The Things You Don't Know About Military Spouses, But Should
"Thank you for your service" doesn't really cover it, although spouses rarely get that, either.
A little over a week ago, we left the house we’d called a home for the past 3 years, located on a military base in eastern New Mexico. My husband doesn’t officially PCS until mid-July but we got out of there early, as we have done in previous summers, to escape to our true home, a tiny cabin on a lake in northern Michigan.
We’d decided to do a DITY move this time around, in part because we’re not moving terribly far — not like the last time when we moved from Florida to New Mexico. But also because military movers have a habit of breaking things and I’m still not over how they handled my favorite green bookcase during the last move, resulting in part of the base cracking.
We (and by “we” I mean mostly me) managed to pack up about 75% of the house before heading to the cabin. It’s mainly small kitchen items (plates, utensils, cups), bathroom stuff, bedding, and all the random stuff you mostly just want to throw in a garbage bag and never look at again.
I sold some of my plants, gave away a few others, and took a few with me for the summer, one sitting on the arm rest in between the 2 front seats as we drove north. There are at least 20 plants left in the house, ranging from a rubber plant nearly as tall as me to a few tiny, windowsill succulents. My husband will hopefully bring the rest of the plants with him when he packs our remaining stuff into a U-Haul and his car, which he’ll tow. This will be one of the greatest tests of our marriage yet.
This is our 5th PCS in the 8 years my husband has been in the Air Force. In fact, 8 years ago I had no idea what a PCS was, because it would take me awhile to start learning what all of the acronyms used as language shortcuts in the military even mean.
My husband joined the Air Force at the ripe old age of 33. Yes, I am well aware that 33 is not old, but it is if you are joining the military. Most who enlist or commission do so between the ages of 18 and 24.
When he first mentioned it to me as an option, I was newly pregnant with our second child. At 32, my husband was tired of working a job he hated and where he had no career prospects or job mobility, so he applied to the Air Force after they raised their age requirement from 27 to 39.
I wasn’t a huge fan of the military, but I was (and still am) a huge fan of my husbands happiness, so I supported his decision to join. I knew it would radically change our lives, but actually mine more than his. Becoming a military spouse would drastically change my career path and my financial stability, as well as my relationships and likely, my mental health.
I was also nervous about how it might impact our kids as they got older, but I was committed to the adventure we’d go on together.
So at the age of 35, I became a military spouse.
If I’m honest, while I was ok with my husband joining the Air Force, I was less excited about becoming a military spouse myself.
When I was in my senior year of high school, I was voted Biggest Drama Queen but if the superlative had existed, I also would have been voted, “Least Likely to Become a Military Spouse.”
And yet, here I am.
In the past 8 years of being a military spouse, I have learned a lot.
I went into military spousehood with a lot of assumptions about what it meant to be a military spouse and I thought I didn’t want any part of that.
Some of those assumptions were not far off the mark, particularly when it comes to the career challenges, regular soloparenting, profound loneliness, and the trickiness of some of the relationships with other spouses.
I’d been slowly rebuilding my career postpartum when my husband joined the military. I was teaching at new studios, offering more classes and in-depth workshops, as well as teacher training programs. But I was nowhere near my pre-motherhood financial peak. So when my husband joined the Air Force, I had to regroup entirely. I took all of my classes online, knowing it would be impossible for me to find work in a city where I had no contacts (San Antonio) and where we’d only be living for a year (turned out to be 16 months, actually). I had no income for several months while I figured out new technology, created a website, hired someone to help me program the bits beyond my understanding, and opened the doors to my online studio.
This was in 2018, 2 years pre-pandemic. So while some folks eagerly jumped on the bandwagon, lots of people who’d taken classes with me for years offline weren’t interested in trying something new — like online yoga/movement classes.
Having no other options, I stuck with teaching online. I started a YouTube channel, built online programs, and do individual coaching sessions. All of the things I’ve created have been and continue to be successful in their own right, but my finances have never recovered to even pre-military levels.
