Confessions of a Military Wife by Mollie Gross

blues and me in my gown.
    I think at one point she tried to push me down the steps so she could go to the ball with Jon herself. She had such a great time reminiscing about balls she had attended with granddaddy.
    My dad took 800 pictures of us. It really did feel like prom night.
    The anticipation of the night is all tied up in buying the dress, getting my hair and nails done, and even buying some sexy lingerie and good perfume.
    The couples with kids would stay in a hotel that night. This was the one night of the year they would get away.
    Of course, this led to another phenomenon: Ball Babies. These bundles of joy arrive exactly nine months later. Ask a military wife when her children’s birthdays are. If it’s July, I’d avoid borrowing her gown.
    THE BELLE OF THE BALL
    I had a humiliating experience at my third ball. Let me explain.
    I purchased my gown while Jon was deployed. At that point, I weighed about seventy pounds because I had not been eating.
    Once he came home I became fat and happy again. That also meant the dress no longer fit.
    So I bought an industrial strength girdle from Sears to get my “mother’s hips” into the dress. I had had some technical difficulties with the girdle earlier in the evening at Natalie’s, where I had nearly passed out trying to get it on.
    In fact, it had taken two people to get me into it. How in the world did Scarlet O’Hara pick cotton in one of those straitjackets?
    The girdle went from just under my breasts to the top of my knees. It cinched me in pretty tight. In fact, it was so tight that when I sat in it and farted, the farts would slide up my back, shoot out the top of the girdle, and make my hair fly off the back of my neck.
    If I changed position to allow room for outgoing gas, the air would blow down the girdle between my legs. Without warning, my legs would kick out in front of me.
    How was I going to pass those farts off on someone else all night? There was only a tiny hole in the crotch to allow you to pee without taking it off.
    At first, I figured I would not drink anything all night. That really wasn’t feasible because it was one of the few times when I could allow myself to cut loose. In the end, I figured I would have to risk a bathroom disaster.
    I could also barely breathe and kept taking shallow breaths, which left me feeling lightheaded.
    Before we left home, my hair had already started to fall apart. I decided to pull it into a bun high on my head and attach one of those fake hair things that look like a nest of cute curls. I slapped a tiara on my head and was good to go. I had my weave, my girdle, and my tiara. I was ready to party!
    This ball fell between deployments. Jon had just returned from Iraq and we were gearing up mentally for his next deployment in two months. There was a lot weighing on our minds, but we kept smiles on our faces. I started to drink and it didn’t take long before I was feeling wild.
    What happened next may not come as a surprise to you. Let’s just blame the girdle. It squeezed all the sense right out of me.
    I had not met Jon’s new company commander, Captain Rodriquez. All that my husband had told me about him was he was very big and very quiet. My husband is a man of few words himself, so I had to push for more details. I needed to know what he looked like, so I wouldn’t act like a total idiot in front of my husband’s CO.
    Jon paused and finally replied, “He looks like a big black Arnold Schwarzenegger.”
    That’s all I needed. He sounded good to me, real good, in fact. Arnold had been my total teen heart throb.
    I was cutting jokes and telling some silly stories to a captive audience of single Grunts when Jon asked me to come with him to meet his CO.
    I put my game face on, but it was too late. There was a large handsome man with a huge smile, great dimples—sexy-looking and baldheaded. And he had the most gorgeous, petite woman on his arm. Her black hair went down to her butt. She looked like a Hawaiian