Where MrsRW Has Been Hiding

Everywhere I go it's the same thing - "we're tired of your shtick, where's your wife?" It never fails. She drops out of sight for a while and I start getting the emails... "whadja do to her, you MEANIE?" I tell ya I don't get any respect.

Well the plain fact is that while I've been off dreaming away in wonderland, making goslings in the air with my cigar smoke and generally goofing off with my life for the last year or two, happily drifting without so much as a plan or a goal or... er... any use either... actually... MrsRW has been off working and networking and becoming the chief breadwinner around here. I am... as it were... being carried.

Not that I have any complaints. I am nothing if not a practical man. This honcho-macho crap about how the MAHN must be the major income and the MAHN gets the bacon and if your wife makes more than the MAHN you, as a MAHN, are of little MAHNliness is a lot of... well... crap. This is 2008 almost 9. It's a new world.

And starting in mid January it will be a new world for MrsRW as well, as she got word yesterday that a consultant's position she applied for with a national company has been offered to her, along with what would amount to something like an immediate 20-22% raise in pay. As in - for starters.

While I've been traipsing around the blogohexadehydrationsphere adding useless little comments here and there, sending off poorly conceived and even worse-executed "literature" (coughcough hack wheeze) for consideration to agents and publishers who are NOT impressed, dreaming up great big important blog posts that have little to do with anybody or anything anyone cares about, and kind of puttering around the house eating bon bons and wearing my big pink fluffy slippers - MrsRW has been taking what amounts to, basically, an associate's degree and almost twenty years of experience in her field - through various positions that give her a unique perspective in the health care field - and forging ahead with her professional career like a responsible adult human being who actually matters is supposed to be doing.

She's on the board of her professional association, has given speeches and presentations, created the system her present hospital currently employs as a major part of its income stream (which, since it is a Catholic Charities hospital turns NO ONE away and can afford now to do that better), and will now be doing major consulting work on a national scale.

It's going to mean a lot of travel for her, and that's going to be the rough part for both of us - but there's no telling where this leads to after that. Her resourceful care and talent for marshaling her time, resources and intelligence - plus the fact that she's the one usually in charge of things around here anyhow - will put her in good shape for the challenges. And her daughters and I are very proud of her, and love her very much.

When she graduated high school she was an 'A' student - in fact an "Illinois State Scholar" recognized student. Anything she wanted to do, or any school she wanted to go to, would have found an easy reason to accept her. Instead, because of her family situation, she had to not go to college and instead get a job checking people out at a local chain grocery store so she could afford to move out of that house ASAP. What a waste. Then, after we re-met and married and our daughters were born and started school, she maintained her 40-hour a week job and went to nursing school at night. She flew through that, got hired as a nurse, discovered a skill for the admin side, varied her experiences in case management and the like, and eventually became a manager in a major Chicago-area hospital. Now this. Well it's about time the world recognized her. She got - as far as I'm concerned - a bad break finishing high school. And this amounts to vindication.

Her daughters and I are exceedingly proud of her.

And I can afford an extra box of bon bons every week now!