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ILLUSTRATION: ©ANNE HORST/i2iart.com

When the phone rang just before Thanksgiving, 11-year-old Alisha Perreault of Petawawa, Ont., thought nothing about answering. She had no idea the call would change her family forever. After picking up, the unfamiliar voice asked for her mother, Frances.

I was pretty young, so I didn’t know what was happening,” recalled Alisha, now 16. “I gave the phone to Mom who started crying.”

It was 2006 and Alisha’s father, Roger, was in Afghanistan, serving as an engineer with the army. The call was to inform the family that Roger’s spinal cord had been injured in an improvised explosive device explosion. Since then, he has had many operations and suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Roger and Frances have four children; Derek 10, Mathew 13, Marissa 17 and Alisha. This experience was especially hard on the girls. It has been five years and the family is still struggling to cope.

It’s hard enough being a teenager, let alone a teenager with the added stress and responsibility of having a parent in the military, although every Canadian Forces (CF) family situation is different. Some teenagers are struggling while others have found ways to cope. In many cases, coping has made the family stronger.

Roger’s PTSD has put the family under a lot of stress, most of it related to the fear of losing his job. He explained that the military wasn’t prepared to deal with the injured soldiers and that he has been waiting in limbo to hear whether there will be a permanent place for him. “Before, he was a quiet and patient person, but now he has a quick temper and things frustrate him easily,” said Frances. “We all know when he’s having a bad day, which is a couple of times a week, and we all walk on eggshells. It doesn’t mean he’s angry with us, we’ve just learned to live with an angry dad.”

Frances has noticed the biggest change in her oldest daughter who is suffering from depression. “She gets very angry at him and I don’t think she understands why,” explained Frances. Her other children keep to themselves and always come to their mom before their dad.

“His injury changed our house a lot. Everything is more stressful and I didn’t have a really good relationship with my dad for a long time. We still butt heads, but it’s a little better,” said Marissa. “I was really depressed about it and sometimes it makes me mad. Sometimes I see kids and their relationship with their parents is better than mine and I just wish that my relationship could be like that, but it’s different because my mom is put under a lot of stress.”

When she was 14, Marissa’s depression almost took her life. “On my birthday my dad was in the hospital and he was doing really bad. He had just gotten out of surgery and had an infection and they didn’t know if he was going to make it or not. I had friends over and I got really drunk and ended up in the hospital. I didn’t know how to handle my emotions.”

This was her darkest memory. After that she started to get better and to understand the situation, realizing it isn’t her dad’s fault that he got hurt.

Confusion is very common with military teens. In Manitoba, Elaine Ellis, a family counsellor at the Shilo Military Family Resource Centre (MFRC), said closeted drinking and self-inflicted cutting is common in depressed teens. There are 32 MFRCs across the country which provide programming and counsellors to support CF members and their families.

Cameron Lucier, 16, dealt with depression. The Lucier family is currently stationed at CFB Shilo. His father Jason a radio operator with the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry and has done one tour in Bosnia and two in Afghanistan. He has three younger brothers, Matthew, 9, Brandon, 12, and Dustin, 13, and when his father is away most of the responsibility falls on Cameron. “Cameron takes on the father role; he looks out for Matthew a lot and I rely on him more,” said Andrea, the boys’ mother. “Having a father in the military makes them grow up faster, as they have to deal with more.”

The teenager doesn’t mind taking on the extra responsibility, although he said it can be hard at times. He misses having a father around, as there are some things, such as girlfriend issues, that he is uncomfortable asking his mom about. “That’s one of the reasons I developed my depression, seeing as—as long as I can remember—he wasn’t around that much,” he said. “My darkest memory was when I was in Grade 8 and the light armoured vehicle behind my father got blown up and they didn’t say who all survived. At that point I was distant for a long while.”

Cameron’s most common worry is not knowing whether his dad will be coming home alive or “in honour”. And if he does come home, will he be the same person? “It’s a sticky issue for families because the age of communication brought the realities of what’s happening on the battlefield home,” explained Brad White, Dominion Secretary of The Royal Canadian Legion. “So what happens now is you hear on the news, ‘Six NATO soldiers killed in Afghanistan,’ but no more information, so you can guess the stress that puts on the people back home, knowing their loved ones are overseas.”

