I Will Find a Way to Make it Work

When we PCS'd to Fort Leonard Wood two years ago, I had five kids, and my two youngest were just three and two at the time. My employer offered to create a remote position for me so I could keep working through the move, and I was thrilled. Then the panic set in. How was I going to find child care once we got there?

I called the CDC and they told me to expect a two year wait for anything under preschool age. My husband was an E5 at the time, and with five kids to support, a two year wait was not an option. I put my name on every list I could find, CDC and Family Child Care alike, and eventually a new in-home Family Child Care provider opened up nearby and started interviewing families. The only open slot she had was during my son's hardest hour of the day, too late for a nap and too early for bed. My kids are high spirited, and I remember praying he would behave well enough to get chosen. He did, and he got the spot.

My son stayed with her for about nine months and grew close to her, the way kids do in a small, intimate home care setting. Then her husband got surprise orders and she gave me thirty days' notice that she was moving. I called Child and Youth Services to ask about getting him onto another Family Child Care provider's list, and I assumed that since the closure wasn't my fault, he would get some priority. Instead, they put him at the bottom of the wait list, facing another two year wait.

I was working from home with two young kids and hadn't built much of a support system yet. The CDC agreed to hold a spot for two weeks while I searched for something longer term, but there was no transition built in. His last day with his familiar provider was immediately followed by his first day in a CDC classroom he had never seen, with no introduction. I walked in and found kids standing on tables and digging through the teacher's desk. My son, still grieving the loss of the caregiver he loved, clung to my leg and begged me not to make him stay. He promised he'd be good if I just took him with me. I left him there that day. He came home with a bite mark.

That was the moment I decided I would not do that again. My husband and I hired a nanny, and later I started an informal child care exchange with a neighbor, another military spouse with six kids of her own. We swapped watching each other's children so each of us could work, get to appointments, or occasionally get a night out. I also covered for her so she could make the forty five minute drive off post for her child's physical therapy appointments, since that care wasn't available on post. Between our two households, we were coordinating care for what amounted to eleven kids with no formal support behind any of it.

I'll be honest about how complicated these informal arrangements get. Military spouses build friendships fast out of necessity. I've become someone's emergency contact within two weeks of meeting them. Then you have to figure out how to ask that same new friend for child care without wrecking the friendship. It comes down to choosing the lesser of two hard options: keep the relationship purely personal and have no help, or bring money and logistics into a friendship and deal with the strain that can bring.