How My Role As A Military Spouse Affects My Children

How My Role As A Military Spouse Affects My Children

I have never been a Military spouse without children. My husband joined after we had been married three years. We had a 13 month old boy at the time.

I have only ever known the Military life that included kids. I don’t know what it is like for my husband to be gone and not have anyone to take care of or look after. It just isn’t my exeperience as a Military spouse.

As I look back on the past 10 years of being a Military spouse, I have to wonder how it has affected my children. Not in a personal way but in the fact that they are being raised by a Mom who is a Military spouse. A mom who has had to play the role of both mom and dad while her husband has been away. A mom who has had to struggle with anxiety while her husband was in a war zone. A mom who was trying to do the best that she could in a very stressful situation.

I wonder how that has affected them and how they would be if I had never been a Military spouse.

I know it is not good to think too much about that because it is not our reality. Our reality is that my boys have a mom who is a Military spouse, for good and for bad.

Sometimes I think that life is harder than it needs to be for them. That they have had to deal with missing their Dad and missing a bit of their mom too because I have had too many things to do. When you are the only adult in the house, you don’t have a lot of spare time and the kids can pick up on that. You do your best to spend quality time with them and make life happy and fun. But sometimes you fall short and there is nothing you can do about that.

I know that my parenting has changed a bit because of deployments. It had to. There was no way I could parent the same when things turned out different then I thought they would be. I had to let more things go and focus on what was really important.

I have had to work hard to be a good mom and be there even if I felt too sad or like I wanted to just crawl into bed and sleep the day away.

I hope that my boys can feel my love for them and know that I have done the best that I could over the years.

It helps to have a good community of other Military spouses to talk with about this type of thing. It can be hard to admit that your kids might be missing out on something and it is easier to talk about with people who have been there and know those same emotions.

If you are looking for a community in your area, head on over to Hello Mamas to see what is available to you. You will be glad that you did 🙂