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ILLUSTRATION: ©ANNE HORST/i2iart.com

Megan Egerton-Graham, an Ottawa author and guidance counsellor with a speciality in deployment and teen behaviour, agrees. In her experience a lot of teens don’t recognize the difference between factual information and opinions. She was surprised how many teens didn’t understand the chain of command and that the family would be notified of a death or injury before the media could broadcast the name.

Living with such uncertainty can be daunting for anyone, and teenagers often have to deal with a gamut of emotions.

Ironically, Cameron dealt with his loneliness by shutting himself out from everybody until one of his friends noticed and helped. “He basically took me under his wing and acted like the big brother I never had. He is my role model and I try to repay the favour by helping others who feel the same loneliness I felt.”

Cameron takes care of his youngest brother who has the hardest time and cries a lot when Jason is gone. “I feel sad when Dad’s away because I know he could die any second and I feel sad when I hear another person has died from Canada because I understand what they are going through,” said Matthew.

Egerton-Graham recognizes what Matthew is going through. “I’ve taught students who have lost their fathers in Afghanistan, and I’ve had other students whose parents were severely injured and oddly enough they all shared the same anxieties as the children whose parents hadn’t been injured, because it didn’t matter if it had been their real experience, it was the fear of that experience.”

The Lucier family attends the MFRC deployment programs. The Perreault family found MFRC counselling didn’t help. “I did counselling for a bit,” said Marissa. “It’s hard to get counselling here, there aren’t enough counsellors.”

In the last 10 years, the CF has started to focus more on families. When Brad White was in uniform, families were part of the DFE (dependants, furniture and effects) grouping, but today the terminology is ‘military families’. “This is just the tip of the iceberg, as it’s a whole new paradigm: how you treat not just the CF member, but the CF member and his or her family,” he explained. “You are looking at a time when the military has never done this before. First off, it’s a professional volunteer military now, a career, whereas if you look at what happened in past conflicts, it was a very small standing of people who grew out of recruitment, mobilization and training.” This has brought new issues, including new traumas, new PTSDs and younger CF members with more first-hand experience.

“When you talk about assistance for families, I don’t think the system, from a PTSD point of view, knows how to deal with the family,” White added. “I’m hoping it will change, but how do you assist a teenager who is going through their own life-changing time, and then a parent comes home from Afghanistan and all of a sudden becomes totally irrational for an unknown reason?”

Creating a setting where CF family teenagers can get together is seen as one positive step.

The Shilo MFRC has a Teen Centre that offers activities such as movie and game nights. It has tried to offer a group support program for teens, but thus far there has not been a lot of interest on the part of teens. Meanwhile, the Esquimalt MFRC has a social worker for teens, and most of its programming is group focused. “We feel it’s important for our young kids, our middle school age kids, and our teens to get together as a group. This tends to normalize some of the shared feelings,” explained Pauline Sibbald, Esquimalt MFRC counsellor. “Especially when you are in a community where parents aren’t living on the base, military kids can feel very isolated in schools.”

Cameron has felt alone at school. He said it can be hard to attend public school as most of the teens are used to having their families around all year. Military kids don’t have that luxury, so they can feel like outcasts. “In my experience people always pity you and tell you that you’re overreacting about the whole thing, but they don’t understand the stresses of having a loved one in danger,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong, your parent could be a police officer or firefighter, but a soldier is a whole different story.” He believes the risk police officers and firefighters face in Canada is very real, but it is easier for CF personnel to die while on mission. “I have a real pet peeve with people who put down our military, saying they aren’t doing anything. I don’t see them leaving their loved ones to help solve another country’s problems so they can live like you do.”

Fourteen-year-old Derek attends public school in Kingston, Ont. He did not want to be identified in this article, but said none of his friends like to talk about having a parent away. His father, who works in communications with the army, returned home from Afghanistan in early December. While his father talked about his time in Afghanistan, Derek remained quiet, and then offered: “My first sense is laughing and relief because he made it home, but it’s very scary what he went through and I didn’t think he was in as much danger as he was. I knew he was outside the wire, but in a base. I saw the vehicle he was going to be in and was pretty confident it would be able to stand up to a lot of things.”

His dad protected his family by not telling them a lot about the mission. Only now that he’s home safe has he slowly started to talk about his experience. His deployment was hardest on Derek’s younger sister Joan, 8. Derek explained she has become very emotional. Some days she is very happy and others she is really mad or won’t talk to anyone. Her schooling has also suffered. “Mom and I try to help her but she would start crying or yelling,” he said. “I just try to be there if she wants to talk. She’s become happier since Dad has been home.”

