Maria McConville has a unique perspective when it comes to understanding the mental health challenges military spouses face, including their loss of identity, sense of purpose and passion.
She’s lived it and is putting her experience to work as a senior advisor at Syracuse University’s D’Aniello Institute of Veterans and Military Families .
What makes McConville’s perspective especially compelling is her personal journey. The second of six children, McConville and her siblings had their college education paid for by their father. After graduating with an undergraduate degree in nutrition and dietetics from Miami University, she was looking for a paid internship because she did not want to go into debt to further her education.
She learned about a paid internship that the Army was offering. As a child, McConville and her family had camped throughout the United States and visited numerous national parks. That led her to think that was what the Army was about – camping – and that she could do that.
“I applied for the Army’s internship program and got selected,” she continued with a laugh.
No one in her family had been in the military and MConville said it surprised her to learn accepting the internship meant she was joining the Army. McConville said she felt a little like Goldie Hawn’s character in the movie “Private Benjamin.” After being commissioned, McConville traveled to Brook Army Hospital in Texas.
“That’s where I realized for the first time I was in the Army,” she said with a laugh. “I did not know I was actually in the Army.”
After completing her internship, McConville met her husband, retired Gen. Jim McConville, at her first duty station. The couple have three children who serve as Army officers today.
“I finished my commitment to the Army about a week after we got married,” she said. “Within the span of a week, I became an unemployed, dependent wife in Alabama.”
McConville called that the first of her identity crises. In all, the couple moved 23 times during Jim McConville’s career. Along the way, she earned a Masters degree in Public and Community Health from Austin Peay State University.
As a registered dietician traveling from state to state with her military spouse, McConville said keeping up licensure reciprocity agreements was among the most challenging career obstacles she faced.
“I was convenience employed,” she continued. “What I mean by that is, any job I took had to be convenient to lifestyle. I couldn’t depend on my husband to be home at three o’clock to get the kids home from school. I couldn’t depend on my husband to be home on the weekends if I was on call.”
McConville has worked from home for the past 12 years but said most young military spouses don’t have that option and must be physically present at their job site. That has led her to be an advocate for spouse employment, reciprocity of licensure, and telework positions.
In her capacity as an Army spouse, McConville served as the visionary behind the Spouse Master Resilience Training program and spearheaded the pilot program which continues as an active and thriving model program throughout the Army. The program helps spouses improve their mental health and develop resiliency.
“There isn’t one right way to be a military spouse,” she said. “We are all really unique. I always encourage them to live their life authentic to them.”
McConville also owns and operates McConville Consulting, LLC where she coaches clients on nutrition, fitness, purposeful living, energy management, and living life with authenticity. She is also a senior nutrition health educator with the Henry Jackson Foundation in support of the Consortium of Health and Military Science.
Reach Julia LeDoux at Julia@connectingvets.com .
Local News
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