Fart Rainbows or STFU

Ooh boy, drama is a'brewing and I can see the storm clouds from here!

I recently stumbled upon a bit of a blog war going on between 2 of my followers, regarding negativity. Blog Follower A made a post about how the Navy fucked her. Blog Follower B commented and suggested that she was being too negative. Blog Follower A then spawned a second post addressing her own negativity and how it's justified and Blog Follower B followed suit with a post of her own about pride and positive thinking.

Or something to that affect...can't say I know for sure because I was viewing all of this with glazed-over eyes (somewhere in there I saw the phrase "fart rainbows")...


I, for the most part, ignored what was going on over there in the drama llama's den, but then I decided to browse through some of the comments that have been left on my own blog. And that's where I found a little gem hidden in a pile of same old. A partially anonymous person had stumbled upon a rant of mine, posted during a little pity party I was having at Casa Del Laura, and she did not like it.

"You married a Marine, you knew they deployed, so you basically need to get over it." Ah yes, Allie. Anonymous Allie.

Between that and the other blog drama going on, I got to thinking. I started thinking about the expectations put on military wives with regards to how they are supposed to handle themselves and handle deployment. Is it your "place" to complain? Should you put on a facade of optimism to hide the screams inside of you? Should you go on an all-out blog rant about how you hate your husbands branch?

No one can really say. Each wife handles deployment in their own way. Some get by by always seeing the silver lining through the bad situation. Some get by by starting a blog and using it as a sounding board for all things military that piss them off. Some turn to close friends and family. Who can really say what's right for another person?

After telling that partially anonymous commenter of mine to "fuck off", I decided that *I* handle my stress much the same way that Blog Follower A does. I get on my little cyber soap box and cuss up a storm, complain complain, ask "why me?" and stew in misery for a while. And then I get over it. And once I'm over it, I will do what Blog Follower B does and reflect on the silver lining in all of this and think about all the good things the military has done for me.

So that's where the title of this blog post becomes relevant. I am so tired of people acting like there are only 2 kinds of military stress management. There are those who tell us we need to "get over it" or "deal with it" because our husbands enlisted and sucking it up is just part of the job. Then there are those who say we need to never censor our emotions, rant if we want to rant, cry if we want to cry and by golly sprinkle in a few f-bombs to boot!

Well you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to do both. I'm going to kick, scream, cry, rant. I'm going to send angry angry thoughts to the Marine Corps and wallow in self pity and post my angry rants. That IS how I deal with it. I deal with it by letting the anger out so it doesn't grab a hold of me. And once I'm done with that, I'll put on my big girl panties and go do something productive and happy.

I, and many other people on here, come to their blogs to talk about what *they* want to talk about, whether it's how their husband's branch fucked them over, or how they're re-decorating their living room. People blog about care packages, about children and spouse drama, about religion. There will be happy and positive posts and there will be angry posts oozing in wrath. And that's just the facts of life. Sometimes you're happy, and sometime's you're sad.

And sometimes you blog about it.

*P.S. Fuck Deployment and Fuck the Marines. Fuckity fuck fuck (am I making anyone uncomfortable yet? Good...)