Photo: KC Pohtilla

An Inside Look at the Life of a Military Family
When writer Alison Buckholtz met her husband Scott, a Navy pilot, she couldn’t imagine a life without him, even though he tried to discourage her, knowing the sacrifices she would be required to make as a military wife. They married shortly after September 11, 2001. In the seven years since they stood under the wedding canopy they’ve moved four times and had two children, Ethan, who is now six, and Esther who is now four. In her new book, Standing By: The Making of an American Military Family in a Time of War (Tarcher Penguin, $24.95), Buckholtz writes with wisdom and candor about the struggles and unexpected rewards of her life as a Navy wife. She wrote the book while living with her children near a naval base in Anacortes, Washington, awaiting Scott’s return from a seven-month deployment on an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf. Learn more at www.StandingByBook.com.

Q: Why did you decide to write your book?
Once I married my husband and we had kids, I started seeing first-hand what military families go through. I developed a tremendous respect and admiration for military spouses in particular. I wanted to help the world see what goes on behind the scenes of a military lifestyle and to try to close the gap between civilians and the military because there’s not a lot of understanding or overlap in their experiences.

Q: How have the lives of military families changed with our country fighting wars on two fronts?
A: What I’ve seen is that now deployments happen more frequently and are longer. So service members don’t stay home between deployments as long as they would have in the past. In the Navy, the typical deployment used to be six months. That was very standard. Now the deployments are anywhere between 7 and 10 months. That doesn’t even compare with what families in the Army and the National Guard have gone through with 18-month deployments being the norm. In each of the services, it’s different, but what’s the same across the board with military families is that you are going to see less of either mom or dad, whoever is the active service member.

Q: How has being a Navy wife changed your view of patriotism in America?
A: I was like a lot of people: I didn’t have any connection to the military whatsoever. I read about what the military does when I was in social studies classes, growing up in high school, but it all seemed very distant from my experiences and all very theoretical. There never was a sense of the human side, either in terms of the families behind the service member or even what the service members themselves go through.

I think that the way I’ve changed the most is that I’ve seen up close the human side of the military. I talk in my book about how being a Navy wife is like an ongoing civics lesson for me. And I really feel that to be true. I feel that I’m living American civics in a way that I could never have read and internalized when I was in school. It’s given me an appreciation of what the country is all about and the mechanics of how it operates because I’ve seen firsthand how the military works to keep America stable and how it works on an international level. It’s been an education for me.

I found is that the military is incredibly open and welcoming and the questions we’ve had about Judaism from other people have been very respectful. A lot of people are very eager to learn more. There’s never been any feeling that it’s something negative and it never really plays out in a professional context. The military is a meritocracy. It doesn’t operate on status, it doesn’t operate as an old boy’s club, or of people being the same religion, the same color, or even everyone speaking the same language.

The military is a microcosm of America. People are always talking about America being open and welcoming to everyone and, from what I’ve seen, the military is the same way.

Q: What have you learned about marriage and commitment that you didn’t dream of when you dating?
A: Right before this tour of duty started my husband and I went to training specifically for the serviceman who was going to be deployed and the spouse who was going to be supporting him or her. I remember one of the things the trainer told us (and he was someone who had been a commanding officer in the past and had gone through exactly what we were about to go through), is that if you are a strong couple going into this you will emerge even stronger; and if you are not a strong couple, be very careful. Luckily my husband and I have had a good relationship from the start. I feel like it was tested in a lot of ways during his seven-month deployment and during all the stresses that military life puts on a family.

Our relationship did get stronger during the deployment and it wasn’t the old cliché about absence making the heart grow fonder. I found that by my doing my job at home and by him doing his job overseas, we cemented the relationship that we have. Each of us gives 150 percent to what we do. When he’s home he’s completely a member of the family; he’s very active with the kids and they’re very attached to him. It was never my dream to marry someone who was deployed for months at a time, but I think that when he was away, I saw firsthand that I was even happier with the choice I made. I saw that having those roles, doing two separate things in two different places, but still operating as an intact family, made us much stronger.   

Q: Today people seldom associate Jews with military service. How have your experience changed your thinking?   
A: I was very curious whether we would be able to live a Jewish life and make Jewish friends with whom we could celebrate the holidays. That was one of the things that concerned me in choosing this lifestyle. It was a big unknown for me. I was coming from a world where I lived in a very Jewish neighborhood and had a lot of Jewish friends, where there was never any issue about celebrating a holiday or going to someone’s house for Shabbat lunch.

What I discovered is that we were able to practice, in a way, a “pure” Judaism in the sense that Judaism is a religion centered in the home. In moving to Anacortes where there isn’t a large Jewish community and certainly no JCC, synagogue, chavurah or other Jewish institutions for us to count on, my husband and I had to look inside ourselves and decide what we are going to teach our kids at home, things that we had learned as children maybe at a JCC or Hebrew school. I think that made us stronger because we decided how we were going to observe Shabbat and the holidays and how we were going to explain things to our kids. So we really had to look inside ourselves and ask ourselves questions that we may not have had to ask if we had lived in a place where we could depend on the Jewish institutions in the area.

