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Renegotiating Roles: A Family Affair
Nurses commented on the difficulties encountered when having to renegotiate family roles. Some were not ready to jump right back in with domestic chores, helping with homework, paying bills, grocery shopping, and chauffeuring children. Others wanted to take over their old roles right away, and were anxious to get on with their lives. Some met reluctance on their spouse’s part to relinquish the routine that had been established during the deployment. Most found that easing back into a routine with a redistribution of household chores worked best.
We chose the following nine vignettes that are reflective of what many of the other 26 participants experienced on their return home after deployment. However, one has to keep in mind that some of the nurses were single or without children. Thus, the renegotiation of roles depended on a variety of factors. But all of the nurses had to do the usual household chores such as cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, and paying bills.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL JULIE
Julie grew up in southern Virginia and attended college near her home. She joined the Air Force Reserve when she was in her mid-20s, while working in her community hospital ICU. A few physicians and nurses she worked with at the local hospital were members of the Air Force Reserve, and they encouraged her to sign up. Her boyfriend, who later became her husband, was also in the Air Force Reserve.
Julie reported:
My job was as a flight nurse. I did two tours flying out of Balad, Iraq, and a third deployment flying air evac out of Ramstein Air Base, Germany. I have been an air force flight nurse for 24-½ years. When I deployed, however, I was usually deployed in a three-person CCATT [Critical Care Air Transport Team]. When we got to our deployment assignment, we usually met up with several air evac crews from other units and locations across the country. We would then form a whole new unit for the deployment. I was in Iraq in 2003 when the war began. Then I went back to Iraq in 2011. Later, I flew missions out of Germany going to the States starting in 2012. On a CCATT, you have a critical care nurse, an intensive care physician, and a respiratory therapist. We are usually assigned to one to four of the most critical patients on an air evac flight.
Julie described how she and her family struggled once she came home from her first deployment:
I didn’t reintegrate well to my family at first. My husband had taken on a whole new role while I was gone, and it was hard for me to negotiate roles. He was a reservist, too; so, I was used to him being gone and me picking up whatever needed to be done in the family and household. So, I found it much more difficult to reintegrate back into the household than I had ever anticipated. I think what made it so hard for me in retrospect, is that I think I had some degree of PTSD [posttraumatic stress disorder] from just seeing and caring for too much trauma. You do your job very well when you are doing your job, and you try not to dwell on what you’ve just seen or what you have just done in caring for the patient. But, later it really clouds your mind with images and thoughts about all these terribly wounded or burned people. I just wasn’t motivated to pick up the household chores I did before I left, and my husband was very tired of doing everything while I was gone. I felt I needed a break. So, there was some stress between us, and some heated dialogue.
LIEUTENANT COLONEL TONI
Toni is an air force reservist who was a flight nurse as well as a CCATT nurse.
She stated:
When I came back from my third deployment, I wasn’t in the right mindset to step right back into the role of working mother, housekeeper, grocery shopper, and cook. My mind just wasn’t there yet. I think my brain was a little oversaturated with the war and the terribly injured young people I cared for. My husband thought I would want to jump right back in, but I wasn’t up to it. He told me he had never seen me like this; he said I seemed kind of withdrawn and hesitant to pick up on my usual activities. I think he wanted a break from the child-care stuff. However, I wasn’t ready to jump back in. Three deployments had taken their toll. I was grieving for my patients’ both living and dead. The ones that lived had some terribly disfiguring and disabling injuries. Most were between about 19 to 25 years of age. What kind of life will they have? All this took a toll on us nurses. It certainly took a toll on me. I needed time to get my bearings before I became a mom, a wife, and a housekeeper again.
LIEUTENANT KATE
Kate is a navy nurse.
She recalled:
When I first got home, we were struggling to find our roles again in our relationship. Things got better a couple of months after I got home. My husband and I were able to sort through our issues and to communicate better. We were able to talk to each other about the things that were bothering each of us. Our circumstances as a young married couple were probably different from most. We were engaged for about 2 years, but he had been deployed to Iraq during some of that time. We were supposed to get married, but my deployment got moved up, and I had to be in California for 4 months before I deployed. So, he ended up coming to California, and we drove to Las Vegas and eloped because I would have already deployed by the date we had planned to get married.
All in all, I was really only married for a month before I left for Afghanistan. It was a mutual decision to do it this way, but it was sort of a last-minute decision. I’m glad we did it this way because if we had waited even longer I’m not sure we would have been able to keep our relationship going while deployed. It worked out better the way we did it because I was a mess when I came back. I was angry and very disappointed in everyone when I got home. There were a couple of things that were difficult issues for my husband and me. I came home in November, and we rescheduled our big wedding with our families and friends for March. Then, we were going to be reassigned to Guam the following June. We had a lot to do, and we both felt a lot of pressure to get the ceremonial big wedding done for our families, and then get packed up and moved overseas. Now, we have been in Guam for 2 years, and our lives have settled down and everything has smoothed out to a nice pace of life.
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