Back at the end of September, I promised I would write this post; so it is about time I did. After all the griping that I do in this forum, it is only fair if I give some of the other side. And really, I would never have married Wife in the first place if she hadn't had a lot more going for her than I have given you any reason to expect. So let me try to summarize a few of those things.
Grammatical note: For simplicity, I am going to write this all in the present tense. Some of these things have become less true over time, or fluctuate with the ups and downs of her health. But they are all part of the overall picture.
Wife is smart.
We met just out of college. She was Phi Beta Kappa and on her way to graduate school: literature major, classics minor ... the only person I know who can sight-read Latin. Back when Umberto Eco published The Name of the Rose, I read it to Wife because I thought she would enjoy it. She laughed heartily at all the little medievalist in-jokes Eco buried in the book, and translated the long passages of Latin for me by reading it straight off the page (as I would do with English.)
Wife is funny.
I tried to remember some of her better one-liners to exhibit here, but mostly they are context-dependent and wouldn't sound funny on the page. But in the flow of conversation they sparkle: her timing is perfect, her comments acerbic. Like other people I know who suffer a lot of pain over a long time, Wife learned that wisecracks helped her cope, ... just a bit. And she's good at them.
Wife is ambitious, sometimes even cocky.
OK, not so much these days, and the change has been a big blow to her. But part of the reason the blow was so severe is that, whatever she has done, her goal was always the top. At one point, when we were discussing a graduate program and were unsure if it was really the right move, Wife proposed law school as a back-up alternative on the grounds that there is always a demand for lawyers. “Besides,” she added, “How hard can it be?” [Memo: It didn’t actually work out anything like that. But at the time her sheer audacity was bracingly refreshing.]
Wife is demanding, of herself as well as others.
Again, she was never as successful as she wanted to be. But there was a track-record of real achievement to back up the ambition. And after all, sometimes "high maintenance" also means high performance".
- I already mentioned Phi Beta Kappa.
- Years later, when she was teaching high school English, students would come into her classroom the first day and say, "No! Don't tell me I got assigned to Mrs. Hosea's class. I'll have to work twice as hard as any of my friends!" One of these students came back the year after he graduated, though, to tell her, "Mrs. Hosea, do you realize I am teaching all the guys in my frat how to write an essay? There are Juniors at my college who don't even know what a topic sentence is! I hated your class when I was taking it, but now I am so glad you pounded all that stuff into my head ...."
- That was about the same time she wrote an editorial essay for the big metropolitan newspaper near where we lived at the time. (Think on the scale of the Times, the Post, the Tribune ....) She submitted it after working through about 27 drafts, and some junior assistant editor called her to say they'd like to run it if only they could cut it down by a third. Wife said she would rather do the cutting herself. Junior Assistant Editor -- having worked with authors before, obviously -- demurred. So Wife pulled out a copy of what she had sent in, and started going through it on the phone, sentence by sentence, trimming every bit of remaining fat. At the end, she had it the right length, and Junior Assistant Editor just said, in a hushed voice, "That's the best author cut I have ever seen." Oh, ... and the piece was funny, too.
- Years after that she was working in, ... well, let’s call it small-scale custom manufacturing. Supposedly she was the Shop Manager (i.e., operations and not sales), but there were certain clients who wouldn’t talk to anybody else. She always said at that job that her employees hated her but her customers loved her: she could get them exactly the product they wanted, at a price where the store still made money. The jobs she brought in were difficult, and she asked a lot of her staff ... but none of her competitors could turn out the same product in the same time for the same price.
- Fast forward again, to a time when the boys are in school and Wife has had to leave work because of illness. Time and again she would butt heads with their teachers. I would hear about it over dinner, “Hosea, I can’t stand it! I am so much better a teacher than that woman in their classroom.” “Yes, dear, but you are too sick to hold down a job with a regular schedule, so let her do her best.” Now, the boys were both in a special program in the school district, one that the district took a dim view of. And from time to time, some issue affecting the program would come before the school board. When this happened, the teachers in the program let us parents know about it, and they’d ask us to attend the school board meeting to support the program. Usually this job fell to the mothers, and usually there would be several of them there, plugging the program as best they could. But they all looked and sounded like Somebody’s Mom: sweatshirt, blue jeans, tennis shoes. The rest of the day that would be fine, but sometimes during school board meetings it seemed to undercut the delivery of the message. In any event, Wife took the assignment a bit differently. Even if she had just spent the afternoon shouting at one of the teachers – heck, even if she was not currently on speaking terms with the teachers – she knew better than to let the program be ploughed under. And so, before the board meeting, she would go back home to get dressed: suit, hose, pumps, pearls, tasteful earrings, hair in a professional bun, makeup. Then, when the board opened the floor to allow comments from the public, she was clear, organized, articulate; she knew all the educational jargon; and she could speak the languages of both management and the classroom. And she knocked them dead.
Wife is a good teacher.
This may sound obvious after the foregoing stories, but I mean more than that she is demanding. It continues to amaze me, but for all her impatience with other aspects of life, Wife is infinitely patient in the classroom. The turmoil and confusion of her outside life fall away; she is clear and organized and always unruffled. And she is consistent, whether teaching one student or thirty.
Wife is a good mother.
