How to Be a Good Wife

I’m on my way to Montreal today and N was driving me to the airport.

“Are you sure we are going in the right direction?” I asked him. “Because I’m not recognizing this landscape.”

“I’m following the GPS,” he said. “It’s got to be right.”

We kept going, and now I was really not recognizing the landscape.  There was an enormous industrial facility to the left of us, and there is no way I could have missed it on my many trips to this airport. I’m obsessed with factories and never fail to notice them.

“This looks really unfamiliar,” I told N.

“Yes,” he said. “But I trust this GPS.”

Finally,  the trusty GPS informed us that we had reached our destination. We stopped and realized we were nowhere near the airport. In fact, we’d been driving for 40 minutes in the exact opposite direction.

Now in many families, this would have devolved into eye-rolling, frustrated sighing, sarcastic comments, snapping and the hateful “Why do you always have to” melodrama.

Not so in the Clarissa household, however. I’m sitting there thinking, “Let this be the greatest hardship I ever experience.” So what if I miss the plane? I’ll get on the next one. Or maybe I won’t get to travel at all today.  None of this is worth making the person I love suffer.

I grew up in a family where every little mishap was a reason to bark, feel aggrieved, and start a scene. So I taught myself to be different because life doesn’t deserve to be wasted on yelling and eye-rolling.

So we set out in the opposite direction feeling happy and content. And then I got an email saying that my flight was being massively delayed anyway.