Dealing With Disappointment During Military Life
Have you ever planned a vacation only to have to cancel or reschedule it because military dates changed?
Have you ever given birth when your husband was deployed because they simply wouldn’t send him home like you thought they might?
Have you ever wanted to be stationed close to home only for your spouse to get orders clear across the country?
Most military spouses have been through one or all of these disappointments not to mention others that can happen when you are a military spouse. Dates change, your spouse can’t always be around when you need them, and you don’t always get a choice in where you are going to live.
What can you do when disappointment hits? How can you turn things around to get to a better place?
Shock
When met with disappointing news, you will probably be in shock. They say to “hope for the best, plan for the worst” and we know things might not work out the way we want them to, but we still hope that they do. And then when they don’t? We can’t believe we are hearing that news.
If you feel shocked when you realize things are not going to be the way you want them to be, you are not alone. It’s normal to feel this way at first. You had the hope of a better outcome, and now you have to start to accept your new reality, and that isn’t always easy to do.
Sadness
After shock comes the sadness. You are going to have to move to Alaska even though your family lives in FL. Your husband is going to deploy right before your 30th birthday. Your family trip to Walt Disney World will have to be postponed by six months.
You might need to take a moment to cry into your pillow. You are allowed to be sad about this; you are allowed to have those emotions. Let things out, call a friend and vent, have a good cry, and then move on to planning.
Planning
Every time I get some disappointing news because of my husband’s job, I eventually find myself coming up with a plan. I know that I will need to be creative to move forward. I will need to figure out a way to get through whatever it is I am dealing with.
If it is a matter of an unexpected deployment, I try to figure out what I can do during that deployment to stay as busy as I can, I think about how the deployment pay can help us, and I think about extra things I can do that I might not have time for if he wasn’t going to be deployed.
Being able to have a plan to deal with the disappointment will go a very long way in finding relief.
Relief
Relief happens when you get to a place where you feel like you can figure out a way forward. It might not always be easy, you might not always be happy about what happened, but you can figure out how to get through it.
If you assumed your husband would be at the birth of your first child and they are not, you are going to go through a wave of emotions about it. You will eventually figure out who you want with you because he can’t be. And then you will start to accept that this has to be your new normal. And with that comes the relief that you can, in fact, give birth without your husband.
You Got This
Remember, you got this. Reach out to your friends, make plans, and figure out how to deal with disappointment in your military life.
Disappointments will happen in military life. They say to write all plans in pencil because all plans can change, no matter how close you are to the date they are supposed to happen. We as military spouse want to support our service members and getting to a place where we can move forward is a good way to do so.