{"id":11364,"date":"2011-11-27T04:11:11","date_gmt":"2011-11-27T04:11:11","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2011-11-27T04:11:11","modified_gmt":"2011-11-27T04:11:11","slug":"Updating-Facebook-Status-to-Divorced","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/?p=11364","title":{"rendered":"Updating Facebook Status, to Divorced"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the past year, I\u2019ve seen divorce-related Facebook messages filled with anger, desperation, sadness and even, on occasion, glee. They run the gamut from the \u201cvague-booked\u201d status update, to cries of \u201cIt\u2019s over! I\u2019m so done!\u201d (naturally followed by a check-in at a lawyer\u2019s office) to personal message blasts detailing long travails of infidelity and post-deployment estrangement. One acquaintance didn\u2019t bother to mention her divorce at all \u2014 instead, she posted photos of her immediate wedding to a civilian, after everything was official, to break the news. I know it sounds tacky \u2014 perhaps overly theatrical, too. But Facebook is both an effective and efficient method of getting the word out on major life changes (as well as getting a quick read on which friends will support you as you make those changes and which will drop you like the proverbial hot potato). I\u2019ll admit, when I first filed for divorce, I fantasized about updating my Facebook status. Probably because, as an officer\u2019s wife, I felt there was so much I couldn\u2019t say, or shouldn\u2019t say \u2014 even while planning my exit strategy.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I couldn\u2019t mention my concerns about the company my husband was keeping during his deployment, nor ask friends for their advice about how we might communicate better. Once my husband returned, I couldn\u2019t complain about our inability to find any equilibrium in our home life. As a former leader of a support group for spouses and children of deployed soldiers, I was supposed to pass on all the wonderful resources available to families in crisis. So it seemed hypocritical to mention that the only marital counselor available to us was the guy whose primary job was evaluating young children for learning disabilities. As much as he might have tried to switch gears to more adult issues, he just wasn\u2019t much help. And, frankly, I didn\u2019t have the words to share my son\u2019s unhappiness\u2014which, ultimately, made any further wavering in my decision seem unnecessarily cruel. Once I finally made my decision, I couldn\u2019t share the humiliation involved in my first information-gathering trip to Legal Services \u2014 the noncommissioned officer who rolled his eyes when I stated my purpose, and then set me up to watch a canned military divorce video in the public waiting room, in full view of other soldiers and spouses coming in for power-of-attorney and other standard legal forms. I couldn\u2019t talk about the hoop-jumping and personal interviews required to arrange for my son and I to leave Germany, my husband\u2019s permanent duty station, without him. Nor the degrading interview with a chaplain who told me I hadn\u2019t thought my decision through \u2014 and who suggested I humble myself and \u201cbeg\u201d my husband\u2019s forgiveness before my son and I found ourselves alone and destitute. Back in the states, I couldn\u2019t mention all the phone calls to Army-related agencies regarding my son\u2019s health care or other benefits that ended in: \u201cI can\u2019t help you. You need to ask the service member to handle this.\u201d (I did, admittedly, offer statuses regarding how long I was put on hold for most of these phone calls.) When the Pentagon cheered about the military divorce rate taking a dip in 2010, a sign, they argued, that the many family programs they had instituted in the past few years were working, I kept quiet. I also didn\u2019t mention my lawyer\u2019s handful of calls to the Defense Finance and Accounting Service regarding the allocation of my husband\u2019s retirement \u2014 not even when one representative yelled: \u201cMrs. Sukel gets nothing, do you hear me? NOTHING!\u201d before hanging up. And, of course, the stilted and angry phone calls between my ex and I about, well, everything, seemed not worth mentioning either.<\/p>\n

Now that my divorce is final, I wonder if perhaps I should have chronicled these events \u2014 yes, even on Facebook. With some perspective, I realize now that I am one of the lucky ones. I had a family waiting for me back in the states, support from close friends, my own career, my own money and a sense, even as I fought time and time again with the military bureaucracy, of how my divorce should be handled. Perhaps the odd status line would have helped someone else, lost and alone, find a path that didn\u2019t throw them back at their soldiers or back into the world without the right support for themselves and their kids. Maybe I could have offered some humor, some direction \u2014 or, even, with luck, hope. More important, I could have shared the realization that while I did, indeed, leave my husband, I have not and will not leave the military behind. The Big Green Machine \u2014 and its bewildering bureaucracy \u2014 will be with my family for some time to come. My former husband, my son\u2019s father, will still deploy. My son and I will still face many of the same mental, emotional and financial issues that intact military families do. I just no longer have the military ID card, or convenient power-of-attorney, to help me slog through any problems. There\u2019s an old joke that the military calls family \u201cdependents\u201d for a reason. But as an ex-military spouse, I now discover that I may be more dependent than ever \u2014 especially when it comes to my son\u2019s health care and benefits. Until my son turns 18, I will have to rely on my former husband to navigate any issues, whether he\u2019s stationed in Kabul or Kansas. I\u2019m one of the lucky ones here, too \u2014 because I know that no matter how angry he may be at me, my ex will make sure our son is taken care of. Others, I\u2019m afraid, won\u2019t be so lucky. When a soldier passes away, the family is assigned a casualty assistance officer who helps the bereaved navigate the military bureaucracy as they make the transition from the military back to civilian life. As I look back at my own experiences of military divorce, as well as those of all too many Facebook friends and acquaintances, I can\u2019t help but feel that the military would also benefit from creating a new post: the divorce assistance officer. Certainly, the families, bereaved and broken in their own way, would.
