For more than three years, I have tried to get my wife interested in my blog posts. I didn’t have much success until a couple of months ago. Suddenly, she is checking my website on Sunday evenings to see what I have posted over the weekend and asking how many other articles I drafted during my two days off.

My wife is a nurse and she works at our local hospital. For over two decades, she has worked a weekend night schedule. She works 12 hours from Friday night into Saturday morning, does the same shift from Saturday night into Sunday morning, and is then off for the entire week.

That schedule worked great for us when our son was in grade school. I cared for him on the weekends while she slept during the day after her night shifts. On weekdays, she was at home to take him to the bus in the mornings and pick him up when the bus dropped him off in the afternoons.

Those benefits came with a cost, however. We had few opportunities to do things together as a family, apart from the handful of vacation days she had.

Our two children are 11 years apart so our daughter had already moved out years before our son left for college. With the departure of our son, it would have been ideal for her to switch to a weekday work schedule so we could spend weekends together. However, she is so used to the night schedule that she has decided to stick with it.

I don’t have much appetite nowadays to go out and do things on my own on the weekends. After running whatever errands I have, finishing up some housework and exercising, I usually spend the rest of my time writing at home.

It turns out that someone asked my wife a question that prompted the sudden interest in my blog posts. According to her, one of her colleagues asked whether she had any worries about leaving such a handsome man (her colleague’s description, which I liked very much) unattended weekend after weekend. Her colleague and I haven’t met, but she has read my book and seen some of my pictures on my website. That is how she formed that (correct) judgment.

If she were alive today, my Presbyterian mother would be aghast at this lack of modesty. I would explain to her, with an apology, that I am not in our humble village anymore, and that where I live now, it is sometimes necessary to toot one’s own horn. I would add that in this case, I am only repeating what someone said about me.

My wife did assure her colleague that she had no concerns about leaving me “unsupervised.” When she comes home on Saturday and Sunday mornings after her shifts, I am often already at my desk, writing. After she wakes up late in the afternoons to prepare for work, she sees me in the same location engaged in the same activity. In her mind, there is little chance that some “intruder” would distract me from my writing. However, she needed a way to validate her assumption.

In addition to the one or two articles I complete and post on my blog each weekend, I often write a couple of drafts of what I intend to work on next. From her careful scrutiny, my wife sees that my productivity level has stayed consistently high, which proves to her that I am not getting distracted while she is at work.

I am now wondering how she will react if I slack off for a few weeks.

After all these years, I think I have finally found the solution to this work schedule mismatch problem. I am going to cut back on my writing for a while and see what happens. Maybe that will spook her enough to make her consider switching to a normal shift. I just need to somehow keep her from reading this post.