Story #55 - Jill, Dumfries VA (USA)
“If you are a female officer in the Army, you can't command soldiers and have to give birth or care for a child at the same time. You just can't. It's the way the culture works: you get the job, you do the job, and you can't give up on the mission by letting your child get in the way.”
The Army is a male-dominated profession and they make it difficult to have children and to be a mom, if you want a career and be successful.
You have to have specific jobs at specific times to become higher in the hierarchy and have more responsibilities. You're always moving, both geographically and career-wise. You go from a job that sets you up for promotion to a position they call "developmental," where you're learning other skills but aren't in a key leadership position. This is when you want to have your baby.
The Army also makes you compete against each other. It's just part of the culture. So, as a woman, if you're trying to have children, you really have to schedule when you're going to have the baby. Because for a lot of men—not all, but some—mothers are a liability.
They think: "Oh, she's going to be out six weeks for her maternity leave, and then the baby will get sick, and she'll have to take care of him... where's her focus?" We are a war-fighting machine, and everything that gets in the way of the mission is a threat.
I was at the end of my first assignment in Germany when I had my daughter Courtney. I was about to fly back home to get more training, so the timing was perfect.
Although I was in a foreign country, I gave birth to her in an army hospital, so with American doctors and nurses. The delivery went well. I was very fit. I used to run every morning until I was about eight months pregnant. I only stopped because of the pressure on my bladder that made me pee my pants.
The doctor I happened to get the day she was born didn't like epidurals—he said it hurt the mother's ability to push—so I didn't have one. It's the military, so you don't really have a choice when it comes to medical options. They decide what you need, and you go with it.
The nurses did give me some Demerol, but I think it was to quiet me down because I was yelling too loudly.
I labored for seven hours, then had her. I was put in a postpartum room with two other women and their babies, and we had to share a bathroom with another room. So six mothers, all vaginal deliveries, sharing a toilet, a sink, and a huge garbage can. We had the medical staff coming in and out for all of us, plus the visitors for three people... I couldn't wait to get out of there.
Her father, who was also in the Army, was present for the delivery. He didn't stay the night. The facilities weren’t like the hospital room you have nowadays for civilians, where you can spend the whole weekend of whatever. I was only there for two days so it ended up being fine.
I spent my first weeks postpartum getting ready to move and applying for her passport. My husband went back to work, but I was pretty independent, so I did whatever I wanted during that time and I didn’t require much.
Because we were still in Germany, we had no family. The military community is very tight-knit, especially overseas, so we had a lot of neighbors with little kids and people from my unit who came to visit.
But we were so ready to come back to the US and had movers come and go to pack our stuff and take it away. We spent a few nights in a hotel once our household goods were shipped and then hopped on a plane with our five-week-old infant on our lap (and our cat in cargo!), for a transatlantic flight to Atlanta.
We were stationed in Alabama, and the first few months of the new assignment were fine. I was in a school environment, and the days were pretty set, which is great when you have a new baby. We did physical training in the morning, then we were in a classroom while Courtney was in daycare.
On posts, military installations have their own daycare centers, and they cater to the military. They open at five in the morning until six or seven at night. The providers are very good, all excellent background checks. Most of them are military spouses, and I felt comfortable putting her in daycare.
Still, it was hard to leave her. By the time I'd started working again, I'd been with her eight weeks. It's difficult to see your tiny baby in a room with a bunch of cribs and a bunch of other babies. And even when she got sick, I still had to go to work. The structure of the institution makes it very complicated for parents who are also officers.
You can't send your kid to daycare if she has a fever, but you also cannot miss work, so you end up in a no man's land.
In my case, my husband and I were both military, so we were required to have a plan. It's called a "Family Care Plan." It stated by name who would take care of our child if she was sick and couldn't be in daycare, and that person had to sign the document. If you get in a situation where your child has a chronic illness, you can get kicked out of the military because your parenting responsibilities are getting in the way of the mission. That's just the way it is. And that's also why women are the ones who, most of the time, end up leaving the Army.
I was fortunate to have a very good classmate friend whose wife stayed home. She was pregnant, and anytime Courtney got sick, which was often because she had chronic ear infections for the first 18 months of her life, she would pick her up from daycare.
I was lucky to have her because things like that are what gets a lot of mothers... not in trouble, but gets them the reputation of not pulling their weight.
