My wife accepted 11 years of education before she graduated from a nurse-training school. And she had been exposed to this or that new idea successively as anyone of us. However, her notions about love and marriage remain pleasantly traditional. Although she told me before wedding, that if I should loss interest in her some day in our future marriage life, I was free to leave; and after that, I often “threaten” her: “I swear I’ll sell you if you go on like this!” I bet she has never imagined her husband could be another man. Because for her, once we got married, she’ll have to live through her life with me, or to die. It’s fortunate that I hold the same firm belief about love and marriage. Naturally, we enjoy security - the very foundation of all happiness I believe. Neither is it a surprise that we’re still in deep love after many years of marriage. For me, my wife is not another person, but another part of me, unless I’m asked such questions as, who do you think is the most important person in your life? I hand her all I earned, leave her to handle whatever she’d like to handle, obey any sensible order from her, and lay my greatest emphasis on her happiness. She goes even further than I have done. Though we eat together, sleep together, and spend most of our free time together, it seems as if she could never walk when out with me but she clasps my hand (I often refuse, lest we’ll become too conspicuous). Every day for these years, she runs, instead of walks, home, once work is over. Why? “To see you!” she says. And almost every minute without me may result in her uneasiness. Just a few weeks ago, at the hospital where she works, she was required to fill in a patient’s name. She did. But it turned out to be mine. This caused a heartily laugh from her colleagues.
Life is precious. But my wife’s life doesn’t seem to belong to her. Apart from work, she devotes almost all her rest time to my son and me.
She serves as a nurse in the operating room of a hospital, which is a big and busy one, about 15 minutes’ walk from our home. She often has to help with an operation continuously for hours or with one operation after another for a whole day. And, as accidents and bursts of illness choose no certain time to happen, she will be from time to time called up from her dreams in midnight and then she hurried into the cold light of lonely street lamps. However, all these wouldn’t prevent her from doing the never-ending housework and taking care of us. She urges almost all the housework on her, especially washing. She is an extremely clean woman. She refuses to use the washing machine, for she thinks it can’t wash things clean enough. If there’s something she has no time to do for the moment, she will ask me to leave it for her to do later (usually, I won't, though). No piece of cloth in our house may be left unwashed, no furniture unwiped, no floor unmopped, no quilt unsunned. While her work at the hospital can be said to be her obligation, her labor at home is not. Aren’t there so many couples arguing fiercely about who should wash the dishes after dinner?
There were times when I saw her standing before the sink washing clothes patiently. Something hard to tell in my heart moved, and my eyes became wet. In the splashing of the water, her youth and life diminished little by little, going to us. Yet she is totally unware of that, or she doesn’t care at all!
My wife looks after me as a baby. I often lose in my own thought, paying no attention to what happened around and always forgetting. So often, she has to leave me a note, but she can’t simply put it on the table, for I may neglect the table. She found that I couldn’t live for a minute without a cup of tea, so she puts it under the cup that I inevitably will use to make tea. I often wake up with no idea of what I should wear and where I can find them, so she has to get always those clothes ready the night before and put them within my reach on the bedside cupboard. Whenever I’m not feeling well, she would bring home medicine immediately and then instruct me to take. But that’s not the end. She will have to remind me every time when the time is due to take the next dose.
Once I got a foot disease. She suggested that it might be helpful to wash with tincture of iodine - a medical substance that everybody needs some when wounded. Though I can entirely wash by myself, she preferred to squat before me, taking my foot in hands and washing and drying, again and again, while I lay in the sofa comfortably…too much to tell. I wish all wives loved so much their husbands and all husbands loved so much their wives!
There’s a last thing I’d like to tell you. She’s quite pretty, belonging to the kind that husbands will be proud to take outside and meet people. In fact, when we got married, together with her came almost a drawer of letters from boys, including one written in blood. Most of these boys she had not even met before. She once joked that if I got married with her, I would become famous, I did become, to some extent…
That’s my wife, a strong support of my life. I was born unfortunately a spiritually lost boy. It is she that has warmed my icy heart little by little; it is her natural and genuine way of living that has taught me how to live; it is her love that shown me what is love and how to love.
