My wife has been studying like crazy for the past few weeks. She is a masters degree student at TU. Whenever she has to prepare for her exams, she has many major panic attacks. Yes, there are folks like her who suffer from ailments during exam time while people like me go to the exam center fully expecting to ace the exam even though deep inside we know that we have not even covered half the textbook.
Yes, you can call me an optimist. My wife worries more about how she might fail rather than just doing her best no matter what. I’m the kind of person who buys the door prize tickets at a party and expects to win free air tickets to Dubai for two. I will still have high hopes of bagging the main prize until the announcer walks up the stage. But after that, I won’t be the lucky winner but will still go home happy dreaming about what could have been had I won the prize.
I tell my wife not to worry and just study and to do her best. But my wife doesn’t listen to me. Well, she never listens to me. I think she thinks that it is a wife’s job to act like you are listening to your husband but then you do your own thing. But if I don’t listen to her and do what she tells me to do in less than sixty seconds, then she is on fire and you know that forest fire will take more than a day or two to be extinguished.
My wife is what you would call an ‘early to bed and early to rise’ person. She starts to go into sleep mode by 9 pm and even an earthquake fails to wake her up after she is into deep sleep. But I’m more of an evening person. I have to watch some TV shows till midnight and then only I start getting dizzy and fall asleep and if the water tanker shows up at 6 am, I’m up and ready to start my day or else the world may end at 10 in the morning and I may not even know about it.
But when exam time is here, my wife forces herself to stay awake till midnight to work on her textbooks. It’s not easy for her because she is not a night owl like me. I make her some coffee. But she doesn’t like the Nescafe stuff. She only wants the Korean 3-in-1 mix stuff which I hate. Nevertheless, I do what a good husband should do – support my wife by making her coffee and taking a plate full of shortbread cookies to her work station.
Our guest bedroom now looks like an office of some American TV series dealing with criminal investigations. She has her notes plastered all over the wall like a detective looking for clues. I tell her that we really don’t need any wallpaper for our rooms in the future if she does plan to do a PhD or pursue multiple advanced degrees. She tells me that she has a lot to study and I should not come to the room and disturb her. So, I go downstairs and start my late-night TV watching session. I change channels every two minutes so that I can watch Jimmy Kimmel, The Big Bang Theory and some Chinese flick with English voice-overs in an hour.
My wife then comes downstairs and is mad at me again for watching too much TV. I tell her that I’m just supporting her mission to ‘stay awake’ till midnight and she should be thankful that I’m such a supportive husband. She then turns off the TV, turns off the lights and is fast asleep. I have no option but to turn on the TV again and lower the volume so that only I can hear what the Chinese Kung-Fu master is telling his disciples. Yes, you can learn a lot of stuff from these Chinese movies. They may seem like another kung-fu flick for most of the folks out there but the English dialogues at the bottom are really deep and if you are a motivational speaker, you should just take notes and use it for your class the next day.
I love my wife. I help her with her notes but sometimes, she goes a little too far by asking me to go through her textbook and then writing a business plan for her class. I tell her that it’s not a good idea to do someone else’s homework because then she wouldn’t learn anything. She tells me that I should not complain and just do it because she is busy with other assignments. After all, a good husband helps his wife with anything.
But I then act like I’m not listening and go do my own thing. A day later, she goes into the ‘silent mode’ and stops talking to me. I then figure out that I’m the fool and I should help her out. Despite the realization, I still refuse to do it but tell her that I will sit beside her and start blurting out whatever comes into my mind and she should start jotting down my words of wisdom.
She happily obliges while I feel like I’m the new-age Swami who is preaching about world peace and some reporter is writing down each and every word I say. Oh, the things a husband has to do when his wife has exams!
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