A talk with Alison Buckholtz, author of 'Standing By'
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Alison Buckholtz and her family on the flight line. (Photo credit: K.C. Pohtilla)
I caught up with Alison Buckholtz recently at a cafe in Anacortes, Wash., where she reflected on the reception to her book and her family's next chapter: a 14-month IA assignment for her husband.
Buckholtz's book, "Standing By: The Making of an American Military Family in a Time of War," came out in April 2009. It chronicles her experiences during her husband's assignment as commanding officer of a Prowler squadron based at Whidbey Island, including all the ups and downs of her first deployment on her own with the couple's two children.
"In writing the book," she said, "I just kind of imagined telling my best friend what it is" to be a military spouse.
She wanted to give people with no connection to the miltary a sense of what's behind the headlines of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and how those wars affect families, she said. Many people want to understand what military families experience, but they "need a point of access."
Buckholtz describes her book as an "unlikely spouse memoir" because she never imagined marrying into the military, much less writing about her life as a military wife and mother.
She met her husband, Scott, when he was a lieutenant commander, already 15 years into his career. He tried to convince her they shouldn't be together -- that she wasn't cut out for life as a Navy wife, as she describes in the book.
But his attempts to scare her off didn't work, thus she found herself facing her first deployment alone with the kids shortly after the family moved to Washington.
Buckholtz said she enjoyed living in Anacortes and found most people she encountered there supportive and curious about military life.
"I've come to see that as an opportunity to educate," she said. "I had those same questions."
What does she tell people who want to know how they can show their support for military families? Don't talk politics. Be neighborly. Volunteer to babysit or help with seasonal housekeeping tasks. Donate some guy bonding time for the son of a deployed father.
"It's not hard to be a hero for a military family, especially one with a deployed service member," she said.
Buckholtz's family is now getting ready for a different type of deployment — one becoming especially familiar to service members in specialties associated with Prowler squadrons. Her husband is expected to deploy in June as an individual augmentee (IA).
She and her husband are preparing by giving the kids lots of distractions, she said, including a trip to Disney World and a move back to the Washington, D.C. area to be closer to extended family.
"There's no way to make it OK so you just try to keep the kids as happy as they can be," she said.
Buckholtz is also preparing herself by learning and writing more about the experiences of IA families and the impact of extended deployments with less and less time at home in between. She called the latter "the defining experience for a military spouse in our generation."
Read more about "Standing By," including the introduction to the book, at http://standingbybook.com. Or order the book, available at the following retailers: