It’s October, and for all of us in the military community, that means one thing: ball season. Most milspouses love going to the balls. Why wouldn’t you? How many adult women get the chance to dress up and spend a night dancing? Add in your husband in uniform — I’m especially lucky as my husband is a Marine, and let’s face it, no other uniform can touch their dress blues — and you’ve got a pretty amazing night. The tradition, the ceremony, the camaraderie, the uniforms, the chance to look beautiful, a night with my husband… I look forward to the ball every year. Literally.

There are, of course, always some Debbie Downers who make it their life’s mission to make sure that everyone is as miserable as they are. And with that, I introduce you to this girl:

I tell myself that we have 3 years and then the milspouse label will no longer apply to me. And in that vein, I have been trying (after a decade of doing my best to avoid involvement with the mean girls who drove me off my first year as a milspouse) to check off all the quintessential milspouse things, like a trip to Disneyland before we depart into that blessed goodnight. This year, I was working myself up to going to a ball, something the t-shirt and jeans (also sweatpants in the commissary) me would avoid like the plague.

… So I will wear my old-fashioned ball gown to the military ball and I am sure I will be mocked by women (aka Cinderella’s step sisters) who think that the only thing that matters is what I wore. I will conduct myself with grace and kindness toward every person there, regardless of my attire.

Now, after having attended her one ball, she is presumably an expert.

Beyond that, my summary intel is this: IGNORE EVERYTHING SpouseBuzz and MSM tell you. You can star that if you like.

… Beyond my large scale observations, we drew the lucky straw and ended up at a table with people like us. The odds of this occurring were so infinitesimally small, but it happened. So I didn’t have to put on my military spouse facade for a change, but instead got to roll my eyes with the other ladies every time they mentioned how spouses have the toughest job in the military. I maintain until the military starts paying me, I am not employed by them. And in all honesty, compared to my life growing up, military life is relatively comfortable. I can’t complain. Nor do I feel I have the right to claim toughest job when I am not a full time caregiver to a Wounded Warrior (that’s a tough 24-7 job), nor am I grieving the loss of my partner. I have it pretty damn good. Regardless, it was great to sit with people who felt like me and not have to pretend to be more of a mainstream military spouse.

That said, I ran into my arch nemesis from the good olde days back when I was there before, who bullied me as part of her mission to turn me into a proper military spouse when I was new to military life (in all fairness, she was one of a group of people with that mission). The result of her bullying was to drive me away from the community and to not interact with them. I am not sure that all of her efforts were worthwhile. She didn’t look particularly happy.

But here’s the overall headline: Veni, vidi, vici. I can cross it off the list of milspouse Disney rides to undertake before we are out of here. We had decent food (dessert was great). We had decent wine. We had great conversation with people who view the world the way we do (conversation covered organic food, science, engineering, business, etc). The band was less than awesome, but we got a couple of good dances in and a picture that shows the hubster is in as good of shape now as when we married (though I’ve gained weight…uggh…I’m working on that). I doubt things could have gone better than they did.

And of course, to reiterate the take home lesson: Feel free to read the drivel put out by the mainstream military spouses, but take their advice with liberal heaping tablespoons of salt. Life is too short to listen to people who are afraid to live in the moment and as always I am glad I stayed true to myself and ignored what everyone else said.

Look, I’m not a huge fan of Spousebuzz since Jacey Eckhart took over. The articles posted are usually so mind-numbingly stupid that I actually lose brain cells reading them. They’re about on the same level as Military Spouse magazine when it comes to realism towards the lives of milspouses. Milspouses are usually spoken to like kindergarteners.

But that said, I have to defend them here a little. I’ve read some of their ball advice posts. For the most part, they’re common sense. Don’t wear anything slutty or ostentatious, for example. Because it’s true. Wives do it every year, too. They skank it out, wear cocktail dresses to a black-tie event, or wear a dress with so much sequins and glitter that Las Vegas surely must have run out.

This, of course, is deeply, deeply offensive to the milspouse in question, who is clearly one of those spouses (more on that in a second). Why, I’m not entirely sure. Because guess what? Telling spouses that the military ball is not the place for them to wear whatever the hell they feel like wearing is not bullying, or high school-ish wives being judgmental. It’s the truth. As much as I love attending our Marine Corps balls, I know that the fact of the matter is, this isn’t my night. It’s my husband’s. It’s the Marines’. And every single person they work with, and all of their wives, will be there… including the CO, XO, Sgt. Maj., and chaplain. You’re representing your husband there in front of all those people, so yes, it is the smart thing to do to present yourself well and act appropriately. Even if it is such a drag.

Now, who are those spouses? They’re the spouses who hate the military. They complain about other wives, they complain about family readiness, they complain about irregular hours… in short, they complain about everything. And it’s not their attitude. Oh no. It’s the military. Once their husbands get out, their lives will be peaches and cream and unicorns and rainbows. And why do they hate it so much? Beats me. I don’t like deployments and constant changes as much as the next girl, but good Lord. Really, it must be exhausting to be perpetually outraged all the time.

These wives, they’re the ones who are not involved in family readiness because they “hate all the drama”. It’s really hard to make friends because “so many wives are bitches”. They can’t have fun at the ball because “all the other spouses are so judgmental”. And on and on and on it goes. They’re constantly miserable, they hate everyone and everything about the military, and they fail to notice that the common denominator in all of these situations is them. Meanwhile, they’ll try to bring as many other spouses as possible down to their level. Misery loves company and all.

It makes me feel sorry for their husbands, honestly. I can’t imagine how it must feel to have a wife who you know loathes what you do with every fiber of her being, especially if you love your job in the military. And God knows they’ll pounce whenever he mentions a single negative thing about their day to try and exacerbate it into a reason why he should get out. They surely won’t be supportive and positive and uplifting, which (in my opinion anyway) is what they need and deserve.

Part of being a milspouse requires being able to bloom where you’re planted… being able to roll with the punches, and find something good in even the worst situations. These girls can’t do that. And it isn’t even that they can’t. It’s that they won’t.

They will, however, congratulate themselves on not being a mindless little moto military wife. They’ll pat themselves on the back for being so much better than all of the other spouses, because only they truly understand how terrible the military really is. They sneer down their noses at all of us, and then complain that we’re all mean to them.

The author of these posts? I’d bet you anything that this is exactly the kind of spouse she is. Every unit has a few of them. She clearly is theirs.

Notice how she makes sure to talk about how much better she is than all of the other spouses who went to the ball. You know, she was gracious and kind to EVERYONE there, even though she secretly hates them all. And she’s accepting and tolerant. She even likes teh gayz! She talked about how cliquish everyone is there, but then in the same post admitted that she spent her evening with “people like us… people who view the world the way we do”. The best she could say about things at the ball was that they were decent.

A positive attitude is clearly not in this woman’s repertoire.

The take-home lesson? Don’t listen to the bitter milspouses who are just dying to get you to hate their lives as much as they do. Ignore their advice. Because even though they brag about “staying true to myself!!”, you can stay true to yourself without being a bitter, raving bitch.