Being an Army wife seems like the ultimate sacrifice – but we don’t have a choice
Lt Col Mark Teeton, 47, was airlifted to hospital after being stabbed on Tuesday. His wife Eileen, 46, had screamed at the attacker to leave her husband alone and then tried to pull him away in an intervention that may have saved his life.
The kind of courage she displayed is just one necessary characteristic needed to survive as an Army wife, as I have discovered from personal experience – alongside forbearance, DIY skills and an ability to trade white goods.
When I married into the Army sixteen and a half years ago, I didn’t really know what I was taking on. For a start, my husband had been planning to leave. But here we are, almost two decades on, still shuttling around from pillar to post, following that bloody flag.
In the interim, there have been multiple deployments, many house moves and years, collectively, living apart thanks to the demands of the job. We joke that he has spent more time away from our three children than with them. I don’t dare to do the maths to work out whether that’s actually true.
For most of the serving personnel I know who’ve gotten this far, the reason they’ve stuck it out for so long is because it’s a vocation. To serve is built into them. And by extension, it is built into their families, willingly or not.
What that looks like differs for every family. There are those who have chosen to live apart, so that the non-serving spouse can also pursue a career, whilst the children have a stable home. The serving partner comes and goes from wherever they’re based, in whatever country. It gives you a shot at buying your own home and creating a community in one place. But it’s lonely and hard work, especially if you have kids and you’re effectively a single parent.
More commonly, the family moves as a pack. Army jobs change every 18 months to two years; you get perhaps six months to a year’s notice – sometimes less – as to where you’re going next. That time will then be spent in a flurry of attempts at preparation.
You work out if you can take your job with you or have to look for a new one, or whether that’s even possible. We spent the first couple of years of our married life in a country where I wasn’t allowed to work under the visa restrictions. I got some unpaid work so I didn’t have a gaping hole in my CV, and had a baby during that time.
You see if you can get yourself added to the “patch” Facebook group of where you’re going so you can ask about schools and nurseries for the kids, wheedle your way onto waiting lists and hope that by the time you actually move there might be a place available.
Or you bite the bullet and put the kids in boarding school; try to work out where in the country is going to be geographically easiest over the long term – until you get posted to the other end of the country, or to another country entirely. You have to pretend you’re fine with this, even as you sew on name tapes, crying onto their uniform and count down the days until they next get a long weekend and are allowed home.
You don’t know what home is going to look like, of course. The Facebook group might be able to tell you options or which homes might soon become available, or what the basic room layout is. You try to work out if your furniture’s going to fit or whether you might have to sell some stuff or put things in storage. You pray the housing will be in OKshape, and not one of the (many) military properties riddled with damp and mould.
Mostly, the first time you see the house is the day the moving truck turns up. When you get there, there’ll be an oven but nothing else: you have to provide your own white goods. There’s a lot of trading that goes on.
Sometimes, you’re doing all this solo as your spouse is either deployed or in a flurry of pre-deployment training. You do a lot of things solo as an Army wife. I did an entire nine-month pregnancy, with two other children under five and a full-time job, by myself. Luckily my husband was back in time for the birth; I have many, many friends who’ve had their babies on their own, or whose husbands have been deployed days after it has been delivered.
There’s all the other stuff you get used to doing solo too: wrangling the kids; dealing with a leaking dishwasher (I once managed to flood the flat below ours in a fit of misplaced can-do enthusiasm); putting up shelves; juggling school pickups and doctors’ appointments. A lot of the time you don’t know where, exactly, your spouse is or when you might hear from them next. Usually that call comes in the middle of bath time or at a particularly awkward moment, but you take it because you don’t know when the next one might be, and you try your best to sound upbeat.
Always at the back of your mind is the possibility that you might one day get a call saying that everything is not fine, that something has happened. You try not to think about this, as it’s a waste of time. But that doesn’t mean your kids aren’t thinking about it.
“What will happen if Daddy dies?” my middle son asked me once. I blustered and told him it wasn’t going to happen. He persisted. “But what will happen?” Eventually, I told him that it would be awful, but we’d just have to get on with it. “Do you think if he died I could have his watch?” he asked. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
You build a network of other wives because they’re the only ones who really understand. Sometimes they’re geographically there, on the same estate, easily available for a glass of wine and a whinge; sometimes they’re on the other end of a desperate WhatsApp message (“Talk to me Goose,” replies one friend whenever I send her a desperate “Arghhh”.) These are the ones you can ask for help from; the ones you aren’t ashamed to show your vulnerabilities to because they get it; they’ve been there too.
One friend keeps a letter she drafted to her husband two years ago when things were particularly tough, telling him she was planning to leave if things didn’t change. It’s a relief to know I’m not the only one who’s written a similar missive. You don’t share these details with the outside world because, to them, you need to seem as if you’re holding it all together. “I don’t know how you do it,” said one non-military friend to me once – but what option do I have?
The truth is, we, the wives and families, don’t have a choice.
We didn’t join the military, and the military, much as it might pretend to, doesn’t really care about us – we’re a nuisance to be dealt with; collateral damage. But we serve too. We’re in this together, whether we like it or not.