Cops’ Wives : Policemen’s Life Partners Get Together to Share the Burdens on the Home Front

Her husband told her not to be surprised if he got home early: He wouldn’t be finishing his graveyard shift that night.

Anaheim Patrol Officer Jeff Mayer was calling his wife from the hospital to let her know he had been hurt. He and his partner had chased a man suspected of stealing a motorcycle, and in the ensuing struggle, the suspect, who was high on PCP, beat both Mayer and his partner on the head with Mayer’s night stick.

The suspect wrestled with Mayer’s partner. Mayer was forced to shoot when the man didn’t heed orders to stop.

“I really wanted to be there, needed to be there for him,” Linda Mayer said. But she was stranded in her house with her five children.

“You go through a range of emotions yourself. He has been hurt before but this time it really affected me,” Linda Mayer said. “I have a lot of confidence in my husband, (but this kind of situation) leaves you feeling a little helpless.

“I worry now if he hasn’t come home for a few hours. I get scared,” Mayer said.

Fortunately, Mayer only received a concussion that required a few stitches.

Another time, her 7-year-old also started to worry when his father, due home at 3:30 a.m., was not there by 7. “I’m getting worried about Dad,” he said to his mother. “Do you think he’s dead?”

Television cop shows have familiarized everyone with the risks police officers face in the line of duty. Lesser known are the stresses and fears of the officers’ spouses: the feelings of exclusion from his work life, the emotional armor that hinders intimacy with his wife, the difficulties in maintaining a family life with children or even celebrating holidays, the ever-present fear that he might get killed.

Linda Mayer shared her thoughts in a recent meeting of 26 women, members and female guests of the Anaheim Police Wives Assn. This group, in existence for more than 30 years, gives wives a chance to voice concerns among others who may have had to confront similar situations. They discuss how to cope with a husband’s frequently changing shifts, how to explain a father’s absence to the kids. (One wife switched jobs and worked as a cashier at a grocery store so she and her husband would have the same hours free.)

The Anaheim gatherings also give wives a chance to leave behind household responsibilities just one evening a month.

“It’s my Monday,” is how Becky Martinez, Anaheim Police Wives Assn. president, describes those monthly meetings. “It’s so important that we have those couple of hours. . . (to) release a lot of tension. We like to socialize and have a good time. It’s good for the kids; their mom is less stressed.”

Psychologist Judith Neighbors attended the Anaheim Police Wives Assn. meeting earlier this month. The wives expressed concern about a number of recent shootings in the city. Neighbors, who is working on her doctorate in post-traumatic stress at UC San Diego, had been invited to field questions by the membership.

Tracy Jefferson told the group about how her husband was involved in a shooting. “It was 2 o’clock in the morning and the driver did not have on any lights. When a third officer tried to pull the man over he ran into a motel.” Two officers shot because they believed he had a gun, but the man was not armed.

Her husband, who was on the graveyard shift, woke her up to ask if someone else could take her to work. She said she knew he might be shaken up and waited for him to come home so he wasn’t greeted by an empty house. In the end he made it home and she was glad she’d stayed, “glad they had a chance to talk about it” in those 15 minutes as he drove her to work.

“You can live with whatever happens,” Jefferson said. “He has to know everyone else is gonna rag on him but he can come home and tell me. People second-guess it. (It was a) split-second decision with limited information. It’s important that the family can deal with it.”

Linda Mayer said her husband, Jeff, confessed that he’s still angry about the situation. “I should have killed him,” Linda said he told her. “He’ll be out on the streets.” The man was jailed only for a few months and has already been released, according to Linda Mayer.

Communication is the key to bridging misunderstanding and nurturing intimacy in times of crisis, Neighbors said.

“Be supportive, interested, understand, but know you can’t fix it. Talk about it (just to help him) to let it go,” she said. Once officers start shutting off emotions to deal with the criminal element on the streets, they may carry that out in other areas, such as their home life, Neighbors said.

Police wives are also concerned about how their husbands are perceived by their children, their neighbors, the media.

One woman at the Anaheim meeting said her 3-year-old son had started telling his playmates, “My Daddy’s a policeman. He shoots people.” Or a variation: “People don’t like Daddy. Why do they want to hurt Daddy?”

Background Investigator Rick Martinez, Becky Martinez’s husband, has worked as a school resource officer and given talks to Anaheim elementary school students.

He gave a puppet show on Halloween safety. A little girl once asked him, “Have you ever been killed?” presumably meaning, “Have you ever been shot?”

But Rick Martinez answered her question. “If I’d been killed, would I be standing here talking to you? No, I’m very much alive.”

