Military families carry a unique emotional load – before deployment, during it, and even when everyone’s finally home. Stigma still gets in the way of asking for support, and that has to change.
Our CEO Anna Wright shares a personal reflection and why projects like Military Minds matter.
This is a picture of our son when he was two years old. He’s kissing a photo of his daddy that was halfway up the stairs, saying ‘Goodnight’ with my mum. He did that for eight and half months while my husband was deployed at sea, and I was so pleased for both of them that they recognised each other when my husband returned.
It’s a story I shared this month at an event to launch the work of one of our recent grants: an event planned long before the international scenes of the last three weeks (at the time of writing), but which brought home hard the stresses that some forces families will be experiencing right now, and which many, many more understand only too well.
My lived experience may be from serving in the Royal Navy for 12 years and being married to a sailor for 36 years, but the military family experience doesn’t fade.
