Chuck: The Teaching Widow

Day 19:  Tell someone you know how grateful you are for the work they do. Share your story here.

My husband Chuck is a teaching widow.  

I come home from work and continue working til 10 or 11 every night.  He usually cooks and cleans and does laundry while I respond to student work, create learning opportunities, write or read or knit. Even when it doesn't look like I'm working, I am--running through scenarios, making lesson plans, thinking, thinking, thinking, and what-if-ing.  My mind is open 24/7 and working on hyperdrive. 

Every day, my German general husband organizes our son Tommy and I, two Scots-Irish layabouts. If we lived in medieval times, Tommy and I would be traveling bards and Chuck would be running a castle, if not a kingdom. He packs the swimming bag, he warms up my truck when it's cold, he tells me what to put on my calendar and when and where I need to be to pick up or drop off our super-busy boy.  

When he's not organizing us, Chuck is an active leader in the Boy Scout troop.  He is an unofficial leader of the 4H First Lego League group.  He devotes a serious amount of time to the activities that are closest to our boy's heart.  Last weekend he organized and supervised a weekend camping trip for the Boy Scout troop. He spent Friday-Sunday cooped up on the coldest weekend of the year with a large group of boys under age twelve. He even whittles silly totems for them.

In addition, we have numerous sheep, pigs, and horses who need tending.  He's responsible for that, too, attended to by both dogs who think he's the most amazing human on the planet.  Dogs usually have good judgment. I'm not even sure what he does all day out in the barns, but his to-do lists are miles long, and he is always behind. Last weekend, a snow fence appeared on the west boundary, and I didn't even notice it.

He works full-time as a loan officer with a local bank.  He manages the money and pays the bills. Even when I owe Amazon more than he likes for books for my students. And Tommy. And me.  Or Target for yet more bookshelves for the classroom.  It's embarrassing to add up what I spend out of pocket, but he understands my passion and respects my purpose.

He spoils me with homemade cookie dough, he listens when I'm rambling, and when I'm working late in my classroom, he usually shows up with pizza so we can still have a family dinner.  If I do any kind of domestic chore, he thanks me profusely. This is embarrassing to admit.

A mutual friend told him a year she wished she'd had an inspirational English teacher like me, but she wondered what the cost was.  To my husband.  To my son.  To me.  The compliment was so heart-warming, but the cost?  That gave me serious pause.

The cost is high, my friends.

I've seen the investment pay off again and again in my students. But I hope the investment pays off for my son and husband.

Chuck is steady and predictable and reliable.  Yet after 24 years together, he's still capable of surprising me.  And he's still making me laugh. "Thank you" hardly seems sufficient recompense for 

all he does.  I am reminded of a line in the spoken word poem "Origin Story" by Phil Kaye and Sarah Kay that best encapsulates how I feel, "I have seen the best of you, and the worst of you. And I choose both."

Thank you, lovey, for choosing both.

June 21, 1996 on Mom's front porch in Storm Lake, Iowa