Its a Thursday afternoon, toward the end of an unusually rainy May. Last year at this time our family was fresh off a plane from Jersey and we were embraced by lovely blue skies dotted with puffy white clouds. This spring has been a little different. Whereas we had summer days in February, May has been an onslaught of cold rains, punctuated by arbitrary patches of blue, with concurrent, literally out of the blue hail. Today has been the first pretty day in a while.
Today I get to do something uncannily normal: attend an elementary school function for our oldest – WITH my husband. It’s daughter’s end of the year party, which is held early, due to the teacher’s upcoming foot surgery, which is complicated enough to warrant miss the last two weeks of school and being off her feet all summer. A sub will see the kids through the last two weeks of the academic year. It’s the first time in a long time that we’ve gotten to go to one of her things as a couple. Most of them coincide with when Daddy is on call. The one other time he’s come to one a thing since internship started, he swore up and down the wazoo (whatever the wazoo is,) that he’d be home by 6:30, to pick us so we could go as a family, in time for our daughter to get there by 6:45, which is when the teacher expected her in the dressing room for the 2nd grade play. My Love (though I didn’t call him that on the evening in question,) arrived 45 minutes late, with no phone call and twenty reasons why, until it was too late, he really thought he could get out on time. During that 45 minutes, of course I had to take the kids on my own, not knowing what was gong on. It was that time of the month, to add insult to injury. I was so mad I made him sit separately from me when he finally arrived.
I keep learning again and again that if you choose to hold expectations of life, then your happiness will be dictated by luck and a plethora of capricious influences outside your control. I keep learning this lesson over and over again because of two annoyingly simple and painful words: Unfair, and Promise. Immediately these two words put you at odds with other people, life and possible God. They even pit you against yourself, though whereas we tend to feel rage and self-pity when someone or something outside ourselves screws us, when we are unfair to ourselves or break our own promises, the emotion we typically feel is guilt. Lovely. Unhelpful.
With fortune on our side today, this elementary school function t is actually fun. My Love and I walk across the grass from car to classroom with linked arms and enter portable 2. It’s cool to see our oldest girl in her “other” environs; to observe her cruising around the room arm-in-arm with her best friend; then to our 2nd grader sitting at her work table (albeit eating pizza and popcorn instead of working on class assignments,) and to watch her reaction when a boy offers her his crackers (something between polite disdain and innocent amusement.) When the party winds down, we thank her wonderful teacher. In the course saying goodbye to a fellow parent, I mention all the fantastic qualities of this fine educator and how perfect she is and then casually say something about how our daughter Nika said that while she’ll miss her teacher, the sub gives longer recess. At that moment, As fate would have it, at that very moment, the teacher walks right by. I’m fairly certain she heard only the last bit. Food in mouth. Foot in mouth. And off we go to pick our little ones from preschool.
In a few short hours, my Love will be back at work for the night.
Life of An Intern's Wife 