The men in my family have done amazing things. My grandfather become a successful engineer after he mostly taught himself electrical engineering. My father is a physician, a professor of medicine, a hospital administrator.

But the conspicuousness of their successes have also at times made the accomplishments of their wives seem muted and dim. When my grandfather tells stories from his life, he

sometimes cuts my grandmother off if she interjects or starts to tell us bits and pieces of her own story where they intersect with his. When my mother finds herself drowning in housework, she has to steel herself against the dark feeling that her work is somehow less important, is somehow taken for granted by us all.

And what have the women in my family done exactly? They have all of them worked jobs while they also raised children, cooked meals, cleaned homes, balanced check books, entertained guests, and otherwise forborne and compensated for the flaws of their husbands and their sons—sometimes thanklessly and in the background, but almost always with patience and a wry yet loving sense of resignation.

Really, I have always had the feeling that if my mother died today, God forbid, my father would go spinning off into some void of uselessness—eating toast for breakfast, lunch and dinner, getting lost on his way to an out of town meeting, mismatching his coat and his pants, or putting laundry detergent in the dishwashing machine. Whereas if my mother lost my father, she would roll up her sleeves and figure out how to make ends meet. Because that's what she's always done. She, like her mother and mother in-law before her, shaped her husband's success with her own two hands, and then she got down to doing her own.

All of which makes my mother and grandmothers awe inspiring. And which frequently makes me feel that I am not deserving of any of them.