Measuring Up at Home

A lengthy article in the National Journal, entitled “When the Troops Come Home”  showed up in my in email inbox today, and it is going to take a while to absorb everything in it.  I’ll probably be blogging about the issues it raises for a while as I think about each in turn.  One of the things I noticed immediately was the candor with which some of the interviewees talked about what it was like to have a service member back after deployment. 

As a professor at an urban community college, I have a lot of military spouses, wives mostly, who have gone through similar experiences during the semester they are in my class.  They talk of their excitement about the spouse returning, mixed with fear that something will go wrong at the last minute.  There’s always a little bit of anxiety, or perhaps a lot, mixed in with the happiness that the deployment is nearly at an end.  When one person has held down both spouses’ part of the job of keeping a home and raising a family, it's hard for the returning spouse to fit in smoothly. Much as both spouses vow to focus on the good, the little details sometimes derail a happy return. 

'"[When] there's soup bowls in the sink that should've been rinsed out and put in the dishwasher, it's really easy to start getting mad about it and yelling at your wife or yelling at your family," says one Army bomb squad officer. "But you have to look at it and just kind of take a step back and say, 'Man, I'm glad I'm home and that these are my worries now.' "

And on the other side, the spouse who has been at home feels much of the same stress.  "You finally let your guard down from worrying and worrying and worrying," says one military wife, but then "you start to get mad, like when he does little funny things around the house -- man, they just sound silly -- but not putting your dish away. And you just get angry. Like, 'Do you have any idea how much I worried for you? Put your dish away!'... It sounds silly, but you really do feel those feelings."

Some of the explosiveness of this period is letting go of months of anxiety.  Other times it comes from the fact that people change when they are separated, and the fit will not be--cannot be--exactly the same as when they parted. Every return requires a renegotiation of the relationship, which takes place in a highly charged emotional environment. 

As the article points out this renegotiation is “a delicate task, for which a year of screaming orders at subordinates in a combat zone is not good preparation,” and relationships can come apart at the seams in the months after the return.

The article doesn’t talk specifically a great deal about children, but it is easy to see how complicated a return must be for them.  They expect the parent they remember--or in the case of the young, have mostly imagined--to be at their best and to meet their needs, when in fact it may be difficult for the returning parent to meet his or her own.  Possibly there’s been a great deal of idealization of that parent, which is natural.  It’s hard to imagine how any parent could live up to all the expectations of their children for how things would be when he or she returned.  Add to that the observable strain between mom and dad as they adjust--the arguments over dirty dishes, and the like--and it is easy to see that it isn’t appropriate to see military children’s stresses ending in the rosy glow of their parents’ return.