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Going It Alone
Marriage Across the Miles
For Foreign Service families, absence sometimes does not make the heart grow fonder. how do officers and their spouses cope with prolonged physical separation?
By Francine Modderno
This article originally appeared in the July-August 1999 issue of the Foreign Service Journal. Thanks to the American Foreign Service Association for reprint permission.
The Foreign Service community now has proportionally more female officers, more tandem couples and more professional wives within its ranks than ever before. In part, this is due to the elimination in 1974 of the requirement that any female FSO resign from the service upon her marriage. But more significantly, these ongoing changes in the makeup of the Foreign Service reflect the happy fact that American women are achieving steadily greater levels of professional responsibility in most fields.
These opportunities do not come cost-free, however. More and more Foreign Service families are grappling with the age-old truth that balancing two careers sometimes requires extended periods of physical separation, with one or both partners living, perhaps with children or other relatives, under dangerous physical or political conditions.
How do FSOs and their spouses cope with the stresses such separations inevitably create? Are there ways to minimize their impact on marriages?
The Traditional Wife
"I was a traditional wife," says Rita Wysong. The*audior of Packing Up and Moving On: Life in the Foreign Service, (North Country, 1995), Rita began writing only after her husband Robert Clayton retired in 1967 after 20 years in the Service. She and Bob had to live apart twice. "I didn't want it," she says. "It just happened." Rita says that in her day, spouses didn't question separations. "You just went where you were told. As far as discussing it — never.... I almost felt like I was an extension of my husband, felt almost as if I didn't have an identity of my own. ... Now the Foreign Service wife's life is so different. I just took orders."
Rita and Bob were first apart in 1955 when Rita retumed to the States from Jeddah to have their third child. "Our daughter was three and a half months old before he saw her. We didn't have telephone and communications like nowadays; and toward the end, when thiings were so up in the air and our furniture hadn't been sent yet — well, I had been a pretty good Foreign Service wife up until then, but I guess I felt almost abandoned. I remember thinking, They can take this State Department thing and do what they want to with it.' It was easier for Bob than me — he was in his element; he was in an Arabic country, doing what he liked."
"We've been happily married for a long time and we don't like to be separated. ... But there are times when jobs and opportunities and responsibilities are such that there's very little choice." The wife of an ambassador as well as a high-ranking FSO herself, Phyllis E. Oakley, currently assistant secretary of State for Intelligence & Research (INR), has certainly wrestled with the dilemmas posed by such situations.
A year after she joined the State Department in 1957, she married fellow FSO Robert B. Oakley and was therefore required to resign from the Foreign Service, though she reentered it in 1974. As she and her husband have pursued their careers over the past 40 years, they have lived apart on five occasions, twice for a period of almost two years each.
Their first separation came after seven years of marriage, when Mr. Oakley was assigned to Vietnam, and the previous policy allowing families to accompany FSOs there was suddenly reversed. Having just returned from Africa,* Oakley decided it would be good for her and her two small children to be near family and in a small community, so they moved to Mr. Oakleys hometown of Shreveport, La.
Their second separation occurred under considerably different circumstances more dian two decades later. Both Oakleys were in Washington; Phyllis was deputy spokeswoman for State and Robert was working in anti-terrorism.
Then he was tapped as the new ambassador to Pakistan in 1988 following the tragic death of Arnie Raphel in a plane crash, and quickly left for Islamabad.
"Our children were in college and needed a home base. It was simply better at that point that one of us be here. We never would have chosen this, but it was just the way it happened. We then tried to shorten the assignments and make arrangements so that we could stay in closer touch." Eventually, Phyllis was able to join her husband in Pakistan, where she worked with the Afghanistan cross-border humanitarian assistance program on loan to USAID.
Giving Birth Alone
"I didn't come into the Foreign Service expecting to be away from my husband," says Bobbi Brown. Brown was introduced to long-distance marriage right off the bat, when her husband Phil's first USIA tour in 1966 took him to Africa. Pregnant with her first child, she remained at home to have her baby before following him. "That was the first time we were separated," she says. After the birth of her second child, Brown was medically evacuated several times for postpartum problems. "When my mother came to be with me in Paris, I wondered what kind of a job this was when my husband couldn't be with me at such an important time. There was a great deal of tension. At that point, I was ready to give it all up."
