My Playful Wife — A Tender Literary Love Story

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The collection sold, the cloth went out into the world on other people's bodies, and three days after the December room my wife sat down in the middle of her empty workroom on the floor, with her back against the cutting table, and did not get up for a long time.

My Playful Wife is a serialized tender literary audiobook about marriage and family, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

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The room they gave her for the show was long and white and full of December light, and I took up my position the way I always do, at the edge of it, near the back, where I do my best living.

I have thought about this, over the years — why I am always at the edge of the rooms that are hers, and whether it is a failing. A husband, the world might say, should be at her side, in the photographs, sharing the light. And I have stood at her side when she wanted me there, and I will again. But the truth is that the edge of the room is not where I hide; it is where I work. Because from her side I can only see what she sees — the buyers' faces arranged into the polite masks people wear when they are deciding whether to want something. From the edge, the back, the corner by the window, I can see...

My Playful Wife is a serialized tender literary audiobook about marriage and family, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

That evening I did a thing I had almost never done in the years of our marriage: I went into the workroom and asked her to teach me what she was doing.

It sounds like nothing. It was, in its way, the hardest practical thing I had attempted since the year of the notebooks — harder than the apology, harder than the writing, because the apology and the writing were mine, done on my own ground, and this required me to walk into hers and admit, out loud, with my body, that there was a whole country of her I had been married to for years and never once properly visited. The workroom is Saloni's. I had been into it ten thousand times — to bring her chai, to call her to dinner, to say goodnight to the back of her head bent over a table at midnight — but I had been into it the way you walk...

My Playful Wife is a serialized tender literary audiobook about marriage and family, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

I bought the fifth notebook on an ordinary Wednesday, and I almost didn't write in it, and that almost is the whole of what this volume is about.

The first four had been easy to begin, in the way that grief and astonishment are easy to begin — they wrote themselves, because something enormous was happening to me and the writing was the only railing I had to hold. The first notebook began because my life had broken open on a balcony and I needed somewhere to put the pieces. The second began because the pieces were rearranging into something I did not recognise and had to describe in order to believe. The third and fourth began because the new thing was so large and so good that I was frightened of taking it for granted, and the notebooks were my method against that fear, the daily...

My Playful Wife is a serialized tender literary audiobook about marriage and family, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

A year is a full circle only in the sense that the calendar says so.

The earth goes around and comes back to the same place, and we call it a year, and we pretend the returning means something — that we, too, have come back to where we started, that the wheel has closed. But the earth does not come back to the same place; it comes back to the same place in a galaxy that has itself moved on, so that the circle is never really a circle, only a spiral that looks like a circle if you don't have the instruments to see the drift. We had not come back to where we started. We had come back to the same morning, the same kitchen, the same October light at the same angle through the same window — and we were not the same, and so the morning was not the same, and the circle was a spiral, and the...

My Playful Wife is a serialized tender literary audiobook about marriage and family, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

There are things you keep and things you let go, and the wisdom, if it exists at all, is in knowing which is which.

I had kept the notebooks. All four of them now, in the drawer of the bedside table on my side — the three large ones and the small fourth — alongside the other things that gather at the place where a person sleeps: the reading glasses I had started needing this year, which I resented and wore anyway; the phone charger; a strip of medicine; a pen that worked and two that didn't; the small unremarkable sediment of a life, deposited nightly within reach of one hand. The notebooks lived among that ordinary debris, which felt right. They were not relics to be enshrined. They were tools I still used, filed with the other tools of being alive — the glasses for seeing the page,...

My Playful Wife is a serialized tender literary audiobook about marriage and family, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

The fourth notebook was smaller.

I chose it deliberately — a pocket size, the kind you carry rather than leave on a table, because the whole point of it was that it had to come with me into the days rather than wait for me at home at the end of them. The first three had been objects you went to; you sat down at the kitchen table in the evening, after the day was over and safely past, and you wrote at it, looked back at it, made sense of it. The fourth had to be a thing I carried into the live current of the present, so that I could catch the day while it was still happening, before it cooled into the past where the other notebooks had always met it. So: small. Pocket-sized. A thing that rode in a shirt pocket against the chest, warm from the body, ready.

My Playful Wife is a serialized tender literary audiobook about marriage and family, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

The third notebook ended on a Tuesday evening in May.

I wrote the last entry and held the pen over the page for a moment afterward, aware that something was completing. Not the story — the story was ongoing, would go on being ongoing, had no natural ending of the kind that stories are supposed to have, the kind where a door closes and music plays. But this particular telling of it, this record, this object, was full. The pages had thinned toward the back the way they do, announcing the end before I was ready, and now there was one line left of room and I had used it, and the third notebook was a finished thing.

My Playful Wife is a serialized tender literary audiobook about marriage and family, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

She sang in the shower on Tuesday mornings.

I had known this for three years and never once heard it.

I want to be exact about that, because it is the whole of the episode and the whole of what I had learned and kept learning: that knowing a thing and hearing it are not the same, that you can live beside a sound for three years and have it not reach you, blocked by the simple fact that you are not listening, that listening is not a thing the ears do automatically but a thing the whole attention has to choose to do. I had known, the way you know the furniture, that Saloni sometimes made sound in the shower. I had filed it under the ambient data of a shared life, along with the click of the geyser and the particular complaint of the bathroom tap, and I had never once actually heard it,...

My Playful Wife is a serialized tender literary audiobook about marriage and family, written by Mia. New episodes daily.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Still here.

I want those two words to carry what they actually mean, which is not resignation, and not mere persistence, and not the grim endurance the phrase sometimes implies — well, we're still here, the way survivors of something say it, half-surprised, half-tired. I mean it the other way. As an achievement. As a daily, active, repeated thing. I am still here. We are still here. After everything the year did, after the kitchen and the fire and all the long work between them, we are still here, still waking up beside each other, still choosing it. This is not nothing. It is, when I stop to look at it directly, very close to everything.

My Playful Wife is a serialized tender literary audiobook about marriage and family, written by Mia. New episodes daily.