They get comments like, "Here we go again! That's why women don't belong in the military." For most men, it's easy because they have wives at home taking care of the kids, and they don't even know if someone gets sick.
Unfortunately, a lot of the senior leaders are men or women without children who are brought up in that culture. So when they have a female who works for them and has a sick child at home, they're not as understanding.
We also had papers, signed by the power of attorneys, that stated who would have custody of Courtney if both of us were to deploy to a war zone. This is another reason why women end up leaving. I mean, there are some single dads in the military, but mainly, the pressure becomes too high on the family.
I understand the Army has to have their people focused on the mission. You can't have a leader who says, "Sorry, guys, I need to stay home and take care of my sick kids; you go fight that war!"
At the same time, I deployed to Afghanistan for one year with women who had barely given birth and had to leave their three months old at home.
It's one thing when your child is 12, but we all know that babies change so quickly in that very short period.
Of course, fathers have to go through this as well, but I think there's something about that maternal instinct that makes it harder for those women to leave and come home to a baby who might not recognize them.
When Courtney turned 21 months, I became a commander. I was in charge of a unit of soldiers, and that's... that's when it got really tough.
There were days that I didn't see her at all. Depending on where we were in our training cycle, I would leave at four in the morning and not come back until nine o'clock at night. My husband got a job at the same time that also required to work incredibly long hours. We had to figure out how to get her to daycare, when to pick her up, and who would bathe her. It was so, so hard, because it meant that Courtney had to be in daycare for twelve hours, being raised by wonderful providers, but who weren't her parents.
It was difficult because I would have loved to give her a sibling, but there was never a time that would have been right for both another child and my career. You work so hard to get where you are, and then you find yourself having to make a decision that most men don't have to make.
It becomes even more of a challenge when you're married to another service member because there's a risk of having to split the family or deploying at the same time.
So someone has to give, and usually, it's the woman.
A little bit before our daughter's fifth birthday, my husband and I got divorced. We shared custody and made a conscious decision to stay in Virginia to keep her stable. I chose to change my career filed to something more administrative and landed a position at the Pentagon. It had its own setbacks, as the quality of life when you work there isn't great either, but at least I knew I could spend several years working at the same place.
In the end, both my ex-husband and I had to sacrifice some of our career potential to achieve that. He retired and took a job as a school teacher while I was still plugging along and deployed a couple of times.
The first time I left was for Afghanistan. She was in third grade, so eight or nine. She had a hard time understanding that I would be gone for a year. I remember coming home for the Holidays halfway through the mission for two weeks. They call it a Rest and Relaxation break. She was initially standoffish. Didn't run right up to me to give me a hug. You rationally understand because she hasn't seen you in six months, but it's still hard.
The only thing that made it easier for me was to know that other women over there had it way harder than I did, with tiny babies at home. I'd ask them, "How are you doing this?" For many, it wasn't even a choice: they needed this job and/or its benefits and couldn't afford to do otherwise.
For others, this is what we always had wanted to do, and we were going to make it work.
Courtney was only a child when all of this happened, and I don't think she realized how crazy our work was. From birth, this is all she had known, and she never had a normal family. "Normal" isn't the right word... She never had that reference to the typical American family, and I'm not sure she was conscient of missing out on having both her parents.
As Courtney was growing, I found myself second-guessing my decision and feeling the guilt. I thought, "Should I have left the military when I had her?" But back then, I was the breadwinner and made a lot more money than my husband, and leaving would have significantly altered our standard of living.
But then, Courtney started having issues in school. She had a learning disability, ADHD, and I always questioned myself if it would have been different for her had I stayed home. Again I'd think, "Should have I made her my priority after she was born, and not my career?" I went through that for several years, but in the end, you can't go back and relive your life. It's done.
Ironically, I retired the year Courtney graduated from high school. I went through these struggles raising her, missed all those years, and then chose to retire because she was having a lot of problems. I thought I needed to be home and try to get her to a stable place.
After I retired, someone contacted me on behalf of a female general that was overseeing our field. She wanted to know why I'd left, considering there weren't many successful female leaders in the Army. I was honest with them and said that the military was a tough place to be a mother and a successful leader. You don't go into the military to do a half job, and you don't go into motherhood thinking you'll be a terrible parent.
I told them that because people want to be good at what they do all the time, this was an impossible task to achieve. The demand for both of them was too high.