"[But] we felt not only that it was a challenge but that it was something that was very, very well worth doing — in fact, terribly important to do. So it never occurred to me to say, 'Oh, are you going to leave me home?""
After that bumpy beginning, Brown learned to love the Foreign Service lifestyle and, with a master's degree in education, patched together a career by teaching where she could, in Russia and at the Sidwell Friends School in Washington. Then she and Phil lived apart in 1995, when Phil served his last Foreign Service tour in Vienna. Although she spoke better German than Phil and was tempted to accompany him, she decided to stay home because she'd just finished a course on learning disabilities in order to work at the Kingsbury Center in Washington, D.C. "I just said, 'No, I wasn't going to do it again.'"
Splitting The Kids
Mette Beecroft stayed in Washington during her first separation from her husband because she'd been named the first deputy director of the Family Liaison Office. "I helped establish it in the department and then proceeded to set it up worldwide. My husband went to a good job in Bonn in 1978, but I felt that mine was just a fabulous job and it was terribly important to give it some sustained effort in the beginning. My husband accepted this readily and we actually split the kids: he took our son and got him started in school, while our daughter stayed with me. It worked very well; we each had a child and each had company. We did this for a year and then [my daughter and I] followed and were at post in the normal way."
A successful business venture kept JoAnn Piekney home after 15 years abroad with her husband. She and FSO Bill Piekney had been married for 22 years when they chose to live apart in 1989. During their years overseas they had raised two sons and JoAnn had worked intermittently as an elementary school teacher and in other part-time positions before getting involved in real estate. She later got her license and worked for a respected Washington-area real estate firm whenever they were Stateside.
In the late 1980s, believing that Bill would not be assigned overseas again, JoAnn opened a real estate and property management company in Northern Virginia. Her business was getting off the ground nicely. She had a good client base and felt a great commitment to her work. Then Bill was offered an important position in Cairo, a job too good to pass up. "The business was at a point where I either had to commit or just walk away. We had to make a choice: Would I sell my accounts and leave the States or would I continue the business and live apart from Bill for at least a portion of the year?" For the next four years, until her husband's tour ended, JoAnn managed her business in Virginia during peak business season, March to September, and spent the remainder of the year with Bill in Cairo.
A Tandem Couple
Like the Oakleys, Barbara and Earle Scarlett are a tandem couple. They joined the service as a team in 1976, one of the first married couples to do so. Wed in 1971, they both took the Foreign Service exam in 1974, were put into the same entry class and took the oath of office together. Yet Barbara recalls that the Foreign Service recruiter who interviewed Earle told him, "We're looking for people like you — and by the way, what does your wife do?"
The Scarletts' first priorities when considering postings are whether they would be good for their family as a whole and whether tandem positions are available. Individual career enhancement takes a back seat to these prime issues. "Perhaps our careers could have moved faster," says Barbara, "but we've enjoyed what we had to do." This strategy also spared the couple any lengthy separations for almost 20 years, until 1995, when Earle accepted a three-month TDY to Bosnia which stretched out to a year.
Barbara Scarlett found herself acting as a go-between, relaying detailed briefings over the phone between Earle and his office in Washington. "In addition to my own work, I had to take on his," she notes.
But the biggest strain came when the late Secretary of Commerce Ronald Brown died in a plane crash near Tuzla. She had just talked on the telephone with her husband, who was very excited about seeing his old friend Ron again. When she saw the news report of the crash, she immediately assumed Earle was on the plane. She tried to reach Sarajevo by phone, but couldn't get through. And State couldn't tell her who was on the plane, much less who'd been killed. "There were two hours when I was very, very angry. ... I don't know how I would have responded if Earle had been on that plane."
