Deciding to marry a military service member can be taken as a sign that you understand what it entails to be a military spouse. Regardless of your perspective, you’re expected to embrace the role of a military wife/husband or quickly learn the ropes to be able to do so. Generally, it may entail sacrificing your career, living a family life that is often disrupted with PCS, and enduring long separations during deployments.

Given your willingness to accept all these, you can’t be prepared enough to be a single parent and be responsible in running the household on your own while your partner completes the deployment orders. As a single parent, you need to do all these no matter how tired, cranky, sad, or angry you are.

The Conflict of Emotions

A deployment can bring about a wide variety of strong emotions that may seem to contradict each other. You terribly miss your soldier spouse, but at the same time you resent his or her freedom from the share of family responsibilities. You put on a brave stance as you calm your children’s fears about their parent in deployment, but deep within you are as afraid for the safety of your partner. You feel abandoned and depressed, yet you don’t want your deployed spouse to know it because it can possibly cause distraction or worry while on duty.

Solo Parenting during Deployment

Like other military spouses, your primary responsibility is to take care of the household and be supportive of your husband or wife’s military duties. Parenting is tough enough, and it can be doubly difficult when done single-handedly. The distress and the pressure can increase the risk for depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, and other mental health problems. Being left at home, how do you endure the long hours of being alone? Who do you turn to when you need a shoulder to cry on? How can you remain strong for everyone and yourself?

The Kind of Help that Works

The emotional and psychological distress you’re feeling may weaken you as a single military parent. It takes courage to accept that you can be weak at times. To stay strong in the midst of the challenge, find the right help that you need when feeling low and vulnerable. If professional assistance is what you need, that is what you’ll get when you call Carolina Counseling Services – Fayetteville, NC. It independently contracts therapists; one of them can provide you the right assistance you need to find the strength to be able to carry on while your spouse is away. While succumbing to loneliness and distress is easy, it is easier to make that call to CCS.