This week, my husband officially retired after a 20-year career in Naval Special Warfare. While I’m still wrapping my head around his new status as a Navy veteran, I can’t help but reflect on how we got here, our family of four still intact and functioning after eight deployments, multiple tours to Iraq and Afghanistan, several cross-country and overseas moves, and 20 years of marriage during our nation’s longest wars.
As any military family knows, the road to reach this milestone hasn’t been easy. Reflecting on our journey, it’s clearer than ever that a significant yet unrecognized group of people plays a massive role in helping military families: our kids’ grandparents.
Looking back, the extra service and care from our kids’ grandparents has made an incredible impact on our family — and I know we’re not alone. According to the U.S. Department of Defense, the United States military currently has 2 million uniformed service members and 2.6 million military family members. Extending from these numbers are countless grandparents of military kids, many who quietly take on an extra heavy lift caring for grandchildren simply because of the nature of a service member’s frequent travel, deployments and relocations.
Just to visit their grandkids, military grandparents are asked to travel to distant, changing duty stations, at no small expense for plane fare and accommodations. Some even cross oceans to spend time together.
Filling in the gaps between visits, grandparents become long-distance relationship experts, mailing cards and gifts for birthdays and holidays. They spend countless hours on video calls with grandkids, keeping in touch about sports teams, friends and school events.
Some fill significant gaps of child care, hosting kids for weeks during summer vacation. And some overachievers — like my parents — sacrifice even more by moving to their grandkids’ duty station, uprooting their own lives to be involved on a daily basis.
Throughout our journey as Navy parents, I have noticed how much extra we have asked of our parents compared to our civilian friends. Our parents’ unwavering willingness to serve our family was especially evident in our early parenting years when my husband deployed to a combat zone, leaving me to care for our 3-year-old daughter and newborn son in a town in Virginia with no local family. Both sets of our parents lived 1,500 miles away in Texas.
During those exhausting months of deployment, our kids’ grandparents stepped up in remarkable ways. They flew to Virginia for weeks at a time to spend time with our daughter while I got my footing caring for a second baby. They endured interrupted sleep, pre-dawn mornings, and preschool-borne illnesses right alongside me.
When the extra complications of holidays and winter loomed, my parents invited the three of us to spend months at their home in Texas, which was ten minutes away from my husband’s parents. During those months, our kids’ grandparents served our family in irreplaceable ways.
Each night I would come downstairs after getting both kids to bed to find a home-cooked dinner waiting for me. My mom kept the endless laundry going. My dad was available to entertain a wiggly kid when I needed a few extra minutes of sleep. My parents took our daughter on walks and outings so I could catch some rest when the baby napped. My in-laws watched the kids so I could run errands alone.
Throughout that deployment, as well as the length of our military journey, both sets of grandparents shouldered the ongoing concern for my husband’s safety — which became all too real when a team member didn’t return home.
Our nation’s calendar is full of military holidays, yet there is no official moment to thank military grandparents. There is no presidential proclamation or letter from Pentagon leadership recognizing all the hidden time military grandparents spend caring about and for our nation’s one million military families.
This Sunday, September 7, National Grandparents Day is a perfect opportunity to pause busy schedules and share a heartfelt thanks with military grandparents who go above and beyond building relationships with long-distance grandkids and easing the load for military parents.
Not all military grandparents are willing or able to be involved. But for those who are, rest assured, the extra effort goes a long way toward helping military families get through the hardest seasons.
For all the quiet, hidden ways military grandparents serve, our collective thanks will never be enough.
