5 Lessons Learned From 5 Years in the Army – Part 2

2017 – Juggling family and the military

Welcome to Part 2 of the 5 lessons I’ve learned from 5 years in the Army! This lesson is like the first, only instead of dealing with being separated from your spouse, I’m talking about your spouse having a demanding work schedule that keeps them from being as involved at home as they (and you) would like. This is a challenge that lots of families face—civilian and military.

After AIT, we were sent to the Defense Language Institute (DLI) in Monterey, California. The schedule at DLI can be brutal. Your servicemember leaves early in the morning for PT (I think Michael woke at 4 AM most days), then spends all day in classes, and then has additional Army duties and activities to participate in during the afternoons. When they get home, they must study and do homework for several hours. Then they head to bed early so they can be ready for their brutally early morning the next day. This repeats five days a week, and then on the weekends, every spare moment must be spent studying. After being separated for so long, even this intense schedule was a welcome relief for us. But we had very little time together as a family despite being reunited.

Even though Michael sacrificed a lot of time with us to work on his course, one of his teachers suggested I put our daughter in daycare so I wouldn’t be burnt out at the end of the day and need him to help take care of her. I was so mad when Michael told me that, I thought I might explode. We couldn’t have afforded daycare in California, even if there was a program around without a mile-long waitlist (which, by the way, there wasn’t). And even if there was, I didn’t want our daughter in daycare. I wanted her home with me, and I wanted her to have an hour every day to be with her dad at dinner and bedtime. But the mentality of the teachers and chain of command at DLI is that learning the language is more important than anything else.

We survived the crazy schedule in California, but there have been other intensely busy periods for Michael since joining the Army. When Oliver was born the Army was still only providing 10 days of paternity leave. We requested an additional week of regular leave, but it was denied because there was a change of command coming up, and Michael had to help with inventories. If it’s not inventories, it’s preparing for JRTC or other major trainings which keep Michael on post for 12-15 hour days. Military life is busy and demanding.

There’s a joke amongst soldiers that if the Army wanted you to have a family, they would have issued you one. The Army, naturally, claims they want Army families to be top priority. But everyone knows that the mission is the top priority. It has to be. So how do you achieve any kind of work-life balance when you’re in the military? Spoiler alert: you don’t. I don’t say that to be a downer, I say it because the mystical concept of “balance” that our society is always chasing is a very flawed one. If you’re imagining some kind of life-scale in which work is on one side and home life is on the other, and your goal is to get both sides of the scale to be in perfect balance, you will constantly be disappointed.

My dad likes to say that life is not about balance, it’s about juggling. Some of the balls you’re juggling are going to be made of glass, and some will be made of rubber. Obviously it’s critical not to drop the glass balls, or they’ll shatter. But the rubber balls will bounce when they fall and can be picked back up and reincorporated to the juggling routine. In military life, sometimes your job will be glass. When you’re deployed, or in training, or performing some mission critical task, you cannot drop the ball. And that means your family will have to be rubber for a little while. But sometimes the military can be rubber, and you can choose to let that ball bounce while you focus a little more on your family. The key to a successful military family is learning to discern when your job and your family are made of glass.

I had a mentor tell me while we were at DLI that her idea of balance was like that circus act where china plates are precariously spinning on top of long poles. There’s almost always more poles and plates than the performer has hands, so they must run back and forth from pole to pole, ensuring that the plates never stop spinning, because as soon as they do, they’ll come crashing down and break. In your life, each person you love and care for—including yourself—is a spinning pole. You don’t have to be actively spinning every single pole at every single moment for the plate to stay balanced. But you do have to time when you give each pole a spin carefully to ensure that the fragile china stays aloft. I feel like this applies very accurately to military spouses. It frequently feels like I’m running around, spinning poles, trying to ensure that nothing stops moving and comes crashing down. Meanwhile, my husband is busy juggling, and together we perform an entertaining circus act.

How has your family dealt with the times when you need to be a “rubber ball” in the work/life juggling routine? Share your thoughts in the comments!