This is a common experience for nearly every spouse I’ve ever met. My friend Erica, who is a registered nurse and has served in the military as well, said this to me about her experience as a spouse, “the career path of a military spouse is not linear and most resumes look like Swiss cheese. I have often taken steps back or positions I’m way overqualified for just because of timing, availability, and lack of child care. Licensing for professionals is time consuming and expensive … I have held RN licenses in several states without any reciprocity after a move.”
Dawna, another friend and former military spouse, also mentioned that while HR tries to look for ‘linear career paths’ it’s unrealistic because you’re moving so often, at the whims of someone else’s job. She says, “it really sucked to have to explain “I moved for my husband‘s job“ because they questioned how long I would stick around and sometimes questioned how committed I was to my career. People assume there’s some sort of protection legally for military spouses, but I don’t think that’s true.”
And she’s right. There are currently no real protections for spouses when it comes to maintaining our own careers. As Erica mentioned, most licenses don’t transfer from state to state, so if your career has licensing requirements, you have to get a new license with each state you move to, which is costly and time consuming. While the SCRA (Servicemembers Civil Relief Act) was passed to help address this, it isn’t applied automatically or unilaterally.1
You also might be penalized for your “lack of stability” because you’ll usually be moving within 2-4 years. If you move to a small town, there might not be any career opportunities within your field, which happened to several of my friends and also to me. This usually means that a spouse either has to take work that is below their skill level or become self-employed, like I am.
In fact 21% of all military spouses are self-employed. This, by the way, isn’t an indicator of financial success. It’s simply a common route spouses take because other options are unavailable or unsustainable.
On the other hand, the unemployment rate for military spouses is 5x the national average despite the fact that broadly speaking, military spouses are highly educated. And the real kicker is that spouses earn 25% less than their civilian counterparts, regardless of their level of education or professional field.2
Even if a spouse can get employment commensurate with their experience, childcare is difficult to come by — either because it’s unaffordable or unavailable.
When I taught studio classes in Florida, I often brought my infant with me to classes, wearing her in an ergo or letting her roll around on the floor. There were other times when my husband was working nights or weekends, so I’d have to bring all 3 of my kids to the classes I taught. Ask me how fun that was.
I should note that I was fortunate to have multiple employers who were happy to allow me to bring my kids — not just in Florida, but even back when I lived in the DC area —as well as a job with enough flexibility (yes, pun intended) that made it easier to have my kids around. Not every spouse is that lucky.
And there isn’t always a community that can pick up the slack when you need support, whether for childcare or for basic human connection.
This is something that my friend Amanda shared with me when she said, “An assumption (about being a military spouse) that is untrue for me is how there is a village of support no matter where you move.”
Amanda is second generation military. She spent her childhood bouncing around the country, as well as high school in Japan, thanks to her dad’s military service. She and I were neighbors for a year when we lived next door to one another on Cannon AFB in New Mexico.
I had zero experience with living on a military base, having lived off base at every other assignment. Turns out that living on base can sometimes give you a greater feeling of community and support. There’s a built in sense of solidarity and connection when you know your neighbors understand a lot of what you’re going through. There’s a common language when you’re a military spouse and often a feeling of trust because you share so many similar experiences. And as a result, there’s often a willingness to help your fellow spouses as much as possible.
While this isn’t always the case — I’ve also had the opposite experience with spouses who are unkind, unfriendly, and band together against someone they decide they dislike — more often than not, I’ve been able to rely on fellow spouses more quickly and with a deeper trust.
However when you’re not living on base, it can be harder to feel that sense of community. When we lived in Florida (where my friend Amanda lives now), we lived about 40 minutes from base. I didn’t have any community support there, except right after I gave birth to my youngest. Several spouses came to bring us meals, which were enormously helpful, but after that I never heard from them again. Even when my husband was deployed for 5 months, I was pretty much on my own.
My friend Brittany, a former spouse and phenomenal artist, shares something similar. “My “village” was non-existent.. for the majority of our enlistments. I was typically stranded in a new place with no help, friends or family when my husband was TDY, deployed or on crazy shifts,” she says.