This point strikes, if you will, closer to home. I have alluded to the few times that Wife has really bombed in the area of motherhood (see here for only one example), but what is remarkable is that there are so few. It’s not just that every parent has bad days – heaven knows I’ve had more than my share. It’s that Wife’s own parents were such a catastrophe, in so many ways. Knowing about them, it is easy to see why Wife is as neurotic as she is, why her emotional life is so screwed up. And yet, ... “everybody knows” that abused children become abusing parents. “Everybody knows” that children raised in dysfunctional ways end up learning that the dysfunctional behavior is “normal” and passing it on to the next generation. “Everybody knows” these things, and for the most part they might even be true ... but not for Wife. Wife has worked very hard to see through the crazy things her parents did, so that she won’t repeat the patterns herself. And for the most part, she has succeeded admirably. The boys are absolutely secure in knowing that they have her unconditional love. She has a few bad days, I guess, but no more than any other parent.
Wife is idealistic.
Oh my word. I could talk for days. Let me give only two examples.
Early in our marriage, Wife came home to our apartment in the mid-afternoon to interrupt a burglar, who was carrying off our neighbor’s television set. She later identified him and filed a report with the police. For various reasons this became a big, divisive issue in the little community where we lived (never mind the details right now) and it caused Wife a lot of grief. Most everybody we knew congratulated her on her courage, but soon added, “Don’t you know better than to confront a burglar?” But Wife stuck to her guns. At one point I was talking with Wife’s mother, who was still alive back then, about how very difficult the whole situation had been for Wife, and how she refused to make things easier by just backing away from it. Her mother sighed ruefully, but with obvious pride in her voice, and said, “You know, Hosea, it’s that righteous indignation. The whole family suffers from it sumthin’ terrible.”
In every school where Wife has ever taught, she has been an instantly polarizing figure. She accepted no standard but the best. And whenever a school accepted less than that – cutting class time to make room for extracurricular activities, or nudging up the star quarterback’s grades so he didn’t lose his eligibility – Wife was incapable of keeping her mouth shut. As a result, she could bring out in the open – as a newcomer – tensions that had been submerged among the faculty for years. During her first year at every new school she ever joined, she became a fault line. Invariably the faculty would polarize into those who supported Wife and those who opposed her. The irony is that her idealism sounded arrogant to those who didn’t want to be held accountable to it, but she never meant it arrogantly. When an opponent would derisively challenge her that she wanted everyone else to be just like her, she would reply in all innocence, “Oh no, not at all.” She was all too aware of where she fell short of the ideals she supported, and she wanted the school to aspire to far better than that!
Wife is – or can be – astonishingly empathetic.
I have often said, with only slight overstatement, that Wife can find something to discuss with anybody. It’s true that I’ve also said sometimes she can be tone deaf about what is the right thing to say; but that she can get a conversation going with anybody at all – that she can, in fact, find something that she and the other person have in common, as a point of personal connection, regardless of who it is – this is by itself remarkable.
She is even better when it comes to understanding pain. Maybe – probably – it is because she has been in so much pain herself, over the course of her life; but whatever the reason, she has a profound intuitive understanding of suffering, even in perfect strangers. Wife can talk to anyone about their problems.
One ironic consequence of this talent is that back when she was a teacher, for all her idealism about standards, her A students were rarely her favorites. Her A students, after all, came at her from a position of strength; as a result, all they ever encountered were her strengths in turn, and they all tended to think of her as a demanding, aggressive bitch. But the students who came to her (initially) asking for mercy on an assignment, because of problems external to the school that blocked their ability to focus on schoolwork – the students who lived in gang territory, and stayed up every night fearing that their older brothers could be killed; the students who had to fend for themselves when they got home, because the parents were separated or bankrupt or alcoholic or dead – these students found in Wife (sometimes to their great surprise) an ocean of boundless compassion. She would talk with them for hours after school to give whatever advice she could, and to lend a soft shoulder when advice was no longer possible. And she would ignore the persistent reprimands from her Principals that “Once 3:00 pm rolls around, these kids are no longer our problem until tomorrow morning. Send them away!”
Even now, sick as she is, Wife volunteers on a “prayer line”. Twice a week, she logs into a system that routes phone calls to her (along with other volunteers), a system kind of like the old Dial-a-Prayer except that the caller can explain his problems and ask for a particular kind of prayer. Wife is forbidden (for legal and policy reasons) to give concrete advice; but she listens to the callers pour out their hearts, and then she tries to shape the prayer in a way that she thinks will help them in the right direction. After her shift is done, she can be cynical (even bitchy) about the theology of the organization which sponsors this service; she can get tired of the fellow who calls every single week to ask for a prayer that he win the lottery. But every week there is someone whose story touches her deeply, and whom she tries to touch in turn during the five minutes she is allowed to spend with him.
There is more, but this will do for now.
In any event, the bottom line is – has always been – that Wife is the most remarkable woman I have ever met. Every so often, when she frustrates or angers me past endurance, I have to pause and remember why I married her. And when I think of all these things, I sigh and reflect that – even if I had known just how high the cost was going to be – I probably would have decided to pay it anyway, to keep her from getting away. Young romantic love disdains to measure how heavy burdens are, before taking them on. And I suppose this is a good thing.
