I will be the first to admit that the decision to go to miluim ate me up inside. It left me caught in an exhausting conflict between the duties I carry as a mother and the duties I carry as someone called, once again, to serve.

Last year, I faced the same decision, but at a very different stage of my life as a woman and as a mother. I was three months postpartum when the war with Iran began. I was called up, and I went without thinking. Still, when they sent me home, I was flooded with a strange mixture of relief and disappointment.

Three months postpartum is harrowing no matter how you look at it. I was still confronting the realities of early motherhood and the crisis of identity that can arrive so forcefully in those first few months. I had also chosen not to breastfeed, which was the best choice for me, but it often left me feeling as though I was not needed. I was battling family opinions, expectations, and the pain of not being seen, truly seen, but rather feeling as though I had become little more than a vessel through which this baby had entered the world.

That alone was enough to make things difficult. Adding my obligations as a miluimnikit into the mix made it impossible to think about any of it rationally.

This year, a planned stretch of miluim came my way: two months of guard duty on the border, taking me away from my almost one-year-old son, who would surely be affected by my absence. I am his mother, after all.

This is a dilemma that so many people across the country face every day. But I could not stop spiraling over the thought that my participation in protecting the country might, in some way, damage my child’s own sense of protection.

Sorry, dilemma? What dilemma? Of course you go to miluim at all costs!

This obviously only applies to men, because if you have read until here and not thought to ask why I was even debating when duty calls, then therein lies the problem. 

Men across the country miss births, milestones, and important family moments because of miluim, and we treat this as normal. Sad, of course, but not drastic in the way that a mother missing her child’s milestone would be deemed disastrous. The women at home, with children, jobs, households, and endless responsibilities, are praised for “holding down the fort,” but usually as a footnote. The detailed receipt of what that labor entails is an afterthought and an assumption. After all, this is the kind of work we expect women to do (and do alone) anyway, isn’t it?

It should not be difficult for a woman to care for three children during missile fire while trying to work, provide, cook, clean, create some semblance of normalcy, and somehow not lose her mind as she runs to a shelter carrying more than she can manage on her own. Meanwhile, we often hear jokes men make about miluim being a wonderful vacation from the wife and kids and how nice it is to have such a break built into their year. Comments about how their wife isn’t allowed to “bother” them at certain hours or how their wife “understands” that he has to do what he has to do and therefore shouldn’t complain. 

I get to see the other side of the partnership because I serve with many of these same men. The men who do not know what size diaper their child wears. The men who get off the phone with their wives and describe them as “sensitive” or “nagging” because they volunteered to stay an extra Shabbat without asking first. The men who cannot possibly understand what my poor husband is doing at home — “How is he managing?” “Is he okay?” “How could you just leave your husband and child like that?” — as though he did not help bring that child into the world and does not also know where the pots and pans are to feed our little angel.

To my unit’s credit, most people were very kind to me during this period. They gave me far more credit than I felt I deserved and even praised my decision. At the same time, the fact that I received that much praise in the first place still bothers me. That may sound ungrateful, but hear me out.

The need to point out this discrepancy in such a dramatic, celebratory, or accusatory way reveals how deeply we still expect certain roles to exist in every home. It shows how shocking it remains when someone does something that challenges the status quo.

The language we use around women, especially in the context of miluim, is almost always tied to an identity defined by someone else: “miluim wife,” “miluim mom,” “mom of three during the war.” These labels leave little room for a woman to exist in her own right. They leave little room for her to be someone who serves, someone with a world outside her family, someone whose identity is not built entirely around supporting her husband while he goes to miluim.

I know many women who have given up their own miluim careers in order to defer to their husbands’ service. I also know that we need soldiers, and I am not minimizing, even for a second, the dangerous and difficult work those soldiers do. What I want to emphasize is the real diversity of those soldiers, and to cast light on family dynamics that are reinforced by a miluim system still centered around men — a system that mirrors society at large.

This is part of a much larger conversation about what we deem appropriate jobs, behaviors, and attitudes for women and mothers. We praise mothers of several children who simply “get on with it” while their husbands are away, and we shame those who appear to be in less “peril.” The mother of one child, who is used to having her partner around, may deeply miss her husband, but she is not granted the same right to complain. She is expected to look around, compare herself to others, and minimize her hardship because, after all, aren’t we all going through this? Meanwhile, my husband would have been allowed to complain freely, because he was never primed for this job in the first place. 

It becomes yet another arena for the mom-shaming game, a game fathers rarely seem required to play. Instead, the more time fathers spend away from their families, the more they are praised — even when that time away is voluntary, as it often is when men choose to serve more days than they were called for. When they do come home, we do not expect them to immediately take part in everything. They need to rest. They are having a hard time. They cannot possibly be expected to slip right back into their role as fathers during miluim. Or a new job. Or after a business trip. 

Even my husband’s boss could not understand why he would want to work from home for months after our son was born. “Isn’t your wife at home?” My mere existence in the home must be all that is needed, especially after just giving birth.

We do, however, expect full presence from mothers through sickness, work, exhaustion, and miluim. The few women we know who do miluim, or who have military careers, are expected to waltz back in on their time off and relieve the poor, overwhelmed father who has been caring for the children all by his lonesome. There is little grace for their exhaustion, their hardship, or their need for rest — even while they are on base — because modern communication allows them to manage everything from afar and they are not permitted to demand hours of the day that are off limits.

All this said, I would be remiss not to acknowledge my amazing husband, who gave me what I needed and took care of everything at home. And yet, because of the mom guilt I could not shake, I ran myself into the ground trying to care for everyone and everything each time I came home. I did not want to face more judgment from the world, or from myself — especially from the invisible firing squad in my own head that would not let me rest while my child had been without his mother for so long.

That came at a cost. A cost I carried internally as the mother. But it is not a cost men are expected to carry in the same way. Many men feel perfectly comfortable letting their wives take charge for months at a time without an internal firing squad telling them they have failed.

That is the freedom I am talking about: the freedom to have a self that is not entirely attached to parenthood, partnership, or a supporting role that exists to champion someone else at your own expense.

I chose something outside the home. I chose something that challenged the status quo and gave me a sense of my own development after the profoundly life-altering experience of having a child. Motherhood can leave many women with a crisis of self so deep that some fall into depression. I have experienced that depression myself from time to time, and it can be so debilitating that you begin to wonder whether you will ever be anything other than a caregiver to everyone and everything except yourself or just a vessel for carrying and distributing functioning children.

That is why it is so vital to really see yourself amid everything others want from you. It is how we move, even slightly, toward a society built on real equity.

To some, my opting to do miluim may seem selfish. But to many more, I hope it reads as an act of choice. I hope it inspires other women to put themselves first more often, to make bolder decisions, to cultivate an identity even when society does not want them to have one, and to start challenging any environment that refuses to make room for them.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)