Being solo during crazy shifts is something I’ve experienced, too. My husband is a pilot. When he was flying more consistently, he did shift work. This meant he was sometimes working from 6am-4pm. Or 2pm-12am. Or 6pm to 4am. So not only did I frequently have to try and keep my kids quiet during the day when he had to sleep until 2pm, but any adventures I wanted to take my kids on were always solo. It’s hard for so many reasons and it’s not fun.
Crazy shifts are common place, as are TDY’s (temporary duty which be as short at 1 week and as long as several months) and deployments. I’ve lived through all of these, including a deployment through the early months of Covid. I’ve watched friends go through all of these, too. There was actually a time at the end of last year when over half of the spouses on our loop were deployed or TDY.
Being solo more often than not leads to those deep feelings of loneliness, something that is rarely discussed when it comes to spouses. We’re expected to “hold down the homefront” and keep the home fires burning and support the work our service member is doing without complaining. “It’s part of what you signed up for” people will say, which, as my friend Erica says, “assumes that (you’d) know all the twists and turns of military life in your future. It is wildly unfair and dismissive of the feelings you have when you experience some of those fun military things first hand.”
I agree with her. This isn’t the part I signed up for. And the fact that spouses are supposed to just suck it up and deal with it, truly sucks.
Loneliness, isolation, stress, anxiety, depression….these are commonplace for spouses. And while they’ve existed for as long as the military has existed, at least now we have a greater universal dialogue happening when it comes to mental health.
The problem is that even though we have the language to talk about this stuff now, if spouses do choose to seek help when we are in need, finding a Tricare approved therapist is incredibly difficult. The military would prefer you just see someone on base, but they’re not always available — either because they are frequently booked or the base in understaffed in the mental health department.
Not to mention the fact that finding a good therapist is highly personal and often takes time. If you’re in a small town, your in-person options are limited. If you’re looking online, you still have to find someone in your state. And then as soon as you PCS, have fun finding someone new if they’re not licensed in the state you’re moving to!
We’re also sometimes encouraged (by other spouses or spouse leadership, like a key spouse) not to burden our service member with our struggles because they have a stressful job as it is and don’t need the extra worry.
I think it’s this constant feeling that you never really have full control over your life that makes being a spouse so hard.
We don’t typically have a choice about where or when we move. We have to organize our lives around the schedule set by our spouses work requirements.
When people say “Thank you for your service” to my husband, they are recognizing that he puts his life and his mental health on the line in service of his country. But people rarely acknowledge how much spouses put on the line because so much of it falls into the category of “women’s work,” also known as care work.
Care work is wildly undervalued in our country, so it’s no surprise that spouses are underappreciated for all that we do. It’s simply expected that spouses will sacrifice their careers, their financial freedom, their choices, and their free time to manage the challenges of shift work, solo parenting, and supporting the needs of their service member. Just in the same way moms are expected to care for our kids, selflessly, happily, and without attention to our own needs.
I don’t necessarily want someone to thank me for my service. I don’t do this for my country. And I certainly don’t support the military industrial complex, which I believe does more harm than good.
But I do think that the military could do more for spouses. It would be great if childcare was widely available on military bases and more easily affordable for those who need it (not just mil to mil families — in which both parents are service members). It would be incredible if there was a childcare credit available to military families, particularly if they’re not living on base.
It’s also not enough to just have a “spouse nights out” once a month or once a quarter, especially if those don’t come with childcare either.
I’d love to see more options for mental health care covered by Tricare and more mental health professionals on base to better serve the needs of service members and spouses.
The SCRA might have been created to include spouses in some of the civil protections that active duty service members receive but it would be better if it was more straightforward and required less leg work on the spouses end.
It would be a huge shift if spouses simply had all or many of the same benefits that their active duty service members do.
