The Movement You Need…

Things I don’t tell my wife

My wife, Shelley, is a kind person - perhaps the kindest soul I’ve ever gotten to know intimately. Frankly, we are very different people and she’s far more consistently pleasant than I am. I’m outgoing, gregarious and less even-tempered; she’s a reserved, consistent and calming influence on me. She’ll never be the one quick to shake the hand of every person in the room, but she’ll always be very observant and perceive a lot of things that I’ll miss. Her counsel is priceless to me, and as I write this I feel a bit guilty for not thanking her for it more often. Knowing her, being with her and growing with her has, I believe, made me a far better person than the one she met seven years ago.

I think it is our contrasting basic natures that feeds a lot of what I put into my writings in this blog and various other written forums in which I participate: She simply would rather not know about or discuss what we call current events in great detail. Too many of the reported artifacts and results of human nature we call “news” are off-putting to her. If the terrorist is in our neighborhood she wants to know about it, but if it involves clashes of civilizations in some distant sand-pit that have been going on since Abraham begat Ishmael and Isaac, I know to spare her the details.

Our commitment to each other, building our lives together and raising our daughter gives us plenty to talk about and work on as a couple and a family. We each bring our unique strengths to bear in rearing our daughter. For instance: Very soon, my wife will be the one most intimately informed about the daily details of our four-year-old’s school days; I’m already trying to make sure that Federal intrusions like the insipid “No Child Left Behind Act” don’t render her part of a generation in which all public school children are molded into equally inept imbeciles.

We’ll both be working toward the same ends by different means while sharing equally in Katie’s successes and disappointments. (Continued)

Tags: communications, current events, human nature, no child left behind act, Political Correctness