Sometimes I feel guilty mentioning The Wife in my blog. (Her pseudonym reflects what my grandfather used to call my grandmother, to the amusement of both. It also fits nicely with “The Boy” and “The Girl.”) I worry that she comes off in my writing as little more than a foil. She's much more than that. It's hard to do her justice in prose.
There's a Liz Phair lyric that comes close: “cool, tall, vulnerable, and luscious.” She's complicated: a girly girl who isn't above South Park, an MBA who chose to stay home with the kids once she could, a good apolitical Irish Catholic girl with a spotless condo who married a skeptical lefty Unitarian Scandinavian slob living in a grad student ghetto. She went to a college where the two official religions were Catholicism and basketball – not necessarily in that order – and she married me, who is completely hopeless at both.
She puts up with a lot. Her memory for names, birthdays, gifts, clothes, dates, pictures, and the details of social life is astonishing. Mine is, um, well, I mean well. She simply doesn't age, which I find both inexplicable (two kids!) and kind of cool. She tolerates my perverse pleasure in making The Boy laugh so hard at dinner that he spits food. (The same holds true when he's swishing water after brushing his teeth.) She tolerates my bizarre tastes – I think she'll get time off purgatory for every weird-ass jazz concert I've dragged her to – and should win some sort of 'good sport' award for enduring the geek/twin-language conversations my brother and I have.
She's a great Mom. After a few days at home, I have to either get out or commit mass murder. She's been there for several years now, and the kids are great. That ain't easy.
She's also smokin' hot. Nothing wrong with that, I say. Nothing at all.
Happy Valentine's, honey.
