Rochelle has been hinting lately that she doesn’t feel she is talked about enough in our blog. Her cues have been subtle, but, thankfully, I have a fairly acute sensitivity to these types of things. It’s almost a sixth sense.
So, when my wife makes a vague comment like, “You don’t ever talk about me in our blog. You should write about some of the things that I do.” I innately know what her underlying thoughts about the situation are. What can I say, it’s a gift.
So, about my wife…
My wife puts up with a lot. First and foremost on the list, of course, she puts up with me. This is by no means an easy task. I am one of those people who loves taking on new projects before necessarily finishing old ones, which, I’ve been told, can be kind of difficult to live with.
I am also prone to sporadic bouts of whininess, occasional outbursts of stupidity, an irrational degree of confident optimism, and sometimes, every once in a while, on the rarest of occasions, I can be a little, teensy-weensy bit stubborn.
My wife takes the roughly four ingredients that we have in our pantry and makes meals, from scratch, without any fresh ingredients, that would put restaurants to shame. And she does it almost every day, because our 12 volt refrigerator is the size of a picnic cooler (technically, I think it IS a picnic cooler), and we can’t easily store leftovers. She also makes all of our bread and yogurt (again, from scratch).
My wife only wears three outfits, even though she really, really, REALLY wants to wear more. The three outfits she wears are frumpy, even though she really, really, REALLY wants to wear something cute.
She does this because it is customary for women in PNG to wear shirts that are a cross-breed of circus tents and tank tops, and because the people we live with only own a few pairs of clothes themselves, she doesn’t want to flaunt our resources in front of them. Somehow, while doing this, she is still able to look really, really, REALLY beautiful.
My wife uses a twin-tub washing machine to do our laundry every day. She has to do it every day because:
A.) We are each only wearing three sets of clothes, so we need to keep at least one outfit clean at all times.
B.) All the males in her nuclear family are sweaty, disgusting slobs.
My wife does all of those things I just mentioned AND nurses an infant, makes crafts with our toddlers, reads books with all three kids in her lap, cleans up our house CONSTANTLY (three little boys, and one big one, makes tidiness nigh on impossible), diagnoses and treats a continual barrage of tropical maladies, and is somehow able to make time to work at learning an unwritten tribal language.
My wife, though not always in the foreground of blog posts, is the reason that I have been able to move my family into the middle of the jungle. She’s the reason I’m able to spend hours out in the village with our people and working in my office.
If I’m ever able to actually learn this language and play a role in seeing a church raised up among the Iski people, then it will be in large part due to my wife. Because she is amazing.
