productive or conducive to supporting each other. If the experienced Mom could remember back to how overwhelmed she felt when being sent home with that little bundle of joy, I hope she’d also remember the compassion and guidance others showed her when she was so frightened and scared.  

We all have different levels of give and take, expectations, thresholds and are at different points in our lives. What is easy to some is hard to others and our gift to each other (and ourselves) should be our ability to recognize that we aren’t in some kind of warped competition to the bottom of insanity.

In the ever-changing world of the military lifestyle, what should remain constant is our capacity to support each other, to meet someone where they are at, appreciating those who came before us to show the way, and pass on that same continuum of care to those struggling around us, preferably without one-upping them.