While pouring over one negative comment after another on various newspaper and news gathering sites, Joint Base Lewis-McChord spouse Julia Aten could feel the anger building up inside her.

After being interviewed by a local newspaper reporter about the Feb. 17 shutdown of the popular My Career Advancement Accounts program - which she benefited from and received nearly $6,000 toward pursuing her education goals - the story was picked up by news outlets across the country.

Readers posted comments on various sites accusing military spouses speaking out about the program's closure as acting entitled, and sometimes going even further, saying that some women marry troops only to receive their military benefits, Aten said.

"I could give you a laundry list of some of the things that were written," she said. "We started seeing what people were saying and it hurt."

So Aten and fellow Lewis-McChord spouse Lauren Silva, who was also quoted in the story, set their sights on dispelling those stereotypes and telling what it's really like being a military spouse.

The spouses, who both live in Puyallup and met at the University of Washington Tacoma while taking classes to pursue a bachelor's degree in social work, decided to start the Military Spouses Speak Out blog (http://julia-lauren.blogspot.com/) in March.

"With guys coming back injured, spouses are having to become the primary breadwinners. We felt a little bit attacked (by the comments)," said Aten, whose husband left for Afghanistan on a yearlong deployment in March. "(Starting the blog) made us feel better and speak to the things that some of the media reports left out."

From chronicling any changes in the status of the MyCAA program to more personal day-to-day entries about what going through a deployment is like, the blog serves as an outlet for the pair.

"It's been nice to be able to put our thoughts into words," said Silva, 20, whose husband of one year recently returned home from a deployment. "For us it's been helpful on a personal level."

The two spread the word about the blog through e-mails to other spouses and posting the link on other Facebook pages. The blog has also helped form a strong relationship between the two spouses despite their 22-year age difference.

"We didn't know each other (within the social work program) until she heard me talking about having to pay for college," Silva said. "It was nice to meet someone in a non-military environment and find an unexpected friendship. As military spouses we have a lot of common ground. We go through a lot of the same emotions. We have our good days and we have our bad days."

The two plan on continuing to post entries and follow the status of any spouse education programs on the blog for as long as they can.

"I have to keep speaking out about it," Aten said. "I want to make sure everybody else gets the same (educational) opportunity that I was given."