Vol. 99 - Thanks, Em.

A line-by-line reminder of just how much my wife does

First off, I want to thank everyone for all of your emails, messages, and offers of help about our house fire. It’s truly appreciated. Apologies if I didn’t reply to them all. We still have a ton on our plate. But things are moving and we hope to be back home mid-June.

Anyway, on to the story.

For reasons I can’t quite remember, I got a peek at my wife’s email inbox the other day. It was full of confirmations from the various delivery services and subscriptions we use, of reminders and forms for the summer camps she signed our kids up for, of flight confirmations, and of so many different things that keep so much of our lives on track. On top of that were all of the emails from our insurance agent, helping us navigate the next steps of getting back into our home after the fire we experienced.

And in that moment, I was able to see in very concrete terms just how much Emily does for our family.

Not that I needed the reminder. I’m acutely aware of the lengths my wife goes to to ensure that our lives run smoothly. But to see it all there in one place served as a visceral and visible reminder of what it takes to run a family, a line-item list of just how much Emily does for us.

The breakdown of our household labor often falls like this: Emily handles a lot of the administrative stuff that’s required to operate a family unit. She books camps and flights and makes sure our kids have a place to be during all of their teacher workdays throughout the year. She pays our bills. She acts as the point person for the nurses who take care of her father, who has lived under our care for the last seven years.

I, on the other hand, am in charge of keeping the things in and around our home up and running. I do the yardwork or hire a landscaper when my work is too busy. I change lightbulbs and fuses and filters. I make sure our two vehicles are properly maintained, changing the oil myself and scheduling bigger jobs at our local autoshop. And if I can’t handle certain things, whether due to time constraints or ineptitude, it’s my job to source, hire, and supervise people who can. More importantly, as we both work for ourselves, it’s my job to stay around the house and put my work on the backburner when those people—plumbers or HVAC or arborists—give those “sometime between eight am and six pm” windows.

It’s much easier to notice the things that I do. The lawn is mowed and our walkways are weeded. The dryer vent that was acting up has been fixed and the running toilet tank has gone silent. The dead branches hanging precariously over our driveway have been cut.

It’s harder to notice that those lights stay on because Emily pays the bills on time. It’s harder to remember, as I drop our kids off at the daycamp she booked, that she was the one at her computer the minute registration opened to make sure they had a spot. It’s hard to remember that the handymen keep coming back because Emily pays their invoices immediately.

I couldn’t do anything without my wife. But seeing it all right there in a series of unread emails made that fact all the more apparent.