For military families, a deployment is measured in more than months. It’s birthdays, holidays, school milestones, family vacations, and ordinary weeknights spent waiting for someone to come home. So when a deployment suddenly gets extended, the math changes.
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Kendall Mariah is no stranger to the mental math of separation. This is her husband’s second deployment in two years, so when Mariah learned that his current deployment would be extended, she wasn’t exactly blindsided by the possibility. After 14 years as a military spouse, she knows better than to assume the shortest timeline will always be the one that comes true.
“As a seasoned old lady military spouse, I never gave myself the expectation that it would be anything shorter than nine months,” she told We Are The Mighty, adding that when her husband finally comes home, he will have been gone 20 out of the last 26 months.
Her husband’s current deployment was originally expected to last six months, but when Mariah learned it would be extended, she found herself recalculating all over again—not just how much longer she would be without her husband, but which moments her family would now have to experience without him.
She captured that feeling in a video she shared online, with text over the clip reading, “When you just found out the deployment is getting extended, but it’s your job to keep everything going like normal.”
In the caption, Mariah, who has an online community of more than 200,000, wrote that she and thousands of other families were trying to “conceptualize a new time line.”
“It’s waves of anger and anticipatory grief of the moments, holidays and days that will now be missed amongst the others we already planned on,” she wrote. “As a spouse my job is to assure my husband we will be fine, because we will, though it deeply sucks. As a mom it’s my job to absorb the disappointment so my girl doesn’t feel it, today. As a writer, creator, and citizen I also feel like it’s my job to show you the realities of decisions you see in the headlines, how they have real effects to not just me but many many others.”
The video, which has amassed more than 250,000 views as of publication, drew a range of comments from fellow spouses, service members, and members of her online community.
“I remember when this happened way back when after 9/11. It was being broadcast on the media here but those deployed had no idea. I remember mentioning it to my friend who was in Iraq. He had no idea. I learned real quick to not say a word about anything until he brought it up. Also started planning more care packages. This sucks period,” one user wrote.
“Been there.It’s miserable,” another user wrote.
Another, who seems to be in the same position as Mariah, added, “My heart sank when I read the email. It sucks.”
The post put words to a reality that can be difficult for people outside the military community to understand.
“Just because we know this is a possibility and we ‘signed up for it,’ it truly never really softens the blow of the gut punch to our reality,” Mariah wrote.
And while the news was painful, Mariah says she wasn’t surprised by the possibility, because she’s learned not to build her family’s plans around the shortest timeline the Army gives her, so even when there were rumors that the deployment could last only six months, she says she had a mentor give her advice years ago that has stayed with her.
“Pray for six, plan for 12,” she says of the mantra that has carried her over the years.
That mindset has helped Mariah navigate military life, but it hasn’t made the latest extension any easier.
“I think the real trick is living in the humanity of the middle of it…allowing yourself to process and to validate the suck of it, while also realizing you have to survive it,” she says.
For Mariah, there are two extremes she sees among military spouses dealing with difficult news.
On one side is what she calls the “put up or shut up camp” – the mentality that military families simply need to accept whatever happens because they knew what they signed up for. On the other is the fear of, “how am I ever going to survive this?”
She believes the answer is somewhere in between.
“I can understand on a biological level, like my head can completely process the probability and the likelihood of these things happening,” she says. “I can prepare for it. I can survive it.”
But knowing something is possible doesn’t make experiencing it easy.
“It is unnatural to have to be separated from your spouse for long periods of time and having to explain to a five year old what war is,” she says of her reality.
That’s why Mariah pushes back on the idea that acknowledging the pain of deployment somehow makes a military spouse less supportive of the service member or the mission.
“I could be a damn good wife and supportive spouse and a patriot to my country, while also being deeply disappointed that, yet again, I’m having to go through a deployment cycle and miss my husband and watch my daughter miss her daddy and miss experiences,” she says.
“Those things aren’t at odds. They’re actually the friction of it, and that is our reality.”
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