Weekend Retreat: Dealing with Military Wife PTSD. Is that a thing?

This retreat was 100% necessary.

It is hard for me to even sit here and describe how desperate I was to get away two weeks ago because I returned fully restored, better than before. I am on the other side of that mental wall of misery now. Life is good and happy again, and I fully mean that.

When I packed my bags and left Alan with the boys, I did not even fully grasp why I need this so badly. I just knew that Alan works at home now, so he could handle the boys for the weekend just fine.

I did not realize how bad off my mental/emotional state truly was until I sat down on the airplane, buckled my seatbelt, was looking out the window, and heard a child cry. This was probably a preschool aged child. How many times have I flown with a child and had to quiet down a baby or a toddler on an airplane?

When I hear that sound, my heart always goes out to the parents. I have been that parent so many times. This time though the sound of the crying hit something deeper in my brain, down in my spirit, something I have pushed to the corners that comes overflowing out when I least expect it.

Tears.

No! No! I am not going to sit here and silently cry on this airplane. It is hard to explain why tears were so close to the surface, but I am going to try to explain myself anyway. All those memories of handling babies and toddlers on airplanes, they are all tied up in difficult memories I have of the hard work that I put in through all these years of being an Army wife.

I hear that crying, and instantly I am twenty-five years old, flying alone with my six-month-old to begin a new life in Texas. Alan will follow me in two weeks, but for now it is just me and the baby.

At the same time, I am twenty-eight years old, flying with a toddler and four-year-old alone because I wanted to visit Alabama longer than Alan had off from work. That day the flight was delayed two hours, and after hours of keeping the boys entertained in the airport, I was already on edge when I got on the airplane where I had to make sure Joshua did not come in contact with any peanuts, which seemed to be everywhere in those days.

The sound of the crying starts, and suddenly I was thirty-two, flying home with one-year-old John David to visit my parents who I do not get to see very often because we have lived in the D.C. area for five years. I remember that day there was a super kind lady on the plane who walked down the aisle and gave me a new and different toy for J.D. to play with so he would stop crying.

I am thirty-three years old, flying with all four of our boys to California. Mom flew with me because Alan is already in school.

There were so many moves, and there were so many airplane rides with small children and me. Somehow Alan usually was not there, and I cannot even remember all of them or why I took all of them. I just remember standing in the aisle, softly singing to my baby so he would not cry on the airplane.

I remember landing at BWI airport, with a baby, I don’t even remember which one, in tow, and completely unable to find my car in the parking garage at eleven p.m.

So all of this starts to flash through my head, and water is beginning to leak out of my eyes, while my nose fills up with the overflow of salty tears. I stiffen myself. NO! This is not the place. Every flight attendant on this airplane knows who I am because I am flying with Jennings. (I was alone in a three-person seat though, thanks to the rona.)

Instead, I focused my brain as hard as I could on praying that child to stop crying. He or she was asleep in like one minute. Thank you, Jesus!

Thankfully, I recovered, and Jennings soon joined me to talk all the way to Atlanta.

I had NO idea my brain was going to go in that direction from a simple airplane ride.

But the thing was that my head was already in that fragile place, from all the recent weeks of feeling trapped and homesick, so the airplane ride just kind of nudged me closer to the edge.

The first time this ever happened was the day I listened to a speech about the Combat Reboot program at my church. It just sort of lanced an emotional boil that had been festering for a while. Ew. Gross imagery. Sorry, guys.

Let me explain about that. Our church here in Maryland, back in the days when we all got to go to normal church, has a Combat Recovery program. One day the organizer for the Combat Recovery program spoke at a church business meeting. She was promoting the program and looking for new people to join and/or lead it. Alan has even been asked to lead the group, as it has to be lead by a combat veteran, but this is not Alan’s calling. I totally get that, as I feel that way about many things. Being a combat veteran does not automatically make you a good leader for veterans with PTSD.

I, of course, am not at all a combat veteran. Nor do I have combat PTSD. I have never seen war, lived with the daily threat of enemy fire, or had to watch friends die or be mutilated. Those are certainly not my issues.

However, as she stood up there talking about military veterans and their spouses and the challenges that they face and how this group can help them, I became a complete and total WRECK. I sat there and silently bawled my eyes out for what felt like twenty minutes. It was so humiliating and unexpected.

