Motor-Mouth Mom

Family Man®
By Gregory Keer

My love for my wife began with all that talk, and continues largely because of it. Although we've lived together for more than 15 years, we still burn up phone lines and cell towers.

While ladling three-ingredient Chinese soup for my sons, my wife reports on the day's events.

"Benjamin forgot to turn in his homework, but did well on the spelling test. Ari hugged Amaya till she cried. And Jacob made 11 hearts out of construction paper." She says all of this without taking a breath before I momentarily interrupt.

"What does Jacob want in his soup?"

"Nothing but chicken and rice," she blurts before rattling off details of her work meeting.

I listen as I serve the boys soup. Jacob makes the "ewww" expression and yells, "Who told you I wanted chicken?!"

I point at my wife, willingly snitching on her.

Jacob yells again and cries, "You always listen to Mommy! You always believe her! You think she's pretty and you like talking to her!"

Wendy and I try not to laugh. We manage to solve the soup problem, but two truths emerge from Jacob's statements: I do think his mommy's pretty. And I do like talking to her.

In my first phone conversation with Wendy, I felt my usual nervousness over being able to sound smart and entertaining enough to win a date. I feared the dead spaces that sometimes happened in talks with other women. But Wendy took care of that. She filled every conversational pothole with bubbly comments about her studies in special education and blunt questions about my dating history. Despite a history of over-thinking my dialogue with girls when I was a teenager (I used to pre-script, like some kind of romantic telemarketer), I kept up with Wendy's verbal pace.

We went on lots of dates in those early days, spending much of the time jabbering about everything from favorite amusement parks to people we knew in common. Even after parting, we'd phone each other and yak some more - for hours. When my apartment mates complained about my low voice filtering through the walls, I'd just move the receiver into the closet and talk from there. I have no idea what Wendy and I said to each other, but we never seemed to run out of words.