When Your Children are Being Deployed

The best advice I can give to parents whose son or daughter is deployed is that they make sure the relationship they have with their son or daughter is loving and open. If a relationship is troubled before deployment, it is sure to be troubled during this more stressful time. If your relationship with your adult child is difficult, make sure you work on it before he goes off to a war zone. If there are things that have gone too long unsaid (“I love you,” or “I’m sorry”), say them now. Don’t forget to also say “I’m proud of you.”

Of course, if your child is married, then you want to have the very best of relationships with his spouse too because that’s often the route you’ll need to take to stay as informed as possible. Now is the time for you to be loving, understanding, and supportive, not judgmental or jealous. If your daughter only has time for one phone call, she’s probably going to call her husband, not her mother. When that call is over, you want your son-in-law’s first thought to be, “I’d better call her Mom; I know she’ll be happy to know I heard from my wife.”

Parents need to be extremely flexible during deployment. Military deployment often comes at a time in your child’s life and in yours of great change: your son or daughter may be finishing an education, getting married, possibly even having children of his own. In addition to watching your child leave home for a dangerous location, you yourself are going through some changes: empty nest syndrome, menopause, and other changes associated with midlife. The parents I know who managed this time the best did positive productive things for themselves. One mother went back to school to get a law degree. Others took up hobbies such as photography or gardening. I decided to show my support with a weekly care package and letter and to start a serious fitness program. Eventually, I decided I’d learned enough from my experience to write a book about it.

These things you do for yourself help with your relationship with your military son or daughter too. I mentioned telling your child that you are proud of his service and proud of his accomplishments, but make an effort to do something that makes your child proud of you, too. You don’t want him to call you and hang up thinking how hard it is to talk to you because you are so worried about him. You want him to hang up the phone and turn to his buddy and say something like, “Wow, my mom just got an A on her first college paper.” My own feeling was if I could keep my son’s thoughts about home positive and uplifting, that was one less worry he had to deal with. I figured his job was important and serious enough to warrant my effort to keep him from being worried about his family at home, and that by doing so, I was contributing to his ability to stay alive. If I kept him from unnecessary worry, that would help him stay focused on the very present and daily danger he faced in Iraq.

One other thing you as a parent can do is establish a relationship with some of the other parents in your son’s or daughter’s unit. Ask for a phone number or email address of his friend’s parents or spouse. Reach out to these people who share your concerns. There is strength in numbers, and you can establish your own little support group. Some of the friends I made during my son’s deployment, other parents associated with the 66th MP Company, are still close friends today. We shared a pretty unique experience, we all grew together, and some of us maintain contact five years later.

—Sandy Doell
Mom’s Field Guide

Stars and Stripes: Happy Mother’s Day

May 10th, 2009 by Terri Barnes in Stars and Stripes column Spouse Calls

Happy Mother’s Day! Whether you’re serving overseas, home with the kids while your husband is deployed, or just maintaining normalcy for your military household, I hope that all you moms out there are receiving some warm fuzzies of appreciation today.

The Mother’s Day edition of the Spouse Calls column is all about the mothers of active duty members. Read it here.

One of the moms who contributed advice for this column was Sandy Doell, an Army mom-turned-author. Her book “Mom’s Field Guide,” offers practical advice, mostly for surviving a son or daughter’s deployment.

“Parents need to be extremely flexible during deployment,” said Sandy, noting the changes happening in your parent/child relationship.

“In addition to watching your child leave home for a dangerous location, you yourself are going through some changes: empty nest syndrome, menopause, and other changes associated with midlife. The parents I know who managed this time the best did positive productive things for themselves.”

Attention to one’s own personal development has benefits to parent and child, she said. There is more to a person than parenthood, and there should be more to a relationship with an adult child than caretaking and worry making.

“You don’t want him to call you and hang up thinking how hard it is to talk to you because you are so worried about him,” Sandy said. “You want him to hang up the phone and turn to his buddy and say something like, ‘Wow, my mom just got an A on her first college paper.’”

Sandy’s book is available in print or as an e-book at

http://www.momsfieldguide.com/

More resources for the parents of military members:

• http://somesoldiersmom.blogspot.com/
• http://www.proudarmyparents.com/
• http://www.goarmyparents.com/
• http://www.navy-parents.com/bb/index.php
• http://www.usmcparents.com/forum/default_group.asp
• http://www.navyformoms.com/group/navyparents
• http://www.militarymoms.net/
• http://groups.yahoo.com/group/airforcemomsanddads2/

Technorati Tags: Mom's Field Guide, Sandy Doell, What You Need to Know to Make It Through Your Loved One's Military Deployment

Military Deployment - Families Left Behind

You are beside yourself with worry. Your beautiful child has just climbed on board a C-130 transport plane with about 200 other innocents just like him, and you, along with all the other parents, are walking back to your cars, through a terminal or across an airfield, tissues pressed to your noses, everyone unashamedly tearful. Or you’re standing on a Navy pier waving and crying as his ship pulls out and you fear for his future.

You are more aware than at any other leavetaking that this could be the last time you see your son or daughter alive.

How can you help your child through this ordeal? How will you yourself survive it? Where will you turn for help? The answer is standing beside you, also waving and crying. There is strength in numbers, and you are about to need all the strength you can get. Introduce yourself and get to know your peers. You’ll all need each other in the months to come.

Perhaps you didn’t get to attend your child’s leave taking ceremony. Perhaps you, like me, were 2,000 miles away. Perhaps your good-byes were said at home a few weeks earlier. You can still find ways to contact the families of other troops deployed with your loved one. Make the effort to reach out to them. You’ll be grateful for their friendship in the coming months.

Aside from the all-important question of how your child is going to survive this deployment—literally and figuratively—another issue needs to be addressed: How will you survive it? This may be the greatest ordeal of your life, and you’re going to need some help.

You need information. You need support from the families of other deployed soldiers—those who have been through it before, and those who are going through it with you right now.

There are things you can actually do that will make this year go by relatively quickly and with less stress for you. Working on projects, individually and as a group, writing letters, setting up stations in your home that will make mailing packages easier, making sure your phone/communications system is set up so that you don’t miss any phone calls or e-mails, recruiting your friends and co-workers to help provide needed supplies for your soldier and his buddies, and more . . . things that I will explain in detail how to do that will help you make it through this “year of fear.”

I survived it and so can you. When it’s over, you’ll be stronger for having lived through it. You will know what needs doing, and you’ll do it. In the Army, a mission is a task you’ve been assigned to complete. Your child has a mission and so do you. That mission is the thing that will save your sanity and keep you going.

For this reason, I’ve written Mom’s Field Guide: What You Need to Know to Make it Through Your Loved One’s Military Deployment. Here you will learn all about how to complete your mission safely and with pride.

–Sandy Doell

Technorati Tags: deployed soldiers, Military Deployment