Thursday: Sharing Our Voices
Last night I interviewed a lovely author. As we were chatting beforehand, I mentioned that I am a military spouse, and the author shared that she grew up in a military family. “It’s hard on the wives,” she said, and behind that simple statement I felt the weight of her mother’s experience. (Her mother, of course, is probably my peer, which makes that weight all the more understandable to me.)
In the years when Mr. Bethanne was on active duty, the only following spouse who spoke openly about mental health was Alma Powell, wife of General Colin Powell. In the 1990s, Mrs. Powell revealed that she experienced depression and took medication to manage it. There wasn’t a lot more said, but for someone like me who had been diagnosed with depression in high school and medicated for it beginning in graduate school, just knowing that a military spouse could talk about the disease meant a great deal.
The military is a kind of community — and there are all kinds of communities within the military. There’s the Army. Then the Army officers. The officers’ spouses. The noncommissioned officers. Their spouses. The children of all those groups, who live in different kinds of housing but go to school and other activities together. Among those groups are more: Officers and noncommissioned officers in different specialties. Spouses who love socializing and spouses who loathe it. Kids who love their life “on post” and kids who would rather be anywhere else.
Some kinds of communities require adherence to rules and normative behaviors. I found that to be true of military life. There were career-enhancing events cloaked as social obligations (especially when you’re stationed overseas, it’s not easy to find people to socialize with who aren’t involved with a servicemember’s career), spouse-centric social events that were really part of someone’s career, and so forth.
Part of the problem, for me, is that I was torn. I wanted to do right by my chosen spouse and by our children. But I didn’t enjoy any of it, the way many of the other military spouses I met seemed to do. Now I know that one of the reasons I couldn’t enjoy anything, even the smallest anything, was because I was depressed. Even if there had been an active and welcoming writers’ group right there next to the post exchange, I probably wouldn’t have been able to enjoy it.
I was trying to fit in, a square peg in a round hole, and I didn’t do a very good job of it. I shirked as many “wives’ coffees” and “spouse support groups” as I could without raising red flags. I skipped every Bunco night and tried not to accept invitations to MLM-scheme “parties” for unnecessary things like artisanal baskets and mini-muffin pans and new lipsticks. I knew what I didn’t like. I knew what I didn’t want. But I had no idea what I did want.
Without making this post too long, I can say (spoiler alert!) that I eventually did find out what I want, and I started living into it. (More on that in another post). What I want to say here is that no matter what kind of community you’re in, restrictive or not, it’s worth looking for someone who is talking about the things that matter to you. It might be someone outside of that community. It might be a general’s wife you’ll never meet who shares her own story. Keep looking for the voices that speak to you. Don’t give up and try to turn yourself into someone you’re not.
During my spouse’s two decades on active duty, there was no social media — there was, when he started, when we started, no Internet at all. It might be easier now to reach out to a community not your own. Might. Just because you have the world at your fingertips doesn’t mean you can conquer the world. I believe in you.
Namaste.