One of die major hardships of separation is the drain on finances due to the costs of maintaining two households, plus phone bills and travel. Mette Beecroft recalls, "Before I started working at the department, I was running around getting my husband's danger pay and travel allowances straight. He was never here long enough to do anything about them and, of course, someone had to take an interest." She suggests that the Stateside spouse contact the Family Liaison Office or the Association of American Foreign Service Women for their assistance in obtaining a frequent visitors pass to the spouses office. It's also useful to meet the FSO's office colleagues who may be very helpful in passing on messages and providing information on the circumstances under which the employee is working.
We Became Independent
It seems natural that a lifestyle so hard on marriages would produce a high rate of divorce. No statistics on Foreign Service marriages are collected, so it's impossible to determine die divorce, rate. While most FSOs and spouses believe that the divorce rate in the service is quite high, Terry Williams, who runs the family briefing program at the Overseas Briefing Center, believes that the rate of divorce for Foreign Service marriages is similar to the national rate. However, the perception among diplomatic security agents that their divorce rate is considerably higher than the national average may well be true, since law enforcement officers as a group have a significantly higher divorce rate than the national average.
Many FS employees are attracted to assignments they perceive as career-enhancing, despite the prolonged separation from family that they may entail. A diplomatic security officer who joined the Foreign Service in 1986 and prefers to remain anonymous reflects on his experience with this situation:
When he and his wife had been married for a year and a half, he accepted a challenging TDY in Moscow. His wife was finishing a masters degree in international business, so it seemed like a reasonable time to be away. They missed each other a great deal and he even tried to get a visitor's visa for her to come to Moscow, but this was against policy for temporary employees.
When the agent returned to Washington eight months later, he found that they had both established patterns of day-to-day activities that were incompatible with each other. Six months later they formally sepa rated. "But I told her that I wanted to begin marriage counseling immediately." They came to realize that during the time they were living so far apart, each had developed a level of independence from each other such that"... when we came back together there didn't seem to be much common ground. But the marriage counselor gave us tools to work with and we put them to use: more communication and understanding that marriage is not easy, that it takes a lot of hard work to keep it going."
Married now for 14 years, they consider themselves very happy. His wife has accompanied him on two overseas assignments and they have two children, both born abroad. The agent's wife, a telecommunications senior manager in the metro Washington area, has found life abroad satisfying in all respects except employment. Nevertheless, she says, "I would never do that again. What is the point in being married if you are not going to live together? Put first things first. Couples should determine their priorities. Is it job over marriage or marriage over job? Know your priorities."
Coping Strategies
According to Dr. Karen Shanor, a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist who specializes in the problems of long-distance marriages and the author of How to Stay Together When You Have to be Apart (Warner Books, 1987), "[Successful] couples have decided they are willing to put an effort into staying together and are independent." Her research indicates divorces actually appear to be rarer among couples who have chosen a lifestyle of separations because most such couples try harder to make their marriages work. They also have relationships in which each partner has a high level of respect for the other and there's a good level of trust.
There are, however, special concerns related to women in the Foreign Service labor force. "The need to compete to succeed in the service can make separations particularly difficult for women in senior-level positions," says Dr. Esther Roberts of the State Departments Mental Health Services office. As the prime domestic managers of most families, women often have more demands on their time than men. And even with help from partners and household employees overseas, they often carry the added emotional baggage of traditional societal expectations for females.
As a practical matter, cooperation during separation may include a dramatic new division of labor. Mette Beecroft thinks that the most important thing in separation is to develop expertise in the financial and mechanical aspects of maintaining a household. "The stay-at-home spouse should start to manage all the financial aspects in the marriage long before the partner leaves. You can do all these — and I don't mean to sound facetious now — all these warm and fuzzy things like keeping in contact and communicating and e-mailing. But if you don't have essential things straight, the stress level you set up for yourself and for your family is tremendous. Take a strong interest in the way the house mechanically functions. If you own a house, you have to be able to garden, to cut the lawn."
There are other basic concerns to address, as well. The couple needs to have full, not limited, powers of attorney, bank accounts both parties can use and up-to-date wills. And don't forget that tax season rolls around once a year.
Ultimately, however, there are no short-cuts to protect Foreign Service couples against the pain of separation. As Phyllis Oakley observes: "At some point, all officers will have to face separation, and in their equation — involving job, opportunity, commitment to the profession and to the family — they will make some difficult choices."