Leah was disappointed with the limited support she received from the military service when her husband was deployed.

Transcript

I mean, what luckily kind of saved me is I got – my family doctor gave me that medication, maybe three or four weeks into deployment. So early on in the deployment. And thank God because I don’t know how I would have gotten through it without medication. So that was helpful. But I honestly I don’t know. I literally had to take it one day at a time. My toddler is having pretty – what I consider pretty severe behavior issues yeah before and after his dad left. And then of course, after my husband left, I was on my own to deal with it. And he was getting violent and throwing furniture and like really, really bad tantrums. And then you have a baby to take care of the same time. And I mean, the baby was good, but they are babies, they still require a lot of care. So I don’t – if there was somebody else going through it, I don’t even know what I tell them. Except for you literally take it one day at a time, things are gonna go wrong, I got a hole in my car tire. Just go and replace that and drag the kids with me [laughing] to go to get it done. Things are always gonna go wrong. Yeah, I’m very upset with our military family resource center. You know, I left the board because of it. They used to provide, I think good service to kind of help with some of the stressors and – but they’ve –it’s really declined over the past few years. I think other parts of the province might do a better job. I don’t really know exactly what’s offered. But yeah, here in [my city], I think the programming and services are really declining.

And I don’t know, necessarily if the public, for those who aren’t in military lives understand that. They think, oh, great, you have this military family resource center, so that – they must do babysitting for you and offer services to help when your car breaks down. But that’s not at all the case. And yeah, even the kind of fun programming where you could just go and meet other military families, has really declined over the years. And I just – and even when I reached out, they kind of boast about their mental health services. I was really disappointed when I actually reached out and use those of what I received.

So I, – it makes me really – a friend that actually was here last night, who was on the board same time. We both left the board. And there’s just been some issues with the resource center. And we just both feel strongly, we think it’s an important service to offer. And we wanted to help other families. But yeah, we’re having – we’re both getting very worked up about the state of that resource center. And I just, yeah, the normal public wouldn’t understand that. They think that military families have all these services and things to help us out.

---

Go back