ThomasLitchford

It’s rare to see a piece about male military spouses (i.e. military husbands) in the wide circulation press because we’re such a minority part of the military spouse community. But today I stumbled on this USA Today editorial on military husbands.

(Via My Military Life.)

It’s a nice little piece, and it speaks to something of a problem for male spouses: we haven’t built up much of a support network for ourselves (and the existing support network is really geared toward women’s needs, for obvious reasons).

The one problem with the piece is that it doesn’t offer a solution, really. Yes, it’s hard to be married to a deployed service member, and it’s hard being a father playing a (traditionally) mother’s role. But the author solved his dilemmas by ‘[building] up a better support network’ and seeing a psychologist. These are strategies that he had to undertake on his own and only after he’d totally broken down.

We military husbands need to support each other. There aren’t many of us, but those of us there are, those of us who’ve been through a couple deployments, need to communicate what wisdom we can to the new guys, because, I guarantee you, there will be more and more of us over time.

We need a forum — probably online, because we’re so spread out — or some kind of network (a blog network? What do you think, John?).

And I’ll tell you, it ain’t this.

Note: Edited to add a link.