Q: How did you create a Jewish community?
A: After we became the Jewish lay-leaders for the military base, it was an entrée for us to reach out to other Jews in the community. We were able to create a small but close group of Jewish families in the area, some of whom were associated with the base and some of whom were living in the community here. We found that this community was as beautiful and as meaningful as the large community that we had come from. Here we came to depend on each other much more than I think we would have living in a larger community. We always get together for Rosh Hashanah dinner and a Passover Seder, do a Chanukah party for the kids, and usually get together once during the summer as well. Our experience here has taught us how to create a community for ourselves in a way that we had never needed to before; in the past we had always been automatically included in whatever Jewish community we lived in. I think this experience will allow us to leave here with a stronger sense of who we are.

Q: You write about your husband’s seven-month deployment and being the sole parent. What have you learned about yourself as you’ve met this challenge?
A: I learned that I am a lot stronger than I had ever thought. At the beginning of the deployment I remember thinking to myself, how am I ever going to do this, this is an absolutely impossible task. I had been separated from my husband for long chunks of time when he was deployed earlier in our marriage, but because it was the first deployment with kids, it felt completely different to me. I thought there was no way I could meet the challenge of being on my own with my kids for seven months.

It wasn’t about my being lonely; it really was more about how was I going to help kids deal with their feelings of sadness, loneliness, abandonment, anger, fear, all of the things that come with deployment from a child’s point of view. What I found was you take it day by day and try to meet the challenges as they come and sometimes you do a better job than others. The process of deployment from a family point of view is never going to be pretty, you just have to get it done. Once it was behind us we were able to resume our life as a family again.

Q: How has your conception about what a home is changed because of your experiences as a military wife?
A: You know the idea of home is very troubling in a military context, because you move around a lot. In an ideal world I would probably be the kind of person who would settle in one place and never leave because I really value rootedness. This is completely at odds with being a military spouse, which is all about rootlessness. I have come to see that home can be more than one place. I feel at this point after three years in Anacortes and the Pacific Northwest that I do feel very much at home here. Yet, I find I still think at same time of Washington, D.C. as home, as well. I guess my idea of home has become a lot more elastic. I have come to think of home less as a certain place and more having to do with anywhere the four of us can set up shop and live our lives as being home. That’s something that has changed tremendously for me from the time I married into the military. I never would have thought like that before.

Q: You talk about the relationships you develop with spouses in the squadron. Was that a surprise to you?
A: I had heard about the supportive community of military spouses. That’s legendary—that they are always there for each other. I was very hesitant when we first moved here to ask anything of anyone. I was always very eager to help anybody else who was in need, but I never really wanted to ask myself. That changed because if you have a husband who is deployed and little kids at home, there is going to come a time where you have to ask for help, either because the kids are sick or you are sick and someone’s got to be driven somewhere. Gradually I began to see firsthand the value of those relationships.

Q: Because the military requires long absences of one or both parents, do you see children being emotionally damaged by the experience?
A: Both being a mom and being a military mom were both fairly new to me. I really depended on the advice I got from military spouses who have been at it a lot longer than I have and had been through deployments numerous times before with their kids. They told me that the kids always turn out O.K. in the end. I took heart from their advice because I depended on them as expert sources. I don’t look around and see children who are damaged, I look around and see children who miss their mom or miss their dad but are happy centered children who have a parent at home who loves them and supports them. I feel as though the spouses who counseled me that everything would work out in the end, were right. I feel very grateful to have their advice and reassurance throughout the process.

Q: Is there support within the Navy system to help families cope?
A: There are a lot of great resources in the Navy system to help families cope. There are all kinds of outlets--family support group networks and organizations, counseling and pamphlets. From what I’ve been able to see the military goes out of its way to help families. They know that the happiness of the family is a factor in whether the service member stays in the military. No one is well served by an unhappy family.

Q: What role did your extended family play in helping you get through your husband’s deployment?
A: My parents, my siblings, my mother-in-law, and my best friend all came to visit at different parts of the deployment. They provided me with support and company and they provided the kids with much needed distractions. There was something to look forward to during deployment because there was always a family member coming to visit us. That helped a lot. My family rose to the task. They didn’t just ask, “How can I support you?” They did it: they made the plane reservations, they took the time off work, they sacrificed their own time and money to come to visit us and do what we needed. I saw a willingness and commitment to help us that underscored the love and respect I already had for them.

Q: Do other families experiencing deployment have that same kind of support?
A: I don’t get the sense that everyone has that. I really don’t think that I could have done as well as I did had I not had the support of my family. I felt very fortunate.

Q: How has being a Navy wife, which forced you to focus a significant amount of your time in the domestic sphere, changed your perception about feminism?
A: It’s been one of the biggest surprises of being a military spouse. The way I think of feminism now is that it’s about choices that expand women’s lives rather than constricting them. This is ironic because people tend to think that living in the domestic sphere constricts your world. But I have discovered through the life I’ve lived since I married into the military that there is so much more out there that I never knew about. In that way being a military wife has greatly expanded my world. I’ve met people and traveled places and had to do things and ask things of myself that I never had to before.