Valentine Redux

The marriage, the children, the friends, the relatives, the career on hold, the backlog of phone messages and emails.  I’m a newcomer to neither the parental juggling act nor the checklist of solutions: get a therapist, get a Blackberry, declare a date night, vouchsafe yourself time alone, use Fresh Direct, order from Ollie’s.  All well and good, but what I seek is harder to recover.

My husband and I met in 2000. I worked, earned good money, biked three or four times a week, filled remaining leisure time with museum exhibits.  Back then we took daytrips to Philadelphia and upstate New York and vacationed in Europe to, well, visit more museum exhibits.  But what I remember most from that time: I read at least two newspapers a day, cover to cover.  The Times and the Wall Street Journal.  I could quote stock prices—heck, I could quote CEOs and Alan Greenspan verbatim.  I could name obscure African capitals and European prime ministers.  When corporate executives were hauled off in cuffs, I understood the esoteric financial shenanigans they were accused of.  Glass-Steagall Act, Enron, high tech gizmos, violent Hindu-Muslim conflict on the Indian subcontinent, wrinkles in the Oslo Accord, bad behavior from Silvio Berlusconi?  I was your girl.  IPO and UNMOVIC were not alphabet soup to me.  I felt, in a word, smart.

Then suddenly, I didn’t.  After the birth of our third child I stopped working.  The first thing to go was quality reading time, and when there was time to spare, I had no attention span, I could just about handle perusing a mail order catalog.  I needed an atlas to spell Herzegovina.  My husband would come home from work and ask, “Did you hear?  Sandra Day O’Connor retired!” and “Did you read the David Brooks editorial?  Brilliant!”  Me?  Not so much.

But God bless him, my husband has found a solution, and with it perhaps a way back to the conversations we used to have about current events, politics, Middle East history and social economics: he emails me all the articles he thinks I might have read if I were The Old Me, articles he knows I’ll appreciate and that we might even want to discuss.  He knows I can’t read a whole newspaper, that I don’t even have time to scour one for the best nuggets.  So as he reads the Times online during a break at work, he sends me just the tidbits it takes for me to “get it.”  Some wives get Valentines, but I think my husband’s messages are—dare I say it?—romantic.  They tell me he has not given up on my brain cells yet.  So neither do I.