The Salute to Spouses series profiles the lives of men and women who hold down the fort at home while their loved ones serve their country.
Lynnette Holley is a mother of three who lives on Dyess AFB in Abilene, Texas. Her husband is an active duty member of the Air Force. She received her Associates Degree in Accounting from Bryant & Stratton College in August.
Last year was not a good one for Lynnette Holley. She was inundated with school work, and although she was happy she finally had her husband back after a year-long deployment, the couple and their three children had to make a quick move from New Jersey to Abilene, Texas. If you’ve never traveled eight hours a day in two cars with three children, Lynette will tell you, it's an adventure. "We got to see a lot of things,” Lynnette says. “But I’m not gonna say I’m excited about doing it again anytime soon.”
As the Holley family traveled south, the bitter New Jersey January melted away, and everything seemed to go according to plan. However, Lynette knows all too well that plans, no matter how carefully laid, just never really work out exactly as you hope.
It was storming in Texas. Not a balmy sort of rain or thunder, but ice. Texas rarely gets ice storms. The Holley family, unable to get on the base and facing a town completely crippled by the bizarre weather, checked into a hotel. They had not been there three days when the pipes burst, flooding their room and cutting off all power.
“I couldn’t turn any homework in,” says Lynnette. And with her associates degree within months of completion, timing was crucial. “It was like a waterfall. We had no Internet, the city was shut down so I couldn’t go to the library. At that point in time, I felt like anything that could go wrong would go wrong.”
Lynnette is no stranger to setbacks, big and small, planned and unexpected. She married young, right out of high school, and passed on attending Winthrop University in South Carolina to be closer to her family. Then she had a daughter, and in the wake of September 11, her husband was deployed. Another baby, another deployment.
In 2005, a few days before her birthday, a call came that changed her life. “It was my sister,” Lynette says. “My mom had a heart attack in her sleep.” Lynnette’s young brother had found her lifeless in her bed. “It was … the worst day of my life.”
Amid the grief and the confusion, Lynnette’s loss galvanized an important goal: She had to finish school.
“Seven months before her death, my mom brought me a laptop,” she says. “She told me, ‘I don’t care what you do, I don’t care how long it takes, I’m giving you this on the sole belief and promise that you will at least get your associates degree.” Lynnette pauses. “Now, I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’m not going to have her haunting me. I had to keep my promise to her.”
In the face of difficulty, Lynnette still manages a delightfully wry sense of humor.
Lynnette had been taking classes on and off for a few years, first in psychology and later in accounting. In 2009, she enrolled with Bryant & Stratton and began formally working towards her degree.
This was the degree that hung in the balance as the family sat out the storm in Texas. After it passed, and after nearly three weeks in that hotel, Lynnette, her husband, and her three daughters finally settled into a house on the base. They organized shipping for furniture. They took a pleasant day trip to Dallas.
Then another phone call came. Her grandfather had died. “Now, not only am I grieving and making travel arrangements, but I’m also making moving arrangements.” Lynnette says she called her advisor, and said, “To be quite honest, mentally I’m at my breaking point. Between the move and the school work and the flooding and the deaths, I can’t do anymore.”
But Lynnette didn’t quit. Her husband Gerrell, who works in Aerospace and Ground Equipment, works nights and accommodates his schedule so that Lynnette can finish her work on time. “He’s my personal cheerleader,” she says affectionately. “He’ll look at me and say, ‘Lynnette, I don’t see you with your book! Go upstairs, you have to do your work.”
A few days before her birthday in April, Gerrell had a cookout for her. In a moment of family horseplay, Lynnette somehow broke her finger. A tiny injury, usually, except for the Microsoft Office classes she was taking. Oh, and the keyboarding class with timed tests.
She called her advisor again. “She said, ‘Oh no, here we go again’,” Lynnette laughs. But like times before, Lynnette was simply not allowed to give up. “My advisor said, ‘You told me you were going to get your degree, and the only thing that could stop you was being hit and killed by a Mack truck. You’re not dead. You didn’t get hit by a Mack truck’.”
“If it wasn’t for her,” Lynnette says. “I wouldn’t have gotten my degree in August.”
When the degree did come, Lynnette had been watching the mail for days. “I opened the envelope, and I pulled it out, and it had the seal on it and it had my name on it.” It was the moment that made it all worth it. “To see my kids be more excited than me, and say ‘I can’t wait to grow up and be like you,’ all the jobs and the pay, all the interviews and the accolades couldn’t compare to seeing them be so proud of me as their mom.”
However, there is no time for Lynnette to rest on her laurels. She is already on the road to getting her bachelors, and then her master's degree. Lynnette says she is grateful she had the luxury of witnessing every moment with her three daughters, the girls that now serve as her inspiration.
“Yes, their father is a great role model,” Lynnette says. “He serves his country, what better role model is there than that? However, I want my daughters to say, ‘My mom. She’s just as tough as the people in the military. If she’s tough, I can be tough.’ That’s my goal.”
Lynette was contacted for this series through SaluteToSpouses.com.
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