20140701.0750

Today is my wife's birthday. What number birthday it is does not matter, for to my eyes, she has changed in appearance only insofar as she has grown yet more lovely. Hell, I show more gray in my hair than she does; I have diminished more over the nearly nine years I have known her than she has. Her sunny disposition accounts for much of her continued vitality; she routinely displays a youthful exuberance I have long tended to deny myself, so it should be no surprise that she retains more outward youth than I do, despite my years-later birth. She certainly retains an inner youth that is a delight to see and to be around.

That youthfulness does not come at the cost off naïveté, however. My wife is an intelligent, perceptive person upon whose insights I rely (and in which I ought to trust more than I do); she is an adept scholar and thinks along paths that end up being better to tread than those many others seek. So she is not fooled by the kind of thinking that informs certain recent judicial decisions--and she is not fooled into thinking that online slacktivism will be of any effect in righting situations that are wrong. And aside from political concerns, she is a skilled teacher and reviewer from whose oversight efforts many people would certainly benefit.

Further, if I may range into saying so without being thought to reinforce heteronormative gender roles as part of a phallogocentric assertion of patriarchal hegemony, she is remarkably nurturing not only to her own family (whom she recently traveled to the Texas Hill Country to help) and to me (she bolsters my fragile and unsteady sense of self-confidence frequently), but also to Ms. 8. The child's delivery was...unusual, and her first few weeks of life were not the easiest, and my wife did most of the work of caring for Ms. 8 through it. She did so with a good will and cheer, not approaching it as a heavy obligation to be borne but as a delight--and she still maintains the sense of delight (somehow), smiling even at our daughter's screaming and at changing diapers that seem to defy reason in their contents.

I am lucky to know her and more lucky to be part of her life. That she has long consented to have me with her has been the second-best thing to happen to me (the best thing, of course, being the arrival of Ms. 8, but that was itself an outgrowth of my wife's agreement to have me with her as she does). We argue from time to time, of course, as any two people who are both thinking will, but she is usually right, and I am lucky to be able to learn from her not just better reasoning and better ideas, but how to be a better person. And even in my folly, she sees in me something worth loving and loves it. For those reasons and many others, I love her, and I am greatly pleased to be with her on her birthday once again.