“Why??” I kept wondering. Why am I crying so much, and why can’t I stop??? And I could. not. stop. crying. It was terrible.

It was like every time she said the word “military” my heart just poured out more grief. This is so hard to explain, but again, I will try. I literally was left wondering if military wife PTSD could possibly be a thing. Maybe this is because this could be our last duty station? Or because we are nearing our twenty year mark? I don’t know, but suddenly, here it is.

When I was at this meeting, we had only moved in three or four months past. I was fresh off two years of moving in a row, five moves in four years, and eleven moves in eighteen years. Then there were those year long, fifteen-month, and six-month long deployments where I juggled the kids.

So many nights of being new in town, and it is like all the emotions of all those hard things that we dealt with in the midst of all these years as a military family just piled on top of each other in a very untidy fashion. You know how you stack things that are not equal sizes, and if you stack big things on top of little things and crooked on top of straight, and after a while it all just starts to slide?

Well, that day we had a full on avalanche of pent up feelings. When you are tense and fighting through a move or a family separation or a war deployment or being new year after year after year after year, it catches up with you.

This had never happened to me before, crying over I was not even sure what! I think it is the eighteen years of it just catching up with me. We could retire in two years, and I am so extremely ready to do just that. Retire and buy a house in Alabama, land of my forefathers. Maybe the Army thing possibly being almost over is a whole other part of it. I don’t know.

All the feelings started to come out my eyes and my nose:

-hurt -disappointment -uncertainty -inadequacy -failure

-abandoned– So many times I felt abandoned to deal with raising the boys alone. It was not Alan’s fault. He was doing his job, and that meant he had to go overseas sometimes. I knew that with my head, but sometimes it felt an awful lot like plain old alone. Maybe it was wrong, but it was a feeling I had to deal with.

-exhaustion -confusion -worry -frustration -anger

Well, obviously, I could go on and on. That was when I realized that no, Alan was right, combat recovery was not a good program for us. He did not feel like he needed it, and I needed recovery too much to go. That would have been a whole lot more of facing all those emotions that busted out all suddenly on me, and I could not handle it. I really couldn’t.

That incident was late last fall, and I had not had another moment of raw emotion like that one at the church business meeting until this flight to Florida.

But I am happy to tell you that I held it together for another twenty-four hours.

Then I spilled it all out onto Jennings, and somehow I feel like I ACTUALLY worked through it, to the point that I am not even the same and I am able to sit here and type about it without coming apart at the seams. I cried it all out in Florida. Poor Jennings! She got an earful!

Do you know why it helped?

Maybe crying it out, facing your problems, and talking about it always helps. I am not sure, but there was an extra layer present at Jennings’ beach bungalow. That added factor was the way that she pointed me back to what matters, to Jesus. She kept pulling up her Church at the Highlands telecasts and Christian music playlists, and it was exactly what I needed.

With God on your side, you are not relying on your own inner strength alone to get you through hard things. With God there is a bigger comforter and help that goes further than you could get on your own.

Jennings and I talked about our current problems, and we laughingly discussed and debated our old foes too. Together, we even combed Facebook and successfully found one of our friends from college days who we thought we would never be able to find. It was so good just to see her smiling face, looking exactly the same.

Every morning we ate our eggs and walked on the beach. Ugh, I would rather have cereal or a pop tart like in my younger days. Why won’t my pant size cooperate with that??

Then every evening we would take one or two walks. Two different nights we went out around midnight to search the beach for sea turtles laying eggs in the dark. There were none to be found though.

We got sun burned, ate lunch on the beach under our umbrella, and even went souvenir shopping. You might be happy to know that even down in Florida, they took our temperatures at the store, and everyone was required to wear a mask.

I got the cutest souvenirs ever, and I bought every single one of my boys (even Alan) a new Melbourne Beach t-shirt.

With every ounce of seriousness inside of me, I am telling you that this trip was a gift from God. He knew I needed it, and I am so thankful I got to go. The Lord saw my exasperation with lockdown isolation and homesickness, and he blessed me with a ticket to get me through until we visit our family in August.

If you are feeling miserable, pray!! Pray for help. You never know what that help may look like or what form it may come in, but don’t turn it down when it arrives!! You never know what God may have in store for you.

Seize the day! And pray!

We cannot wait to see all of our dear family in August! You will be getting the most desperate-for-people and visiting version of us ever. Ha! I hope you are ready!