My Mac Wife

It’s true. I write about the Mac, but my wife lives it. It is in every part of her day. She is a teacher, and also a student getting her final degree, so her trusty iBook goes with her everywhere, and often when she is home, she is in front of her new iMac, working away.

Being a teacher means long hours, full weekends, and often little sleep. Grades have to be entered, and tests and homework needs to be graded, curriculums written, and so on. But, she loves her work, and I am happy that she does. She excels in about everything she does, and she is also about the most organized person I know.

Not that I am prejudiced or anything, you understand.

On the Mac, I use a word processing program, a browser and some games. Once in a while I do a little HTML coding, or use an illustration program or Photoshop.

My wife however, makes excellent use of iDVD, iMovie, iTunes, iPhoto, iWeb, InDesign and GradeKeeper, as well as Excel, Word, and a host of other apps. She is also a talented and award winning photographer, and she employs those photos of hers very well in accenting her media presentations.

Its fun to watch her quickly create a class website in iWeb, where her sixth grade students can go to get their assignments and check on stuff for class. Or she will make a quick DVD with photos from a class outing, along with music, to show at parent’s night. LINK

I said she was organized, but not on her Mac. She never seems to put stuff in folders, and her desktop has over 200 documents and icons all over it. Her screen is completely full. However, she can always find anything right away, using Spotlight, so I guess a messy desktop on the Mac doesn’t matter that much.

She wasn’t always this way, however. When I first met her, nearly 30 years ago, she was a single mom, making it on her own, working in a county office, as a secretary. She didn’t do well in high school, and hated to study or read much, but she learned Shorthand in a secretarial school, and was quite adept at taking full annotated notes at the speed of speech.

When I met her, I knew she was very intelligent, and could do a lot more, but she did not believe in herself. She just never thought she could go to college, or take classes. It did not appeal to her because she thought it was all beyond her. She was a product of her generation and the school system.

But, because of my deafness, in 1990, she got an opportunity at the local community college to take an Adult Ed class in sign language. Who knew she would like it so much, and be so good at signing? She went on, taking more and more classes in American Sign Language, as well as English, History, Math and Algebra, and she soon got her AA degree.

Then she accepted a job at Cypress college, working as an adjunct with the large Deaf population there. By then, she was teaching sign language and interpreting for the deaf, and she was wonderful at it.

Me? I was the deaf one, and I also took classes in sign language, but I was never any good at it, and to this day my signing is rudimentary and minimal compared to hers.

We had a Mac back then – a MacII, brand new, with a 12-inch color monitor, which I used to create technical art for aerospace manuals and illustrations for court cases. My wife used a PC running the new Windows 3.02. It wasn’t that she didn’t like the Mac, but she was a Windows person, using the prehistoric Microsoft Office at her work and school. It was from her that I learned about all the horrors and pitfalls of Windows, and often had to come to her rescue when her crude computer lost her work.

Much later, quite on her own, she discovered that the Mac was not only much easier to use, but much more reliable, secure and productive. Somehow, she couldn’t learn that from me, a self-appointed Mac guru, writer and evangelist. Go figure.

But all those things are water under the bridge, and they don’t matter, really. When you love someone, those sorts of things are non-issues, aren’t they?

Later, when she was working at Pacific Christian College, a place that she respected and cared deeply for (and one where she coveted a place on their staff), she got the opportunity to complete her degree. It was something really new – a Degree Completion program, where students go one night a week, don’t take tests, and complete their Masters degree in a year and a half.

She liked it so much, and was so excited about it, that soon she had me signing up for it. My only ‘degree’ was from a local business college, in drafting, but with a couple of CLEP tests, and credit for years of work experience, I was in the program too.

So we both went to school together, one night a week, and we got our MBAs. What a kick! (Oh, she hated how I studied! She would study all night for class. Not me. I rarely cracked a book, but we both got the same top grades.) Once she graduated, she was able to be on the staff at that college, soon to be Hope International University. I said she was smart. She graduated Magna Cum Laude. I would have gotten that too, but I got really sick during the last few months, and missed out. But then I had the privilege of telling her what the Latin meant in her honorarium.

She went on with her education, of course, since it was sort of free (Federally funded student loans), and she is now in the process of completing her Doctorate in Education, as well as successfully completing her California teaching credentials, again with exemplary marks.