\n<\/strong>
\nWhen I imagine it, the divorce assistance officer would be a trained and informed unit representative who handles divorced families for an entire battalion, a person who might field basic questions like how to change your child\u2019s primary care physician when you aren\u2019t the Tricare sponsor or finding local, free deployment-related counseling. Alas, there is nothing like that available now. When a divorced spouse reaches out to the military for any assistance, she or he are all but guaranteed a series of frustrating phone calls that usually end with, \u201cYou need to talk to the service member.\u201d Not so helpful when the service member is deployed and unreachable \u2014 or, as all too often happens in divorce, refusing to speak to you at all. The newest statistics on military divorce have yet to be released. I imagine that once they are, my Facebook wall will explode with new status updates and comments again. Certainly, these preventative efforts are something to applaud, even if the programs were not available or didn\u2019t work for my own family. Yet, before the Pentagon celebrates too loudly, I would also ask them to take a look at the tens of thousands of divorced military families already out there, still tenuously tethered to the armed services bureaucracy for health care and other benefits. To care for us may not fall under the Pentagon\u2019s official mandate, but it certainly should fall under the ethical one.
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

SOURCE<\/a>
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In the past year, I\u2019ve seen divorce-related Facebook messages filled with anger, desperation, sadness and even, on occasion, glee. They<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1213,"featured_media":72448,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11364","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"magazineBlocksPostFeaturedMedia":{"thumbnail":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u-113x150.jpg","medium":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","medium_large":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","large":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","1536x1536":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","2048x2048":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-highlighted-post":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-featured-post-medium":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-featured-post-small":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u-113x90.jpg","colormag-featured-image":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-default-news":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u-113x150.jpg","colormag-featured-image-large":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-elementor-block-extra-large-thumbnail":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-elementor-grid-large-thumbnail":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-elementor-grid-small-thumbnail":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg","colormag-elementor-grid-medium-large-thumbnail":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg"},"magazineBlocksPostAuthor":{"name":"Joshua","avatar":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/62ee23f8f40307578d1f284ecd823d77f32da8ea35541e7dbdafeb5da1a4e877?s=96&d=mm&r=g"},"magazineBlocksPostCommentsNumber":"0","magazineBlocksPostExcerpt":"In the past year, I\u2019ve seen divorce-related Facebook messages filled with anger, desperation, sadness and even, on occasion, glee. They","magazineBlocksPostCategories":["News"],"magazineBlocksPostViewCount":130,"magazineBlocksPostReadTime":7,"magazine_blocks_featured_image_url":{"full":["https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg",113,170,false],"medium":["https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u.jpg",113,170,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/u-113x150.jpg",113,150,true]},"magazine_blocks_author":{"display_name":"Joshua","author_link":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/?author=1213"},"magazine_blocks_comment":0,"magazine_blocks_author_image":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/62ee23f8f40307578d1f284ecd823d77f32da8ea35541e7dbdafeb5da1a4e877?s=96&d=mm&r=g","magazine_blocks_category":"News<\/a>","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11364","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1213"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11364"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11364\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/72448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/asiancemagazine.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}