Of course, the female leader who asked me that question had no kids. Same for the female general who had inquired. For a lot of them, that's the price they have to pay. They can't have the distraction of raising a child to be able to play in the same field as the men who have wives at home caring for their children.
Society also places so much more on women's shoulders from the very beginning. This is the reason why women cannot have everything: there's no equity in the load we carry.
As a perfect example of that, I remember being pregnant with Courtney and having to undergo an evaluation because I was about to change position. Both of my bosses were women, and both were mothers. They'd been through what I was about to go through, and, you know, they were supportive of my condition.
But one thing that is very important in the military is physical fitness. You are tested twice a year, and if you don't pass or score well enough, you can be kicked out. You are also weighed regularly and have to meet specific standards. You are exempt while you are pregnant, but you have six months to get back to your weight, and eight to twelve weeks after you give birth to pass your physical fitness test again.
My boss had to sign off the evaluation that would allow me to be promoted back in the US, and on that piece of paper, there is a block about the fitness test. During our meeting, she said: "I really suggest that even though you don't have to do the physical fitness test, you go ahead and take it."
Again, she was a female officer and a mother of three. You'd think, "She's done it. She knows how it is!" But her mindset was to protect me against that bunch of men that would be looking at my files and decide if I was fit for the job or not.
She added, "If we leave this blank or state that you were exempt because of a pregnancy, it could look bad. Although they legally don't have to ask you to pass it, culturally, it'd be better if you did. Any time they see you didn't take the test for whatever reason, it draws attention and the negative kind of attention. You don't want that."
I said no. I knew I was fit enough to pass it, but I didn't want to come in and do pushups, sit-ups, and run two miles under an hour. Not five weeks postpartum.
Of course, it was in the 90s, and I believe it's gotten better. I hope it did. The percentage of females that are joining the military is more significant now. They also did a lot of cultural education because of sexual harassment and sexual assault. But I'm sure women still can't get rid of that little voice in the back of their head that says, "I'm working with all these men, and although they say they support whatever choices I make, they probably think I'm not pulling my weight because I'm pregnant or just had baby."
I know they do because I had horrible morning sickness and was always running to the bathroom while pregnant. I couldn't stop thinking about what they were saying when I had to leave the room in a hurry. Most men already don't think women belong in the Army. As much as they need those babies to grow up and enroll [metaphorically speaking], they just don't want the women who carry them around to disrupt the mission. Of course, not everyone thinks like that, but as a female officer, you can't help but feel like you need to overcompensate.
You not only do your part, but theirs too.
In a way, I sacrificed my own daughter because of that culture. She is the person who paid for it, sitting in daycare wondering who was going to bathe her that night, or put her to bed.
Courtney is 24 now, and... there is guilt. There's no question about it. I have a friend, Catherine, who was in the Army with me and her husband back then. She left when her sons were babies because of that culture. She was an excellent officer. Could run miles around her husband—and he is great at his job. She told me the other day that she was angry because she couldn't make it work and had to give up her career. She said, "You're so lucky. You stayed, had a full career, and now you're retired."
I told her to never, ever, feel bad to have sacrificed her career to raise her kids. Because here I am, served for 22 years, and you know what? The Army didn't come and say, "Oh, you're so wonderful, thank you for those decades!"
When you walk out the door on the day you retire, nothing happens. You're just one of the other millions of military retirees. You get a sense of accomplishment, of course, but there's no prize at the end. All you have is what you've carried along with you and the decisions you've made for your family.
What Catherine sees in me is a successful female Army officer, and she wishes she could have been me.
What I see in her is someone who was home with her children while I couldn't, and I wish I could have been her.
If I’m truly honest, I could have left. I had a college degree and I could have gotten a job doing accounting. I might not have liked it as much, but maybe things would have turned out differently. But maybe not. I'm a teacher now. I see kids who have the most perfect home-life and are still screwed up.
I don't know.
I have learned to let that go and stop wondering whether or not I made the right decision, or if I was too selfish trying to be the best I could in my career. There's no right or wrong choice. You make the ones you make.
And then you deal with the consequences.
Jill teaches accounting to high school students. She still resides in Northern Virginia with her husband of 15 years Jack, her daughter Courtney, and her two grandsons.
She is a fierce woman, a badass retiree female officer, an accomplished athlete, and a loving (grand)-mother.
At last, Jill is a brilliant and humble person who would never say these things about herself.
So I'm saying them for her.
—Ariane