The Best Ways to Survive Frequent Deployments
This is a guest post from Army Wife Sonia Garza of Spouse Connexion. I frequently invite military spouses to be guests here and share their deployment accounts, since we all have unique experiences. Some families only go through one deployment within a year, but Sonia shares her tips on the high op-tempo lifestyle with frequent deployments.
Hi I’m Sonia Garza, and I’m a survivor of a frequently deployed soldier. As a wife of a green beret, I know how difficult it is to get used to frequent deployments. Truth be told, I never knew what Army life would look like…I mean, who does? But I knew my role as his wife, and friend, was to support his dreams, so here I am…left alone, yet again, on deployment number 6…or 7…I lost count.
There’s nothing special about our situation though. Most of us military spouses know what it’s like to live through a deployment. Deployment…it’s my most feared word and I personally refer to it as our “D-Day” when he leaves. My husband will teeter around the next upcoming deployment but I can always tell by the awkward silence what’s to come.
It’s no lie that frequent deployments can put a definite strain on a family and a marriage and having 6 months at “home” (sort of, because we all know they still do trainings, schools and pre-deployment trainings) and 6 months gone, has proved to be very difficult for all of us.
And now that my children are getting older, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to do the deployment thing without knowing how it will affect them and it seems I’m not alone in my worries. Blue Star Families published their top concerns for military families and that was one of them. As an adult I feel like I have the ability to regulate my emotions in healthy ways, as best I can. I mean, wine is therapy, right? But it has been the toils on my children that have my heart aching most days.
The thing about frequent deployments is that every deployment looks different depending on our stage in life. We have done a 6 month to a 15 month deployment, and while it never gets easier, I do believe that I have become smarter, more creative and more resourceful in my approach to each one.
So here are a couple of ways I have found to get us through these frequent deployments.
Keep the kids engaged during frequent deployments
Before my husband leaves for deployments I get a spark of creativity to ease the deployment onto the children. I have done the deployment wall, fully decorated with a map of “where daddy is in the world.” It has since collected dust so this year I wanted to do something different to engage the kids.
With an idea, I solicited for two shoeboxes and a glass jar from neighbors on the Community Buy Nothing page. (If you haven’t head of this group, look them up. They have saved me many times during deployments.) With two shoeboxes in hand I wrapped and traced my husband’s hands with my child’s hand on top and left it for the kids to decorate and color. This became their “daddy boxes”. Inside my husband included a couple of trinkets of his for the kids and now that he’s gone, he sends home postcards to each child and after I read it to them, they place i lovingly in their boxes. I also made family bracelets so they can wear something daddy is wearing too.



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