When my father, Odysseus, and his men sailed off to the Trojan War, they were confident their gods favored a quick victory. Instead, the siege of Troy lasted ten years. After Troy fell, the survivors made their way home to Sparta, Mycenae, Pylos, and elsewhere in the ancient Peloponnese. Neither my father nor any of his troops arrived home with the rest. We waited for years as the news grew worse. Odysseus was dead, we were told,or imprisoned, or, worst yet, he had married another woman and abandoned my mother Penelope, my brother Telemachus, and me.


If he is alive somewhere, his thoughts may wander to Penelope and Telemachus, but he won’t be thinking of me. I am the daughter he doesn’t know exists. Odysseus went off to the Trojan War when his son, Telemachus, was barely old enough to walk. His wife, Penelope, was a teenage bride, and is now a young wife, mother, and queen who has to try to rule Ithaca without him.


I was born seven months after he left. I am a hero’s daughter and a princess of his realm, but I have lived my entire life without a father. I’m nineteen now, and still waiting.


All over the world, and throughout history children grow up as I have. This website will focus on the children of those men and women who have gone off to fight America's wars, and provide information and resources for all who care about military families and want to help.

Saturday, October 16, 2010

Bringing the Battlefield Home

I have been hearing a lot about post-traumatic stress disorder affecting children of servicemembers, but I haven’t seen an article that describes the effect of PTSD on families quite as clearly as this one by Alison Auld.
University of New Brunswick sociology professor Deborah Harrison, coauthor of a recent paper on the subject, said adolescents living with parents with PTSD may face physical abuse, emotional neglect and unpredictable rage.“It’s a crisis like any other kind of major illness or violence in the home,” she said in an interview. “What papers like this bring to light is the enormous amount of suffering that [PTSD] injuries inflict on all the members of the family.”
Her work involved detailed case studies of teenagers whose fathers or stepfathers did multiple rotations in war zones. One girl, called Rebecca in the paper, said that two years after his return from Afghanistan her father developed severe PTSD. He became so violent at times that they had to call police and she had witnessed him being led away in handcuffs. At one point, he was hospitalized after attempting suicide.

Living with someone with PTSD is like having a stranger move into the house. “At some point you lose that person who’s raised you all your life, Rebecca says, “and it’s replaced with someone you don’t like at all.” Another teenager studied said her father would become enraged without warning, and that she has had to become the parent to her mother, who is so affected by her husband’s outbursts and their now-frequent fights.
Families are left to cope with a range of unexpected emotions such as guilt, anger, frustration, grief and bewilderment as they deal with the changes in a person they used to know and love.Sometimes PTSD goes into remission and families have to readapt to someone resembling the old parent, one who doesn’t rage and lash out. Trust must be a huge problem in those situations, and it must be sad for the PTSD sufferers too to see the damage they have done just by looking in their families’ skeptical eyes.
It’s hard to read about this without wishing there were a way to avoid PTSD in those serving in combat zones. Is it worse in this war or are we just recognizing the disorder now? If it is worse, why?
The truth in the end is that war is traumatically stressful, and that it continue to be fought long after the combat zone is left behind, in the living rooms and bedroom of military families.
Posted by About AART at 7:37 AM

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