I got the idea for this after watching the Steve Jobs biopic on Netflix, of all things in the world. What would it be like to marry a genius? Have a child with one? I don't think it would be easy.
For my dear friend Katie, as always.
Cindy was irate. She slammed the magazine down on the table. She was keeping track. This was #35 relegating her to the role of a famous man's wife. And to make matters worse, this time she wasn't even mentioned by name.
Did they know that if it weren't for her, he wouldn't eat? That, in the early years, the heating bill wasn't always paid on time because he needed the money for his lab equipment more, and so they'd gone to bed at night in their winter coats? Did they know that she'd gotten pregnant the summer before her first year of law school, and that she'd spent the spring semester nursing a baby and studying for midterm exams while he was abroad working on his cutting edge research and winning grants?
None of these people knew what it was like being married to him. At her graduation ceremony, he was the star, not her. When their daughter was born, every media outlet in the country proclaimed that she was destined to be a prodigy like her dad.
Did anyone even know their daughter's first word'? When Cindy had carried their child into the backyard on a sunny day in July, she pointed at the shed behind their house where her father would disappear for hours on end to cobble together blueprints and proposals, and said, 'lab,' in an almost sad tone.
It was endlessly exhausting being married to Jimmy Neutron, the greatest fucking scientist in the world since Albert Einstein.
And yet, when she looked into his kind blue eyes, she remembered why she loved him. Sometimes when she thought about his ideas, about his genuine desire to help people by mining his mind for gold, his visions for planetary transformation and peace, she wanted to cry. He deserved every moment of his fame, every award he got, every minute he slept on the couch instead of doing the dishes like he promised.
But would it kill him to do those dishes once in a while? To take his daughter to the park more often, instead of spending so much time poring over the technical details of his latest invention? To actually make more of an effort to romance her?
She deserved more, god damn it. When she'd fallen head over heels for him as a girl in elementary school, she didn't know that ending up with her childhood sweetheart would mean signing her heart away to someone she'd always live in the shadow of.
It was sheer madness, and sometimes she wished she'd chosen otherwise. It was hard to think of a different life, of a life without him in it. But every so often, she couldn't help but wish she could be more than just an afterthought.