Lizann running

Being Resilient Is More Than Being Strong

Written By Lizann Lightfoot

The word “resilience” is a dirty word in the military community. Too often, it’s used as an unhelpful band-aid to cover the challenges of military life. Military spouses are told it will be easy to adjust to moving every three years because they are “resilient.” We are told not to worry about military kids losing friends or changing schools, because they are “so resilient.” There’s a whole generation of military spouses who — after two decades of war — are tired of being praised for their resilience and instead want meaningful help.

The problem with resilience is that it’s not a passive trait that military families are born with. At no point does the military automatically assign us a resilient gene. Telling someone to be resilient does not solve their problem or ease their pain. Praising someone for being resilient doesn’t make their challenges any easier to face. It’s this misunderstanding that causes people to bristle when they hear the word in conversations.

The problem comes because resilience is often equated with strength. However, these words are not synonyms. Being strong does not make you immune to pain. Even strong people have bad days and painful experiences or emotions. If a rock were placed in the middle of a rushing river, we could tell it to “stay strong!” but it would still be gradually worn away by the passing water. Too many military spouses have felt like that rock in the middle of the stream, trying to hold their place while powerful forces wear them down.

Instead, everyone needs to understand that resilience is a skill. Resilience is something you become only after effort, hard work, painful challenges and difficult trauma. Resilience is the result of painful growth. Being resilient does not mean someone never fails. Instead, it’s a sign that they have fallen many times and have learned to pick themselves up, to adjust and arrange things differently in the future.

While military families often demonstrate resilience, it’s important to understand that military life doesn’t magically become OK because families are resilient. Instead, it is their ability to adapt and become resilient that has allowed them to be OK with this lifestyle.

So, if it’s no longer useful to challenge military families to “just be resilient,” what message would be more helpful?

Lizann and her family

Here are four useful things to tell a military family (and all are better than asking them to be resilient):

  1. Build a strong support system. Instead of praising military families for strength, stoicism and rugged independence, let’s instead prepare them for the reality that no one gets through this challenging lifestyle alone. We all need a supportive network — in both our military and civilian communities — to help us get through the unexpected logistical and emotional challenges of the military. The earlier spouses are invited into a healthy support network and shown the power of a supportive community, the sooner they’ll learn to reach out and build a new network for themselves every time they move. This will have a long-lasting impact on their ability to weather military challenges.
  2. Develop healthy coping strategies. In military life, families cannot avoid huge disruptions like deployments, PCS moves or temporary separations from their service member. Families can practice healthy habits, mindsets and ways to work through these challenges. Knowing what routines and coping strategies work best for you or your children will make something like a PCS move feel a lot easier to handle.
  3. Nurture a healthy lifestyle. You don’t need an extreme diet and workout routine to have a healthy lifestyle. Every military family member should strive for daily routines that make them physically strong and mentally tough. Physical activity, regular meals and consistent sleep all play a role in your emotional health. Practice making small changes until you feel like the best version of yourself, prepared to handle whatever the military throws your way.
  4. Intentionally practice self-care. The most “resilient” military spouses are those who have identified their own interests and are able to follow their own passions throughout the winding paths of their military journey. Find the habits and hobbies that nourish you and recharge your batteries after a difficult day. Self-care doesn’t need to be expensive or time-consuming activities. Instead, it should be small moments you can look forward to each day or each week because they bring joy and gratitude to your routine.

Instead of expecting military spouses to suffer difficulties without complaint, we should instead speak about the value of building a support system, developing healthy coping strategies, having a healthy lifestyle and practicing self-care. These small changes can have an overall healing and strengthening effect.

Tanecia’s husband and children outside

A Day in the Life

Written By Tanecia Favors

When I hear the phrase “a day in the life” I think of someone who shares what a typical day looks like for them. You know the whole “wake up at 5:45 a.m., work out, make coffee, take a few minutes for themselves before they hit the ground running” type of day. Outside of gearing up for deployments, I have no real everyday routine that would make up a day in the life of a military spouse.

My days look like any other person’s whose life mimics that of a wife, mother, homemaker, entrepreneur, nurse, etc. The list can go on and on. I can tell you that “a day in the life” for this military spouse includes constantly thinking, “Oh, I got this,” only to then think that’s not true. “I definitely don’t have this.”

As military spouses we’re conditioned to “expect the unexpected.” Do we really live our everyday lives like this? For me, the answer is no. If I did, there wouldn’t be any room to experience the joys that show up regularly in the mundane day-to-day routines. Don’t get me wrong, the thought is always there on the back burner, but that’s life, right? The day I want to share with you had the potential to be like any other day of shore duty. Instead, it proved to be one of those days that remind you that you have something on the back burner. I know that whether you are a seasoned spouse or a new-to-this-life spouse, you can relate. Simply because this could be, will be or has been a day in any military spouse’s life.

Every morning starts off the same for us lately. I roll over to silence that horrible alarm that lets me know another day has come too early. I briefly remember the hubs kissing me on the cheek as he headed out the door sometime before the sun came up. I sit on the side of the bed and listen to see if either of our toddlers are awake, and I hear nothing. The silence tells me I might have a few minutes to myself if the floor doesn’t creak as I walk around the room. I play my children’s wake-up playlists on their devices in their room. Just as I was turning the lights on and opening the blinds in my middle child’s room, my cell phone rings. I ignore it because it’s early in the morning and I’m unavailable until at least 9 a.m. As I’m picking out clothes for the day, my phone rings again and I’m like, “OK, maybe it’s something important.” I pick it up just in time to see “My David” (how the hubs is saved in my phone).

