The Added Strain of Being a Working Military Spouse

Okay, so it’s been more than a hot minute since I posted anything. Life has taken over and been more than wild recently.

A quick update, as a working military spouse, I have been taking an 8-week online course through the Institute of Clinical Excellence (ICE) for pregnant and postpartum athletes. It has been such a great course! I have learned external pelvic floor examinations, treatments, and been given a million tools for how to help pregnant and postpartum athletes get back to doing high-impact activities. I have continued to work my normal hours at my job while hosting a student. Last weekend, as a clinic, we took an Emergency Response for the Athlete (ERA) course that allows Physical Therapists to safely provide sideline coverage at athletic events. This course was SO much fun, but also so quick.

I am now in my 3rd or 4th week of Marathon training. I am running 4-5 days a week at 25-30 miles per week. I have been running my workout days hard and my non-workout days easy. It’s been quite the adjustment to how I trained pre-babies, but between working and being a mom, I need the extra recovery these days. 

I am still breastfeeding my youngest, who is now 9 months old. It’s been a struggle as I ramp up running to keep up, but I am managing. Some days though, it feels like I am barely hanging on by a thread. My oldest is 95% potty-trained! I am in awe of how well she is doing. She only needs a diaper for nap time and bedtime. We are SO close to only having one kid in diapers. Can I get an Amen!?

Lastly, my husband has been killing it at his job. He is going to be promoted this month and has been taking course after course while getting ready for another mission that will require him to be gone for a currently, undisclosed amount of time, 3 different times between now and January. So in Army terms that means he may be gone the entire time OR he may never leave at all. The army keeps me on my toes almost more than my children. It’s shocking really. 

Our summer has been jammed packed. I would be lying if I said I had not lost my shit a couple of times since the beginning of June. It’s been exciting, exhausting, and extremely overwhelming at times. Being a working military spouse is not easy, but we’ve made it this far so onward and upwards!

Today, I want to tackle the God’s honest truth of what it means to be a working military spouse to an active duty soldier. Not every MOS (military job) is the same so not every military spouse will have the same experience. Some jobs are better and some are worse, but this is my current experience. 

I am going to replay for you the stress and chaos of last week.

I have had my ERA course on the calendar since early spring 2023 for August 12-13, 2023. So as the end of July approaches my husband informs me that he will be enrolled in a military course that will go 7 days a week for about a month in the beginning of August with varied time commitments. At the time, I thought okay, no big deal. I can handle the girls on the weekend by myself forgetting that I had a weekend course coming up.

Fast forward to August 7th and it dawns on me that one, my girls’ daycare is closed on Friday for active shooting training, and two, my course this coming weekend is Saturday 7am-6pm and Sunday 7am-12pm. I need a babysitter like yesterday. I begin by asking my husband if any of his unit member’s wives might be able to watch the girls, of which I got zero response. So with that being a dud, I reached out to our neighbor who has always been beyond helpful and accommodating to our last-minute requests for a babysitter. However, she was busy on Friday and unable to watch the girls. 

UGH! 

I resign to the idea that I will have to bring both of my girls to work with me on Friday and it’s already a stupid busy day. I reach out to the owners of my clinic who are more than happy to allow me to bring the girls to work with me as it happens often. 

At this point the stress is nearly suffocating as I am still trying to find a babysitter so I don’t have to bring them to work with me, trying to complete the online course work for the ERA course, trying to complete my 8-week online coursework, and still keeping up with all the other normal things I have to do.

I can’t tell you how many times I cried out of frustration in the early days of this week. I was so out of my mind that I even wore slides to work one day which is 100% not okay, but everyone at work is amazing and gave me the grace I needed. I walked around in socks all day. My patients got a kick out of it.

Wednesday evening, I hop on Facebook and am mindlessly scrolling when I come across a past coworker’s account when it dawns on me that she moved to Colorado a couple of months ago. Maybe she could watch the girls? I then have a terrible internal debate of whether or not I should even ask because what kind of person does that make me, asking someone I haven’t talked to in a few years to watch my children in two days? I end up asking because the worst thing she can say is no and let’s be honest, I’m desperately trying to not bring my kids with me to work on a busy day. She so graciously agrees to watch them! I bawled in my living room reading her response. I owe her a cake the size of Texas. What a relief!

I then asked my student’s wife to watch the girls on Saturday and Sunday since my student would be at the course with me over the weekend, I was praying his wife didn’t have plans otherwise. Thank goodness she did not and agreed to watch the girls. 

Everything was coming together. I was staying up until nearly 11pm most nights getting the online coursework done and trying to stay on top of my notes for work all the while continuing to wake up at 4:45am to begin another day. I was tired, but everything was falling into place. The course came and went, it was awesome and the girls were happy. Everything was fine.

So now let me fill you in on how much I spent on childcare alone that week as a dual-income military family, I’m sure most people think we have it made having two incomes, but let me tell you, I agonize over spending $5.00 at a time because in all reality between my student loans, insurance, car payments, a mortgage, and childcare our margins are small. It takes one unforeseen expense like paying for 3 days of additional childcare on the weekend to wreck my finances for a month. Let me also be clear, we have a savings account and yes we can pull from that but I don’t want to if we don’t have to. Below is my financial breakdown of childcare for that weekend.

I’ll even be more honest to say that because I had not planned accordingly, my checking account was overdrawn for a day before my next paycheck because of the additional childcare expenses. I’m truly living my best adult life guys! 

I write about all of this to testify to the added stress of being a military family and needing childcare outside of Monday-Friday while being displaced from familial support. We are in a foreign place with minimal friends, no family, and are truly at the mercy of my bosses’ kindness to allow my children to accompany me to work in times of need, our neighbors frequently allowing our children to come over without accepting any monetary payment from us, or having to pay money I usually don’t have to get high-quality people to watch my girls because I will always pay the extra money to get qualified people that I trust to watch my girls, but it’s a burden.

Not to mention the days when my husband calls me at 5pm saying he won’t be off in time to pick our girls up from daycare and now I have to bend over backwards to get them picked up in time. I am off work at 6pm and their daycare closes at 6pm. I’ll be honest and say that it has only happened twice in the past year, but it did happen that week, and thank God I have amazing co-workers who are willing to accommodate my chaos. I left work 10 minutes early while a co-worker finished my last patient and I still got to daycare 5 minutes late. 

After I put them in the car that day. I silently cried for a couple of minutes. It felt like the world around me was on fire and no matter what I did it was all going to burn down. I let myself feel that sadness and frustration before drying my tears, putting on the Ask Ilizia Anything podcast, and laughing my way home before having to jump back into reality at home.

That was a rough week and in those weeks being a working military spouse is for the birds.

It’s been better since, but those are the weeks that make me want to run away. Those are the weeks that break people. Those weeks are the weeks that you are one bad comment away from strangling some stupid stranger who decided to comment on your parenting skills or lack thereof. Those weeks are hard, but those weeks are temporary, and remembering that is what allowed me to drag myself through it wearing slides to work and laughing at Iliza’s podcast.