Keeping Families Connected During Deployments

“Let’s watch Daddy TV!”

My infant heard that sentence on a near daily basis during my husband’s first deployment.  Although he hadn’t yet celebrated his first birthday, I’m quite certain I had sufficiently conditioned my son to associate those words with the image of his absent father on the television screen.  While my son saw his dad’s image on tv, as well as in the numerous photographs I displayed throughout our house, my husband stayed up to date on our family’s happenings in the letters I wrote to him every day. 

Daddy TV, photos, and handwritten letters are only a few of the various ways to keep families connected during a deployment.  When service members are separated from their loved ones for extended periods of time, it’s not easy staying connected.  But seasoned military spouses have come up with plenty of clever ways to maintain a sense of family unity during deployments.

Ann Marie Detavernier, a military spouse and author of the popular blog Household 6 Diva, is no stranger to deployments.  Since 2003, her husband has been deployed to either Iraq or Afghanistan for a total of 43 months and counting.  So it’s no surprise that she has come up with her own tricks to keep her family connected.

When her husband deployed to Iraq for the second time, Detavernier was 33 weeks pregnant with their first child.  “He read books to my belly in the evening which I recorded to a ‘Daddy tape’ which I continued to play both to my belly and during that first year,” Detavernier says.  She also preserved some of her husband’s t-shirts in freezer bags “to unwrap from time to time for our baby to become familiar with his smell.” 

Detavernier also made sure her husband felt involved.  “Periodically I would send home videos of our baby’s milestones and include a baby sleeper he had just grown out of so Daddy could see exactly how big he was.” 

During the next deployment, her family had grown, with two boys ages 2 and 5 months.  This time around, her husband “wrote them ‘letters’ in the form of shapes and cartoon drawings,” and she read them a Daddy story she had written that included photos of each of the boys with their father. 

In general, Detavernier tries to keep her husband a presence in her house as much as possible.  “Maintaining a constant conversation that includes Daddy in our daily life helps a lot,” she explains.  “When we have pizza, we talk about how Daddy loves to have ranch dressing to dip it in.  When we have waffles, we talk about how Daddy likes to make them every weekend when he’s home.”

When it comes to keeping families connected during lengthy separations, the possibilities are endless.  In her book I’m Already Home…Again, Elaine Gray Dumler shares a compilation of creative ideas for staying close with a deployed spouse.   From creating a family newsletter, to setting a clock in your house to your spouse’s time zone, to tracing handprints of family members so your spouse can hold their hands while he’s gone, the book offers tips that are appropriate regardless of whether or not you have children and regardless of children’s ages. 

Books like I’m Already Home…Again and websites like MilitaryOneSource are great resources for families of a deployed service member.  Books are also available to explain to children of varying ages what a deployment is and why their parents’ jobs are important, which can help further open the lines of communication.  Infants and toddlers will enjoy Zero to Three books like Over There.  Preschool and early elementary children can participate in fun activities that relate to the different stages of deployment with My Dad’s Deployment: A Deployment and Reunion Activity Book for Young Children.  And older kids can write about their feelings in the Deployment Journal for Kids. 

Deployments are tough. But finding your own special ways to keep your family connected can help make those separations a little bit easier. 

To read more from Wife on the Roller Coaster, visit her whimsical blog site.