While My Husband is At War: A Case Study on A Soldier’s Wife

Abstract

A soldier’s wife deals with the emotional, social and financial experiences as her husband attends to his operational duty at war. This is a case study that aimed to explore and examine the lived experience of a soldier’s wife with her family and other social networks as she deals with her life while her husband is deployed at war. It utilizes a phenomenological approach, specifically the phenomenology of lived experience, to explore and describe how this woman makes meaning out of her experiences and how she is able to develop her own strategies in dealing with the emotions and situations engendered by the husband’s absence. The data was gathered by employing methods of observation, participant observation, unstructured and semi-structured interviews during the period of three weeks. These data gathering techniques were done while living with a military family and getting additional data from other soldier’s wives whose husbands were also deployed at war. Being confronted with several situations, a soldier’s wife characterizes her life using the description, “makuri ang isara na babae na ang asawa ay sundalo na dutu sa gera” (“The life of a woman with a soldier husband at war is difficult”). This statement is further explained by her formation of self-depiction, meanings of fear and description of their life in terms of husband’s deployment stages. In its social and economic context, her life is affected by their family dynamics, social support systems, marital power, division of labor and strategized ways of dealing with the husband’s absence.