She Is Away Trekking This Month. So Why Is That the Easiest Part of It?

My wife is away this month, on a trek, raising money for a charity that matters a great deal to both of us.

People will see the photographs and the final total. What they will not see is that the trek is the easiest thing she does for them.

The Trek Is the Visible Bit

I am not being dismissive about it. It is days on her feet, carrying what she needs, in whatever weather turns up — a proper physical undertaking that she has had to train for and will have to endure.

She will come home tired and pleased and already thinking about the next one.

But it is a fortnight of her year, and it is the fortnight with a photograph attached.

What Happens the Other Eleven Months

The rest of it goes on quietly and more or less continuously.

The fundraising, which is a job in itself. The organising, which is a bigger one. Campaigning, turning up, chasing the things that need chasing — and the long unglamorous administration that sits behind anything a charity actually manages to do.

Then there is the part I had not appreciated until I watched it up close: the support she gives other people who are doing the same thing. Encouraging somebody else’s effort, helping them get going, being the person they ring when their own total has stalled.

None of that has a start date or a finishing line, and none of it comes with a photograph. It is simply something she does, in among everything else, and has done for years.

The trek is the month people see. The work is the other eleven.

I wrote in the summer about how uncomfortable I found asking people for money for a single month. She does it all year — and either does not find it difficult, or has decided that the difficulty is beside the point.

The Roles Swap While She Is Away

There is a practical side to this that is worth being honest about.

Most of the time she runs the house and the family around my work. That is the arrangement, it has been for years, and I have written before about what she has been willing to take on so that I could do what I do.

When she is away, it comes to me. All of it, at once, in the order it arrives.

It is a genuinely useful fortnight. Nothing shows you the size of what somebody normally carries like carrying it yourself for two weeks — and discovering you have already missed three things by Tuesday.

I Have Mostly Been the One Watching

Here is the uncomfortable bit.

Across all of this I have been the supporter rather than the participant. The one who sponsors, drives, holds the bag, keeps the house running — and tells people at work how well it is going.

That is a real contribution and I am not going to pretend otherwise. It is also not the same thing as doing it, and I know the difference.

The reason has mostly been timing. Three children at different stages, work that does not stop, and a household where one of us has generally had to be in it.

What Happens When the House Empties

That is changing, and faster than I had expected.

Two of them are effectively out in the world. The third is reaching the point where she can be left to her own devices. Legally, at any rate, which I gather is the measure that counts.

Which means the reason I have been standing on the side of this is running out.

I am looking forward to that more than I expected to. Not out of duty, and not to even something up. Because it has been years of watching somebody put real effort into something that matters. The obvious next step is to go and do it with her, rather than wave her off at the door.

She has built something I have been standing next to for a long time. The plan now is to stop standing next to it.