There are many spouses who might disagree with much what I wrote because their experience has been different or say that I shouldn’t complain because I’m ignoring all of the benefits. My response is that it’s reasonable to appreciate what has been offered to and also respectfully share real life, lived experience and request changes that will make things better for everyone.
Spouses deserve real life actions that makes our lives less stressful, since so much of being a military spouse carries enormous stress and difficult decisions that we often have to make alone.
When I think about the spouses I’ve met in the past 8 years since I’ve become a military spouse myself, they are some of the most incredible human beings i have ever met. Some of them are stay at home parents and some are not. Many navigated long, difficult deployments, often at inconvenient times — I know multiple women who have given birth while their spouse was deployed. Most have dealt with irregular schedules, shift work, and last minute TDY’s that have required them to adjust their own plans and work schedules in order to make sure everything in their lives continues to run relatively smoothly.
And while there are plenty of spouses who are the stereotype of what I expected all spouses to be, all of the spouses I’ve met and become friends with are some of the best human beings I know. We most certainly would not have met otherwise and we don’t even always share the same political views, but we take care of one another.
Some spouses I’ve only met in military spouse groups online. We’ve connected through the things we share that are often different from the larger group of military spouses, finding friendship and offering support. One of those spouses connected me with a whole community of Jewish military spouses, which in turn helped my kids have online Hebrew school (sponsored by the military and entirely free for us), while we lived in a place with no other Jewish families.
Another spouse I met online nearly 8 years ago, when our husbands went through officer training a few groups apart. We’ve never lived in the same state at the same time but we’ve built a deep friendship through regular fb messages and texts, giving each other support that sometimes isn’t available to us in our local communities.
Some spouses I’ve met in person.
We’ve gathered at playgrounds, making awkward conversation at first but slowly figuring out who we can trust and who is the wacky anti-vax person to avoid.
We’ve gathered at spouse nights out or family events, trying to make the most of it and hoping to find someone we click with.
We’ve gone to lame squadron events but making the most of it by daring each other to ride the mechanical bull.
We’ve hung out together while our kids play in the backyard, sometimes talking about things that are mundane and other times going deep with the hard, uncomfortable stuff in our lives.
We’ve hung out in driveways, after our kids have gone to sleep and share stories we never expected to share, always laughing and never wanting to be the first one to leave because it inevitably means we all need to go to bed.
I am grateful that I met these women. They have made my life better. They have made my kids lives better. Many of them I’ll likely never see again in person. But I am grateful for the many ways they have made, and will continue to make, being a spouse a little less lonely and hard.
Later this summer, we’ll move to our new house that will be our home for the next 3 years. We’ll actually be slightly outside of the military community while my husband pursues a Phd (sponsored by the Air Force — we wouldn’t be able to do it otherwise).
While we have some friends and family in Colorado and we’re excited to move there, I will miss my loop ladies and the ease of the connections I made on the military base we just left. The spouses who were in the trenches with me, willing to let my kids play at their house all afternoon or let me grab some ketchup because we ran out and I forgot to grab it at the commissary.
I know we’ll figure it out. We’ll get to know our new neighbors, slowly build relationships and trust. But it won’t quite be the same. And I already miss that.
The SCRA is not a one size fits all law in that not all licenses actually transfer, everything is required in writing and often in advance of moving, but sometimes after. It’s not particularly clear and puts the onus on the spouse to sort of what is needed by their new home state, which is simply one more thing to add to their plate. Not as helpful as the law was designed to be. If someone has better information than I do, please let me know.
All of the statistics are courtesy of an article entitled 7 facts you should know about military spouses.
Fascinating piece. I will forever thank military spouses from here on out. It’s such a clear hardship to be a single parent so much of the time and it’s enraging that the military doesn’t offer ways to make that easier.
I hope you know how important your articles are. I have never known any military families and I always thought it was great for kids to learn to be so flexible and friendly and comfortable in new groups. I never knew that the spouses were not given free or nearly free educational possibilities or better support. The old school thinking that the wife has to follow and accept the husband being considered more important is enough to endure; better services and career assistance should be a given.