I answer and immediately ask is he OK before he can even say hello. He says, “Yes, but are you sitting down?” My heart sinks, and I freeze as I ask, “No, why?” He replies with three words. Words that we have all heard in some variation or another, “I got orders.”

I walk back into my room and sit on the edge of the bed. He asks if I’m OK, and I say, “Depends on the orders.” He confirms my fears. He tells me he is returning to sea. A piece of me knew it was a possibility when retirement was taken off the table (don’t even ask). But for it to be a reality, our reality, my reality, just hit me harder than I thought.

We got off the phone, and I continued my morning routine with the toddlers. I did a good job of holding it together; at least I thought I was doing a good job. About halfway home after dropping my children off at daycare, I felt my chest tighten, a lump build in my throat and my eyes started to water. It hit me that my husband, my partner, the person I had finally let myself get used to being home every day for forever was in fact on a timetable to leave me, to be and do “all the things” on my own.

It hit me that I had allowed myself to be spoiled by him being home every day. I could call him whenever I wanted. I could make all the plans in the world, and he was in a place that we could do them all. Now I have to reign in my expectations and get back in the mindset of “duty days” and “deployments.” I cried for what seemed like forever, and my hubs must have felt my heart breaking because he texted asking if I needed him to come home, and I said, “Yes, please.”

He was home not even half an hour later for me to fall into his arms. I gathered myself, and the rest of the day went as normally as it could. We picked up the kids from daycare, played outside in the front yard before dinner, did baths, brushed teeth and read books before we settled onto the couch to watch our favorite TV show together. That was the beginning of the countdown to my new normal, or maybe normal, as it was amazing to have such a great shore duty. Now it’s back to the regular Navy.

I will say we’re making the most of the last few days we have left together as a family of five. If you find yourself having hard days like this, just make the most of the days you have when y’all are together. We know those are the memories that get us through the tough days of this military spouse life.

Kristi on the beach

Military Life on the Outskirts

Written By Kristi Stolzenberg

I knew it was in the works, so it was absolutely not a surprise when my husband copied me on an email about a U.S. Marine Corps separation brief. But, in the back of my mind the last several months (OK, fine, the last several years), retirement was still so far off in the distance that it was abstract — a future Kristi problem. This email sort of nabbed the abstract concept of Marine Corps retirement from the back recesses of my subconscious and plopped it in my lap. When “one day” gets a date on the calendar, things get very real.

“Fake It ‘til You Make It (And I Did)”

As I like to do whenever I am faced with a challenge large or small, I began to overthink. What would this, now eminent, retirement mean for our family now that it was no longer “if,” but “when?” I tried to find a parallel time in my life that could do justice to the change coming into focus in front of us. A change that would require essentially learning a new lifestyle. I found a worthy example in the military spouse retirement counterpart: when I became a military spouse.

As a new spouse, I remember feeling like I was always just outside the group. I had no deployment stories to contribute to the conversation. I’d only PCS’d once, so I couldn’t tell you whether it went well or poorly — it just went. My browser history was primarily comprised of “What is [insert acronym] + Marine Corps.” And as a lifelong introvert who has been described as “independent to a fault,” I was great with sidestepping most offers for help and spouse events (at least until I was adopted by an extrovert who made showing up less anxiety-inducing). I was content watching and learning from the spouses around me, absorbing anything I could and finding incredible, genuine friendships along the way. Full disclosure, I still feel like I’m making it up as I go most days, which may be a contributing factor to the retirement shock.

Connecting the Dots

In those early days, I felt like I was living on the outskirts of military life, trying to blend in and act like I knew what OPSEC and TDY meant. Today, I feel much the same way (though, I am proud to report that I now have those definitions down). I’m once again feeling like an outsider, albeit an outsider with significantly less energy and more salt.

For starters, we no longer live on base, so the twice-daily morning and evening colors reminder of military life aren’t sounding. Our last two tours — the D.C. area and where we are now — have been a stark contrast from living on base the five years prior.  Without commissary and exchange shopping and having the Marine Corps at the center of every conversation and relationship, it’s easy to forget it’s still such a central component of our lives.

The 40 minutes between me and base might not be the root of the problem, but it is part of it. No, the root of the problem is my developing mindset — one finding it harder to relate and engage. Remember “senioritis” — that feeling that plagued us during that last year of high school? I would equate my current mindset to that. I’m still showing up, doing what I need to do, even volunteering for the stuff I chose to do, but when people start talking about their next set of orders or prepping for their upcoming move, they’ve lost me. It’s not because I don’t care. I absolutely do. I’ll listen, empathize, and — if asked — freely share any experience I’ve gained along the way. But I can no longer relate because that’s no longer the reality of someone on the outskirts. To soften the harshness of this, it’s like me talking to my military friends with a few more years left on their clock about the excitement, fears and jarring emails of retirement. They listen, empathize and offer advice, but they can’t yet relate.

Fighting the Senioritis

This outskirts feeling is heavy, in addition to the weight of the life-changing event around the corner. Especially for someone who has prioritized showing up and pitching in because we (Marine families) need each other. It takes added effort and energy to stay engaged, stay positive, and not let the miles between me and the base or another Marine Corps family be an excuse to say no.

If you’re a military spouse at the city center meeting me today, please don’t mistake my wandering mind, fatigue and saltiness for lack of empathy. Know that I was you not that long ago, and you will be me faster than you ever thought possible. Military life looks different here from my spot on the outskirts. Big stressors look smaller as they shift to the rearview. You come to the disheartening realization that the truly big problems are bigger than you, but that doesn’t mean you don’t chip away at them. To quote myself from a blog roughly a decade ago, “The military is like a small town.” We should strive to be good neighbors; that goes for those of us on the outskirts, too.

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