FRONTIER

SITTING thousands of kilometres away from home, in the Middle East, Melanie Free was discovering one of the harder parts of being a military mum. The RAAF member, now squadron leader of 13 Squadron, was on a six-month deployment, and despite good communication technology, still found it hard to speak with her family: husband Ryan, and children Arabella, then 5, and Lachlan, then 7. “It was hard being away from the kids,” she says. “A really worthwhile experience and it just gives you so much perspective when you’re doing your job back home, but it is hard.” Previously, it was Ryan who had been away but now the roles had been reversed. “I realised while I was on that deployment that it’s hard for every parent, it’s hard for anyone to be away from their loved ones,” Melanie says. “Everyone’s feeling those emotions, everyone’s going ‘oh,

I miss them so much’. The hardest bit for me was, about four months into the trip we got two weeks leave, and so I caught up with the family in Thailand for two weeks, and the hardest bit was going back after that.

“Arabella was five at the time and I remember her at the airport saying ‘don’t go mummy’.

“I think when I left she was fine because she didn’t realise how long it was going to be but I’d been gone for four months and I think she had to say goodbye to me again and she was like ‘no’.”

But the then-mum of two had to return to the Middle East and so it was back to almost daily Skype sessions for the family. “Kids are kids so some days they wouldn’t want to talk because they’re busy and things like that and that was really hard,” Melanie says. “The communication was about as good as it could be, really, but the things that limited it were because the kids were so young. And sometimes seeing your face was really hard for them too.”

Even returning home was difficult.

“When I got back off the plane, Ryan was there with La