“Right now the kids think it’s really neat their daddy’s a cop,” Becky Martinez said about their 7- and 9-year-old daughters. Once they’re in junior high and high school they’ll start saying that their dad “works for the city.”

“There’s often disrespect toward (the kind of work) your husband does,” Becky Martinez continued.

The news media is seen as a primary offender. In any news story, police wives contend, the media will always blame the police officer. One officer told his wife, “I should have been a fireman.”

“Their feelings are hurt,” Neighbors said, when officers get bad press about their work. “They’re out there trying to save the world and somebody tells them they’re rotten or they’re doing a bad job.”

The area of police work in which a husband specializes and its level of danger definitely has an effect on his wife’s level of stress. Jennifer Vargas’ husband has just begun assault training in two-man units. “He doesn’t go out there (on patrol) to try to be a hero. Now he’s dealing with people from Colombia (involved in narcotics). Now he’s following people I wouldn’t want to know. And . . . he’s gone all the time,” she added, more as an observation than a complaint.

But while the wives lament their husbands’ transfer to narcotics, they say the men love the assignment.

One woman told of a vice cop she knew who died from a combination of stress and a congenitally bad heart. He spent four hours every night working at smoke-infested bars, drinking watered-down drinks so his sources would smell alcohol on his breath. He couldn’t wash or shave; the smell of soap on him would betray him. And he got only three or four hours of sleep a night.

His doctor told him he needed a desk job.

He died in his early 30s, leaving a wife and three children.

The job description for working vice should include a statement saying, “ ‘Only single men apply, not daddies,’ ” says Becky Martinez. “It should be a law that these guys not be married, should be single or already divorced,” she continues. “Seventy percent of divorces come from this. . . . Working vice in bars, they’re dealing with the lowest forms of life, the Mafioso, the drug dealers.

“And (the officers) have to be on the streets constantly,” Martinez says. “But the wives and kids are suffering.”

Martinez has told her husband, Rick, that if he were ever to work vice, “it would almost be like being unfaithful. I thank God every day that I have (Rick).”

Becky and Rick Martinez have been married 11 years, and Becky attributes this to the fact that their “communication is strong. I’ve always been there (for him) 100%. He can bring home his work.” He has in the past worked swing and graveyard shifts and “was on motors swing and day (a motorcycle officer on the swing and day shifts) for four years.”

He is currently a background investigator for potential candidates for the Police Department.

Rick Martinez discusses job opportunities with his wife. They recently talked about his interest in a juvenile detective job, which he later chose not to seek. His support for her efforts with the Anaheim police wives group is understood.

Not all police officers are so enthusiastic about the police wives’ associations. Becky Martinez reports that some husbands have accused their wives of spending the time “just gossiping.”

These men fear that discussions among their wives would reveal more than they had intended to say about their personal lives.

But in Becky Martinez’s view, it is these wives who need the help and support of other police wives most of all.

“If a man doesn’t want his wife to join,” she said, “maybe (she) should check into it.”

By contrast, the membership doubled when Pamela Molloy, the wife of the new Anaheim police chief, joined the group, Becky Martinez says. Once she had joined, the officers were telling their wives to join so they could get keep on top of whatever information was being traded. “It’s helped,” Becky said.

Becky’s advice to young women considering marriage to a police officer is to “research it before you get into it. Many holidays find the wife home alone. And the work shift changes are inevitable and can cause problems.”

“Young marriages are at high risk” if one of the partners is a police officer, says Barry Spatz, a therapist who works with the Santa Ana Police Department. The typical pattern is that the wife starts out an innocent, he reports. Within five years they divorce (“We drifted apart, she didn’t understand”). And in another two to three years the man will remarry.

In Spatz’s view, a police officer’s optimal career expectancy is seven to nine years. After that he or she may burn out or succumb to alcohol abuse. They survive by going up in the ranks and taking a desk job.

An officer just starting out undergoes “a tempering process,” Spatz says. “The husband changes. He’ll drink with the boys after his shift to loosen up the tension. The wife gets excluded from him and his career. His partner becomes more intimate.

“Wives don’t understand the changes their husbands are going through from simply being a cop,” Spatz says. An officer will develop an emotional suit of armor. Then “it’s too much work to take that suit of armor off. (The officer) will stop talking to his wife.”

“They are walking time bombs if they don’t talk about what’s going on. A wife has to pry him open and become a part of his life,” Spatz says.

He recommends wives taking ride-alongs, becoming more supportive and involved. “Spouses need to read the signs, not choose to ignore them. Marriages could be saved,” he concludes. “When communication goes, the marriage goes.”