Dear Sally, Military Spouse Ridicule is Making Me a Hermit

Dear Sally,

My husband has been in for 10 years and we have been together the entire time and have kids. Deployments, ups and downs, bad FRG to great FRG, awesome commands to the very worst. I have faithfully stayed by his side.  But many days I want to sit back and cry because it upsets me what a milso has been classified as these days. And it doesn’t help that when one does something negative we all get lumped in. So I just tend to shy away and keep to myself…which has turned me into a hermit.

There are many Facebook pages and websites out there that do nothing but bash military spouses. There are many times that I want and need to ask for advice for something but choose not to because I just know that someone will say something negative, or they will run to one of those Facebook pages and say something. I mean you can’t even ask something as small as “When is the trash supposed to be picked up?” because it always ends up with some snotty comment.

It pains me so much to see how much the military has changed since my husband first joined. It was slightly uptight when he joined, but then it just got progressively worse. I chose not to be in FRG’s anymore, I chose not to do anything because I have developed such anxiety over being judged for everything that sometimes I don’t even want to leave the house. And that’s not fair to anyone to have to be that worried because you don’t know if the lady down the street is staring at you and putting a rumor in the rumor mill about you. So I have found that it’s just easier for me to stay in my house with my kids doing our day to day stuff!

I mean these days, I can’t even “support my soldier” without being ridiculed. I want to be able to proudly wear my military wife gear, but don’t because I really just don’t want to end up on one of those pages! I even ended up taking off the stickers I put on my car because I was tired of being snickered about.

I need advice!  Please help!

Sincerely,
Afraid of Ridicule