Working outside the home and taking care of a family can be a precarious balancing act. When those two worlds collide, lost jobs, exhausted kids and quarreling spouses can be found in the wreckage.
Military spouses are often not just balancing those two worlds, but rather twirling plates on sticks as they try to manage their own careers, their families and the endless trail of red tape and paperwork that comes with the title of military family.
This month, my worlds collided and it felt like a galactic explosion.
My husband retired this month, which resulted in a mountain of paperwork and deadlines that I never anticipated. We were naïve to and unprepared for the required number of meetings, paperwork, deadlines and costs that come with this milestone. I assumed my husband would take care of much of this. He assumed that much of the changes were automatic. We both assumed wrong.
In a week’s time we lost medical and dental insurance. We are without both for the next month and had to fork over more than $400 we didn’t budget for to be eligible to even apply. The Army held his last paycheck, standard protocol of which we were unaware. No paycheck also meant no money was sent to housing, where we still live for the next 30 days. In Hawaii that means we now owe $2,900 that we didn’t budget. I have spent weeks going three rounds with the transportation office to find a flight home that can accommodate my handicapped child’s service animal as well as our family pet. The renter moved out of a home we own on the mainland (meaning less income again) and I have been organizing and cleaning around the clock to prepare for the movers to arrive this week. I am doing this alone while still caring for our five children since my husband left early to take care of family business.
The havoc in my personal life wreaked havoc on my professional life. I work from home but the work wasn’t getting done. Exhaustion set in, causing my performance to slip. I was so busy trying to stomp out the proverbial fires around the home front that I had little left to give at work, and it showed. I didn’t manage my schedule or workload well. I missed meetings.
When the chaos at home creeps into your office, the result is never good. For someone like me, who takes great pride in their work, realizing just how much damage was done was like taking a punch in the gut. Suddenly, you look around and see that you are doing nothing well, anywhere.
I have no great words of wisdom to avoid or fix this situation. After 42 months of deployments, 15 years as a military spouse and handling my own deployment to the war zone as a reporter, I never doubted my ability to handle this move, retirement and my job.
And I don’t think I should have doubted myself. Instead, I should have been better prepared. I didn’t discuss the ins and outs of retirement planning with my husband. I assumed he had it covered. When he didn’t, rather than ask for his help, I took on each and every task myself. I shouldn’t have. When I was preparing for the move it took hours to do so with all five kids nipping at my heels. It shouldn’t have. I should have asked for help from my friends and let them step in to take the kids so I could finish more efficiently.
There’s a lot I could and should have done differently to make the insane workload during this transition more manageable. But I also know it can be hard to ask for help. Military spouses are so accustomed to simply handling whatever is thrown our way that to reach out for help can feel like admitting defeat.
It is not possible to strike a perfect balance every day. We will have off weeks. We will be caught off guard and occasionally, we will slip. But when we set our sights on sailing straight into a perfect storm, such as moving, retiring and maintaining daily life all at the same time, it’s also ok to raise the white flag and ask for help.
