Someone asked me this week where my husband was. I said, “Oh, he’s in Egypt.” And her face changed. “Oh wow, how do you cope? How do you just let him travel like that?”
And I said, oh no, he’s travelled for work.
“Oh, okay,” she said. “That makes sense, then. You made it sound like he’d gone for fun.”
And I sat with that little sentence longer than she probably meant me to.
Because she was right. The way I’d said it: light, easy, no fuss had told a whole story before I’d given her a single fact. I hadn’t performed the worry she expected. I hadn’t reached for the script: how I’m holding the fort, how hard it is, how much I give while he’s away. I’d just said it plainly, because the truth is I don’t have a problem with it. He works. He travels. I trust him.
And somehow, trust read as something that needed explaining.
We got talking, and she told me her own version. Friends had asked where her husband was, and she’d said Nigeria and she could feel them deciding he was off enjoying himself. He wasn’t. He was there working. But the way a thing lands in someone else’s ears isn’t always the way it actually is.
Here’s what I keep turning over. My husband is the kind of man who makes the best of everything. He’ll find the joy in a work trip: the good meal, the good vibes, the moment of rest. And I love that about him. But I know that to someone watching from the outside, joy can look like indulgence. Ease can look like getting away with something.
And the only person standing between him and that assumption… is me. The way I say his name. The words I choose when he’s not in the room to choose them for himself.
We are our husbands’ narrators. Whether we mean to be or not. Every time we mention them to a friend, a sister, a stranger at an event, we hand over a version of them. And we get to decide whether that version protects him or quietly hands him to other people’s judgement.
I’m not talking about covering up what shouldn’t be covered. I’m not talking about performing a happiness you don’t feel. I’m talking about the small, daily choice to speak about the person you married with the same generosity you’d want them to use about you.
Proverbs 18:21 says: “Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruit.” I used to read that as something big and dramatic. I didn’t think it would reach something as ordinary as answering the question “where’s your husband?” But it does. Every single time.
So I’ll leave you with what I’m sitting with this week:
When you talk about your husband to other people when he’s not there to speak for himself, what version of him are you handing over? And is it the one you’d want him handing over of you?
If this is sitting close to home, hit reply and tell me. I read every one.
And today is Father’s Day. I want to say this gently to every wife and mother reading this: the way you speak about the father of your children, especially when he can’t hear you, is one of the most powerful gifts you can give him. Not just today. Every day.
To the fathers working hard, sometimes far from home, making the best of wherever they are, you are seen. You are known. And you are more appreciated than you might realise.
Source: TheCable Lifestyl
