Rhymes With Life

There is a movie called Frantic in which Harrison Ford starred as a husband desperately searching the alleys and apartments of Paris for his missing wife. He’s intent, rumpled, equal parts angry and confused. He doesn’t speak French but he tries urgently to get the police to believe him, believe that his wife wouldn’t just disappear. They shrug, roll their eyes, imply that wives do this sort of thing all the time. Especially in Paris. It is a good movie, or seemed so to me at the time as I watched with my then-boyfriend while Harrison raced through the streets and seedy bits of Paris in the company of a punk ingénue.

As I began to write the paragraph above I paused, fingers poised above the keyboard, tipped back my head and yelled up the stairs:

“What was that movie with Harrison Ford in Paris?”

Needing no further explanations for our now mutual vocabulary, my husband seamlessly answered: “Frantic”.

When we saw the movie, I was much closer to the ingénue than I was to wife. Or at least styled myself so. What struck me most about the movie, despite being in the early days of a relationship with my funky rose tinted glasses firmly in place, was the way Harrison Ford spoke, the words “my wife.” Whether he was imploring, insisting or snarling, the emphasis was on the word wife.  He filled the word with such value and integrity, such unshakable faith, that for the first time I heard “wife” not as the butt end of a joke, not as an apron clad cliché, but as a word that could mean an entire life to another person. 

Now, yelling in a less than charmant fashion up the stairs, I am decidedly a wife. We have made a whole world together, my husband and I, and yet still I struggle with my relationship to that word and to the shadow it casts when I identify myself as such.

The intervening years have seen the rise and fall of Martha Stewart and sarcastic apron-clad 50’s housewives on notepads and fridge magnets. My favourite of these says “Make your own damn dinner”. It is a strange age for housewifery: we are expected to be both domestic goddesses and ass-kickers. If, however, we are too much of either, we become somehow ridiculous.

Too much domesticity: Martha.

Too much ass-kickery: Hilary.

The odd thing is, I find the word husband easy to say. This man I chose. This responsible father, committed husband, this man with whom I have chosen to share love, life, and dirty laundry is all easily contained in the word husband.

Wife sounds diminutive. Like something you might swat.

    Dictionary (Webster Encyclopedic) for wife: [A.Sax: a woman, a wife; root doubtful] a woman of             female of any age who is untied to a man in wedlock. Compounds: ale-wife, fish-wife. 

    Dictionary (Webster’s Encyclopedic) for husband: [A.Sax the master of the house, from Icel.] the             master of the house, a man joined to a woman by marriage

Master of the house as a definition seemed outdated. My dictionary is dated MCMLII, so I tried the new 2007 Penguin Thesaurus, eds. Fergusson, Manser, Pickering and found:

    Husband: married man, spouse, partner, mate, consort, groom, old man, other self, lord and master         – what?!!!

Irked, I quickly turned the pages and found –

    Wife: spouse, mate companion, other half, better half, old woman, little woman, (wait, it gets better!)         missus, ‘er indoors, bride, helpmate, squaw

Slammed the book shut. Fumed.  Briefly considered designing a t-shirt with ‘ER INDOORS emblazoned across the front. Above broomsticks crossed like pirate swords.

Seems we have not yet defined the female side of the domestic equation with any dignity.

I have decided Harrison said it best.

Wife.

Rhymes with life.

This is an original post for CanadaMomsBlog. EarnestGirl also writes about life and motherhood at The West Coast Chronicles.