My wife and I have had a 20 year battle of the brains. The battlefield ranges from game boards to television shows to conversations. In the game of one upmanship I always seem to come out on top, but this is due to my superior skill in being able to conjure up points of argument for anything. My wife, on the other hand, lets me win many of these battles due to her kind and caring nature.
As many of you know we married quite young by today’s standards. I was a man of the world 18 and she was a mature 17. Or so we thought. Neither of us graduated from high school through the normal processes.
I learned early in our marriage that my wife was smart, but reserved. She allowed others to grab the limelight, while she was content listening. She started to blossom in her intelligence when she started college. Since she was in a very accelerated two year nursing program, she had to learn fast and learn well. She did both. Never one to care about grades, even I was impressed with the workload she was handling and the grades she earned. If you’ve taken anatomy you know that it goes past rote memorization. My wife aced this.
While not finishing the nursing program, she did go back and attain a degree in education. Oh, man, that was a tough road for her, but she did it. And she did it well. She graduated Summa Cum Louda and was awarded a prestigious student recognition award. Amazing.
Still, it’s not this accomplishment that makes her smart. Nope. It’s the day to day smarts, the smarts that are lean, forceful and impacting. She continually reads, listens and goes out of her way to broaden her learning. I’ll find her listening to an audio book on spirituality while watching her brother’s kids, but then later that night she’ll lay in bed and read a book on home improvement.
And she doesn’t laud this intelligence or smarts over you. This is a huge factor for her as a person. She’s quietly smart, yet when the time comes, she’s right there. I can’t tell you the times I’ve been surprised by her ability to solve a problem based on knowledge I had no idea she owned.
The best example of this happened when our daughter started high school. She was having a tough time adjusting to the classes of high school, so we offered to help tutor her. We broke my daughter’s list of classes into two; one for my wife and one for me. Of course, my list included soft courses, courses you could bullshit your way through, while the wife’s included the hard ones that, you know, you actually needed to know something to pass.
One night I walked into the kitchen and there is my wife explaining an algebra process to my daughter. My wife, 8 years removed from college, still knew about algebra and how to do it. Myself, almost 20 years out of high school, knew how to spell algebra. Amazing.
Our marriage benefits from her intelligence. Yeah, it’s the hard line benefits such as not making bad decisions, but it’s also aligned with enrichment, challenge and fun. Without my wife’s intelligence it’d be boring.
Today’s Gift: We’ve discussed learning new language in the past, so I am going to enroll us in Spanish clases at the local community college. I can think of no better way to appreciate her intelligence that to hear it in a second language.