A mother slit her three very young children’s throats last week.
She was also a military spouse. This fact was noted at the very bottom of the story, right beside the fact that her husband had recently returned from deployment.
Officers said she repeated the phrase, “he never helps,” referring to her husband.
I want her, and every other young military spouse, to know they are not alone. This is a very difficult life.
The military upper echelon can sing their own praises all they want and brag about the support networks and the help they make available to military families. But when it comes down to it, getting that help isn’t always easy.
When you move, it’s hard to make friends to build that support network. To find people you can call at midnight and say, please, just please take my screaming children for five minutes. I am at a breaking point. People judge. People talk. Especially in military neighborhoods. It can be hard to know who is really there to help, and who is there to gossip.
When you move, you can’t just slide into life on base and drop your kids off at hourly care when you are at your breaking point. You have to file paperwork, bring shot records, get your husband’s signature, who by the way, may already be deployed. When we moved to Fort Bragg it took officials there a full year to process the paperwork that would allow my children to be left in hourly care.
One year. It took one year for an office worker to pick up my packet, open it, look for the four pieces of paper I had to turn in and stamp it as approved. This took 365 days.
Our military families have reached a breaking point.
And unfortunately, this wasn’t the first time. A spouse in Florida last year also killed her two children. Friends remarked that they had no idea. Military police are kept busy every single day tending to domestic issues on base.
I say, this is because we as a community are very bad at doing what we claim to do best: supporting each other.
Military communities are full of people who gossip and judge each other. There is a fear that appearing as though you can’t keep your home life together will harm your military member’s career.
Spouses are left home to handle everything: kids, house, yard, the mountains of paperwork that have to be filed in triplicate just to get some help. When the unit comes home the men can’t help or won’t help. They are tired, they are injured, they are back out in the field as soon as they return.
The young mother also allegedly told officers that her husband becomes angry when the children, a 2-year-old and 6-month-old twins, cry.
Officials tend to forget that when soldiers come home broken from their wartime duty, they take out their frustrations on their families. They don’t deal well with crying and screaming babies, again, leaving the spouse to handle his lingering PTSD as well as needy children.
There can seem like there is no end in sight.
The military is not going to change. The military is not going to stop requiring that you file dozens of papers and wait months to get that much needed help. The machine is tangled so tightly in its own red tape that only a change in attitude from the top down will give spouses the real help they need.
I, unfortunately, believe that will never happen.
We have to make changes from the bottom up.
Your sisters in arms need help. Knock on the door. Be a friend, a real friend who is willing to listen and not just get info to gossip.
Don’t assume you are being too pushy by checking in on the new family. Check in, talk with her, be present in the moment. Sometimes that can make all the difference, and even save a young life.
