By Jennifer Crain
“It seems like keeping up with a routine is pretty important.”
I’m sipping an afternoon cup of black tea in a Lacey coffee shop with Michelle Reichert and Lezlie Burke, two military spouses. We’ve been talking for more than a half hour about the challenges of navigating the holidays when a spouse is deployed. Both nod their heads immediately, even fiercely, in response to my observation.
“Routine is huge,” says Burke.
The mother of three says being thrust into temporary single parenthood has led to exhausted evenings and left her with little time to keep up with daily responsibilities, much less take any time for herself. Burke’s husband, Lt. Derek Burke, has been serving in Afghanistan since August.
“You have a button and it’s on,” she says, “You never get to turn it off.”
Reichert agrees, “I feel like my head never shuts off.”
Add the stresses of daily life to the tumult of preparations and separation from a loved one during the family-centered holiday season, and it’s easy to understand why Reichert insists on a daily run (that’s when she locks in on her daily plans) and Burke tackles to-do lists rather than reading a book or scheduling coffee with a friend during the few hours every week when her two youngest, ages 2 years (Reese) and 5 months (Gunner), are in preschool.
The two describe challenges that are mirrored in thousands of families across the U.S. as the holiday season gets underway. According to the Center for Deployment Psychology, over half of all active service members are married and a notable number, 43%, have children. The most current statistics on deployments are from December of last year, when over 196,000 soldiers were deployed in about 150 countries outside the U.S.
Late last December, thousands of soldiers returned in time for Christmas as a result of the end-of-year withdrawal from Iraq. But the Reichert and Burke families won’t be among those celebrating the holidays together this year.
This is the third deployment for the Reichert family and the first holiday season they’ve been apart in thirteen years of marriage, Reichert tells me. Her husband, Maj. Ryan Reichert, also served in Iraq in 2010 and in Afghanistan in 2004. He’s currently serving in Saudi Arabia.
Reichert is helping their daughters, Lauren and Annabel, navigate through a holiday without their dad by keeping with a steady routine, altering their usual traditions and capitulating to the holiday spirit a little earlier than usual. Instead of their yearly trip to pick out a Christmas tree on the day after Thanksgiving, for instance, she put up an artificial tree. But the kids have had an early dose of the holiday spirit: by late November they’d already decorated the tree, nestled their Christmas village into cottony snow in the front entryway and constructed gingerbread houses.
“Whatever’s going to make them happy and [keep them from] thinking about how they miss out on certain things,” she says, “[that’s what’s] going to help us get through this day.”
Lt. Burke has also never been deployed over the holidays, despite previous deployments to Bosnia and Afghaistan. Lezlie Burke says keeping the holidays as similar as possible to past years has been helpful. Still, a big, unwieldy tree was too much to manage so they went with a smaller one. They also didn’t quite break out all the decorations. But the kids will still write letters to Santa and hang their stockings. And they’ll still get together a care package to send to Derek Burke every week.
Scaling back has helped both families navigate the tumult of holiday preparations, and the big emotions that go along with separation. Well, that and extreme organization. During our coffee date I found out that both finished holiday cards to family and friends before December hit. Reichert’s were mailed. Burke’s were stamped and ready.
The two women say they also have the support of family and other military spouses, who know how hard it can be.
Reichert came home one day from a trip to the mall with a friend to find her house bedecked with inflatable snowmen and a garland across the front porch punctuated by pictures of her husband in a Santa hat. The prank, by another military family, made her day, she said, adding that she toted the biggest of the light-up figures back to her friend’s house to return the favor.
Both Burke and Reichert say they have family who come to spend time with the kids, which can lighten the load considerably. Reichert’s mom will stay for three weeks this year, something for Reichert and the kids to look forward to before her husband comes home on leave next month.
Until then, phone calls and conversations online will keep the families connected and hopeful that next time the holidays roll around, they’ll all be together.