One of the toughest things for Derek is that his dad missed all of his football games and his Grade 8 graduation. “I was really sad when he missed my graduation because it’s a big moment in my life and he wasn’t here. My mom was there, but it’s different without both parents.”

Derek is certainly not the only teenager from a forces family to experience this. The four children in the Nault family of Orleans, Ont., also get sad when their dad misses birthdays and sporting events. The family consists of Lilly, 11, Melina, 13, Lukas 17, Charlene, 18, their mother Claudia and their father Remi who has been with the air force for 25 years and did a tour in Afghanistan.

It’s hardest when Remi misses birthdays. Melina said she also doesn’t like it that he missed all her soccer games and she used to get jealous of Lilly because Remi always made it home for her birthday. One year he couldn’t, so they postponed the birthday until he was home.

“I think we celebrated her birthday three times that year,” Lukas joked.

His deployments have been hardest on Lilly who has trouble sleeping, and will often take her dad’s pillow and blanket to bed with her, anything that “smelted like Poppa.”

As one way to cope, Claudia wouldn’t tell her children about Remi’s mission until he was back safe. Her kids, however, didn’t always think this was fair. “It’s a tough call, because if you tell them after and something was to happen they wouldn’t have a chance to send him another e-mail. But if you tell [them] before, they worry like crazy,” she said. “Like right now, I can tell Melina is worried [even with Remi standing in the same room].”

Overall, the family survives by holding weekly family nights and talking to Remi as much possible on the phone and through e-mail. Meanwhile, the Townsend family of Victoria has also learned to cope with George Sr. being away with Canadian Forces. Cindy says that within the last three years her husband has been away 22 months and her children, George Jr., 15, and Emma, 13, send him regular e-mails. “I find it easier if I call home once every couple weeks,” said George Sr. “If you call too often everybody depends on those calls and sometimes, in the military, it’s just not possible.”

Emma enjoys getting his e-mails. “Sometimes when we were sitting at the computer we would get a message from him and I knew he was there on the other side,” she said with a smile. “We were talking one time and then I didn’t get a reply for 10 minutes and he said, ‘Sorry sweetie, I fell asleep.’”

In the mid-1990s, when Remi was stationed at Canadian Forces Station Alert situated on the northern tip of Ellesmere Island, Nunavut, he was able to phone home every eight days for 20 minutes. When he returned to Alert in 2007 he could phone home every day. In Afghanistan, Remi could phone once a week for 40 minutes. “The military is realizing more that their troops are leaving a family behind and to get the support for the member, they need to be able to phone home,” said Claudia.

“It also makes returning home a lot easier because you are more up to date,” Remi added. “It’s not an easy lifestyle. You can’t get back the time you miss, whether it’s birthdays, anniversaries or Christmas, but it’s something we chose and this job has brought us everywhere as a family. We’ve been to Germany; Quebec; Cold Lake in Alberta; Gagetown, New Brunswick; Gander, Newfoundland; now Ottawa.”

Every teen interviewed for this story said it was harder on them, personally, to move to a new town than it is to have one of their parents deployed. “Moving is harder because when Dad’s away that’s only one element of your world that’s displaced, but when you move it’s your entire world that changes,” said Elena Lopez, 18, of Esquimalt, whose father has been an engineering officer with the navy since 1988.

In British Columbia, 15-year-old Linda, whose mom plays clarinet for the CF, is preparing to move this summer and has been struggling with the idea. She found the support she needed from her school counsellors and the MRFC counsellors, but she is worried she won’t see her father as much, since her parents are divorced and her dad is staying in B.C. She explained it’s also hard to prepare for the move when the family isn’t 100 per cent sure where it will be going, though Halifax is likely. “I’m confused and worried but also stressed because we are making all these preparations, like selling our house, the house I’ve been in all my entire life,” she said. “High school will also be hard because this was my first year and it’s really hard to get acclimatized to the new environment and it takes time to find friends you are close with and I’m going to be starting all over again.”

As for the Perreault family, Roger has asked for a transfer out of Petawawa. Alisha said home life is still as hard as it was when Roger was first injured and she doesn’t think that will ever change. Marissa, however, said she thinks her family has learned to cope with their situation and she doesn’t regret Roger being in the military. “I feel lucky I still have my dad,” she said. “He didn’t come home in a casket, but I sometimes wish he hadn’t gone to Afghanistan and hadn’t gotten injured, but I don’t want to be selfish.”

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