homefront fatigue
n.
A feeling of overwhelming tiredness marked by irritation with military culture, a contractual obligation to sleep alone and the compulsion to solve problems far, far in the future.

My girlfriend used to say that the problem with military spouses is that we don’t really have anything in common. Our husbands and wives are all motivated by the same kind of work. They talk a lot alike. They even wear the same outfits in their leisure minutes.
 
We spouses don’t. No wonder it’s so hard to strike up a conversation — or borrow shoes.
 
Lately, though, I’ve noticed that we do have one thing in common. Four years into the war, we’re all showing signs of “Homefront Fatigue.” I made that term up right off the top of my head. It’s not a real neurological condition like the combat fatigue soldiers had during WWII. Instead it’s what I call that rumbling sentiment I hear from military spouses every day.
 
Some of them have a lot to be tired about. Tonia Sargent is the wife of a Marine stationed at Camp Pendleton. Her husband of 19 years was brain damaged during an IED explosion in Iraq two years ago. She had to quit her job to provide care for him and the family is living on a much-reduced income.

But she says it’s the paperwork that is killing her. “When you are injured and at home, you’re out of sight out of mind,” says Sargent. She says the military doesn’t send anyone to explain benefits to families and that one benefit often cancels the other. She spends her days learning by trial and error.

“I’m tired,” she adds. “Mentally tired, physically tired, emotionally tired. Tired isn’t even a word for me.”

That kind of Homefront Fatigue we can all understand -- the same way we understand that families who are on their third and fourth deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan are tired to the bone. The National Military Family Association released a report in March exclaiming that servicemembers and military families experience high levels of anxiety, fatigue, and stress exacerbated by a lack of institutional support.

We get all that. We even expect all that. But it doesn’t explain why Homefront Fatigue is creeping through all branches of the services in every age group regardless of whether or not servicemembers are currently deployed.

“I've been doing the "single parent" thing and it's been really tough,” says Sara Paris, 23, an Air Force spouse in Virginia Beach, Va. “I'm stressed out and tired most of the time.”

Her husband,Will, was recently reassigned to Malstrom, AFB in Montana. The young couple is living apart so that she can complete her high school diploma while family members take care of her daughter.

“I'm climbing up a neverending hill,” says Paris. “There's always something going on or some huge thing that comes up and I can't keep up with everything.”

That’s pretty much what military wives are trying to say. We are so tired because suddenly our lives seem like “Sara’s Neverending Hill.” There is always more to do than we are able to do and there is no end in sight.

That’s new to our generation. Tonia Sargent says that in the early part of their career they did some hard deployments. Her husband deployed to Okinawa unaccompanied for a year then turned around and deployed to Somalia.

“Everything was on the hush for awhile after that,” Sargent says. She says that it was always busy, but there was time to recover between floats before it all started up again. That isn’t what is happening now. Living with the unplannable is the plan.

I worry about that. Anticipating as well as having that recovery time was one of the tools military families used to use to cope with the stressful parts of our lives. That made things bearable. We knew how to work, rest, and go on. If we didn’t, there was always someone who had gone before us to teach it.

Now we military spouses are teaching ourselves, hoping that our efforts are going to be enough for however long we’re hiking on the Neverending Hill.