When my husband, Jim, is home from truck driving, we always look forward to Sunday night. It contains two of our favorite television shows: "Army Wives" and "Desperate Housewives."

It’s easy to understand why Jim is drawn to the shows. The women in both dramas are literally picture perfect from the shiny gloss on their polished pedicures up to their improbable flawless skin and coiffed hair. Sure, they try to look like everyday wives but "Army Wives" is no more an accurate portrayal of the life of an army wife than are the desperate housewives that take up residence on Wisteria Lane.

It’s entertainment television and it does just that: entertain. Until recent events, I didn’t see the harm in either television show.

And then gunfire erupted at Texas-based Fort Hood and suddenly the images of army life didn’t align with what’s televised each weekend.

Associated Press photographer Jack Plunkett captured on film what television cameras can’t, the real-life reaction of an Army wife as her husband, Sgt. Anthony Sills, tried to comfort her. The Sills’ three-year-old son was at the day care on the base, which was in lockdown following the mass shooting that has brought the death toll to 13.

She’s identified as the wife of Sgt. Anthony Sills. Her name is unknown, but isn’t that more in par with life as an Army wife? Wives are an extension of their husband’s career. Even when tragedy strikes, she remains anonymous, save for the fact that she’s an Army wife whose utter disbelief and shock were captured on film. But, unlike her husband, she’s not trained for combat or combative situations. She’s a wife and mother. Her hair is pulled up in a messy ponytail, any signs of make-up are gone, her eyes are noticeably swollen and her face conveys fear. She’s covering her mouth with one hand and clutching her husband’s fatigues in another. She’s disheveled, scared and you can feel her powerlessness. That’s something no Hollywood set is prepared to show you on any given Sunday.

As a form of escapism, television shows deliver both in reality-based programming and in scripted scenarios. The danger is when viewers transpose what’s portrayed on television as real. Even reality-based shows aren’t a fair portrayal of life. I realized the line had become blurred for me when I picked up the newspaper, saw the picture of Army wife Sills and did a double-take. Consciously or not, Mrs. Sills was not the image I had of an Army wife. Actresses Catherine Bell or Kim Delaney acting distraught while wearing a colorful floral size two dress crisis-after-crisis was.

The television shows may be titled "Army Wives" and "Desperate Housewives" but the ratings draw is generated because neither of the shows deal in desperation. Not the kind of desperation we saw on Mrs. Sills’ face. The desperation only a mother knows when the safety and welfare of her child is unknown.

Television shows like "Lost" or "Flash Forward" are better forms of escapism because the chances of a remote island crawling with invisible monsters or a global two-minute black-out occurring are less likely to happen and therefore keeps an audience grounded in the reality that it’s fiction, not fact.

The more men and women are subjected to housewives that look like Teri Hatcher or Eva Longoria Parker or Army wives that look like Bell and Delaney, the more society will reject real-life housewives and their reactions. The AP photo of Mrs. Sills is a more accurate image of an average housewife. She’s not a size two. She’s not dolled-up. She’s distraught. And it’s not what we’re conditioned to see when drama unfolds.

Reality stinks compared to what we see on television or at the movies. While the same holds true for the groomed husbands portrayed on TV, the stigma doesn’t seem to follow men. My husband is a good-looking guy, but even he’d be the first to admit he’s not Brigadier General Michael Holden, aka actor Brian McNamara, attractive. Again though, the expectation to look movie-star handsome doesn’t seem to plague men as much as it does women.

As someone with an eating disorder, I’d like to say that I probably watch my weight more cautiously than most housewives, but many of the housewives on my street also obsess over an extra pound or two. Why? Because we all watch the same shows with our husbands and the unspoken message is the importance of looking good, not desperate.

It’s why the photo of Mrs. Sills was so dramatic. It was unstaged, unrehearsed and unedited. It captured an Army wife as she was, not as we may expect.

There are days I’m grateful my husband drives long hauls over the road. There are days when getting three of my children on the school bus by 6:45 each morning and then chasing after my three-year-old leaves me looking older than my 41 years. There are days I look and feel desperate. Jim has seen me on a few of these days and it’s not pretty, but it’s real.

The images of women on television, magazine covers and in the movies capture women at their peek because it sells. That doesn’t make it any less damaging to a woman’s self-esteem when she doesn’t measure up to the housewife portrayed in her living room each night. Real housewives don’t always live in the richest ZIP code in the nation, drive flashy cars and have their legs waxed every week. Real housewives worry, stay up late baking cupcakes for homeroom and get up early each morning to drive their children to the bus stop. They are a size two to a size 22. They have good hair days and put-a-cap-over-their-head days. They break out in acne, cry for no reason and cheer the loudest at their child’s sport games. They are curvy, thin, flat-chested, big-breasted, pear-shaped, hour-glass-shaped, can't-find-my-shape-after-this-last-pregnancy kind of women. Real housewives are just that -- real. Mrs. Sills gave our nation a taste of that realism when her world was falling apart and she didn’t act otherwise.

Mary Billiter of Alpine is a weekly Star-Tribune columnist. Write to her at mbilliter@silverstar.com.