My wife is a midwife. I’ve never met anyone who loves her job more than my wife. When she delivered her first baby, we were dating. That day she spent the night with me. She wouldn’t talk about anything but babies. How fragile, how sweet, how innocent and the blessing of their first cry.

I thought she wanted one for herself but “she told me, “You see them dry. I’m only telling you the behind-the-scenes story so you learn.”

The day she resumed work after our honeymoon, she delivered three babies. Two boys and a girl. When she returned from work she told me, “It’s a sign. We’ll have three in the same order. A girl. The test can be boys.”

When we eat, it’s about babies. When we sleep it’s about babies. When we wake up, it’s about a mother whose baby wasn’t feeling well. She’ll rush to the hospital as if she is missing a flight to an important meeting.

One day she came home in the evening with tears stained face. She threw herself on the couch and started crying. She had lost a baby—the first to die in her hands.

She was inconsolable, like the baby passed through her own cervix. I said my sorry but it didn’t help. She was in the chair when I was going to sleep. For a week and some days, she denied me sex, affection and everything that made our marriage a home. She prayed for the mother who lost her child. She called to say sorry as if it was her fault.

I love how she loves her job but it makes me scared. That her job will determine the temperature of our marriage, our home and the love we share as a young couple. “You’re not your job. Learn to take yourself out of your job,” I told her. She answered, “You won’t understand.”

Is it love for babies or love for her job, I don’t know. We are yet to make our own babies. At this point, I know once we start having babies, my position in this home as the first to be loved would be lost. The babies will take over and it will be all about them. I should be pleasantly scared.

She Took My ATM And Stole Money From My Account

She’s out in a village working. I picked up a book she left in the drawer. It contains countless names written in blue ink. They are not numbered. The last page of the book has two names. She wrote them in red ink. I think they are the names of the babies she had delivered. The red ones couldn’t make it, I guess. But I’m wondering, did she invent names for them or it’s from the parents of the kids?

When she tells me she loves me, it sounds vague. I hope one day she tells me, “I love you more than I love my job.”

That will be more meaningful.

— Arthur

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