Me, I went on to get another MA, in early church history, which was really free to me because she worked at the college. I got it to help with my writing and research in history, which I also teach part time on line. I don’t just write about the Mac, you know.

It was during all this schooling that she learned to use the Mac. That was a tough thing, for I had to timeshare our aging MacII with her, but she wrote on it, both for school and for her own edification. She also explored MacroMind Director for animations and presentations. She is actually a much better writer than I am, but she rarely writes, since she is so busy teaching all the time.

But now she uses the Mac and nothing else. She has her own Macintosh. And I have mine.

Of course, there is much more to the story. My wife does not have a lot of self-esteem. It seems she never had much, from her troubled upbringing. She is smart and intelligent, but she doesn’t think that way about herself. She is beautiful, truly so, from her awesome blue eyes, to her showgirl legs. But she doesn’t see herself that way. She is much too critical of herself. Perhaps that is a failing in our culture today, where women are made to think of themselves and their bodies in a demeaning way, by every media and advertisement that seems to exist.

She is also like most every other woman, when compared to men. Life is tough, and I always talk about how we will be just fine, regardless of our sometimes dire circumstances (something about trusting in the Lord), and that we have always been well provided for, and will continue to be. But she has a hard time believing me.

Her faith is much different, and stronger in different ways. She anonymously provides food and clothing for her sometimes needy charges – those students whom she so loves. So you see, I talk about having faith, but she acts on it. Are all women this way?

She is also faithful in another way. Here is a woman who will never lie, nor will she ever leave me. I knew this of her from the beginning, for we were friends for a year before she got me under some mistletoe at a Christmas party.

Funny, that. After I kissed her, I never let her go, nor let her out of my sight. We were married five short weeks later, and we have always been together. It will be 28 years next March. And, yes, I am crazy in love with her, and am just as faithful to her as she is to me. What have I ever done to earn such a rare and wonderful treasure, I am sure I will never know. Just lucky, I guess.

A lot has happened over those years. Twelve years ago I contracted cancer, a slow growing one, and I have been in and out of chemo ever since, except for a year I took off to have open heart bypass surgery (a complication of the first heavy metal Cisplatin I was given). So I was forced to take an all too early retirement – something that is very hard to do when you have a strong work ethic, and have always been the breadwinner in the family. But then I found time to write, and I also found it is something I love to do.

My wife takes all these things a lot harder than I do. I am philosophical about it all, and sort of low key in how I handle and view things. My wife is not.

Her self-perceived insecurities drive her sometimes. “What will happen to me once you are gone? How will I survive? How can I afford to live on my own?” – that sort of thing.

So I patiently go over things with her. She has her degree. She is a successful teacher who is well respected by her peers and beloved by her students. She loves to teach and she is very good at it. She can retire with good benefits, which means she will be well provided for, even if I am not there. Above all, there is one greater than I who will always provide for her and watch over her. And even more than this, our grown sons love her and are determined to take care of her, regardless.

But, this does not completely alleviate her worries. Why do women worry so much?

I also remind her that she is a very good writer, and that she should take a sabbatical from teaching one year soon, and just write. She would write textbooks, of course. Her graduate university would help her get published. I even predict for her that if she writes about her own Critical Pedagogy (the holy grail for teachers), she would likely pay off all her student loans at once. It would be fitting and proper that she should be published before me.

The one solid thing I rely on here, in the midst of all of this, is the Mac. Having the Mac in your life means that you can be much more productive. You can quite easily write a book, make a movie, create a presentation, and do reliably so many more things with a Mac than any other computer. You can be creative and have the freedom to express yourself in ways that you could only imagine. The Mac is a true gift for my beloved wife, for I know that as long as she sticks to the Mac, it will make her time incredibly much more useful and productive, and her thoughts that much more accessible and interesting to everyone else. She even uses the Mac to make all our Christmas presents, making those uber-cool personalized and professionally printed iPhoto Albums that you can buy on line at the Apple Store.

So that’s my Mac wife. And I am three times blessed and incredibly lucky to be living in the land of the free, at peace with everyone, and getting to have and to hold an amazing woman, whom I dearly love and rightly admire.