What's wrong?

I sat in the dark without turning on the lights. The house felt completely silent now that both of our children had left. It was like living in a desert of silence.

Maybe I should’ve gotten a dog. I used to rush into the kitchen with a sense of urgency in the evenings, trying to get dinner ready before the kids came home, hungry and tired.

Even if I didn’t feel like cooking, I had to. So I picked up my laptop and went into the kitchen.
I played the music my husband loved when he was younger on YouTube and lit a candle.
I set the table with wine and made a nice dinner. He seemed to be in a good mood and started chatting more than usual.

But that only lasted a few days. Soon, my husband asked me to turn down the music.
Eventually, he asked me to turn it off altogether and stood up from the table first. Watching his hunched back as he walked out of the kitchen, I thought to myself: If we hadn’t had kids, would we still be living together?

Dinner ended early, and I picked up Gwancheon Essays by Lee Moon-goo. Set in Daecheon, Chungcheong Province, the book is full of that mellow and teasing Chungcheong dialect that grows on you the more you read.

Thanks to my friends, I was already familiar with the Gyeongsang and Jeolla dialects.
But I used to think Chungcheong dialect was just about dragging out words like “I can’t remember~.”
Turns out it’s a lot more subtle and harder to understand than I thought. The book was written in such strong dialect that I had to read sentences multiple times to get the meaning.

At dinner, seeing my husband frowning at the table, I almost snapped at him in my sharp Seoul accent:
“What’s your problem now?”
But instead, I softened my tone and tried the dialect:
“So then, what’s up? Did something bother ya? What’s wrong, huh?”
He answered in dialect too:
“Life’s just a bit tiring these days, that’s all.”
I replied,
“Yeah, I get it.”
We looked at each other and burst out laughing.

Back when I used my sharp Seoul accent, he wouldn’t even want to talk and would just walk away. But ever since reading Gwancheon Essays, I found that if I whine in dialect, he responds with a chuckle:
“Wife, you’re hilarious. Yeah, yeah, it’ll get better, you’ll see.”

Sometimes, I get too carried away and throw in some Jeolla dialect for fun. Now I spend my days bouncing between Chungcheong and Jeolla speech, trying to keep my husband’s mood up. I wonder how long I’ll have to keep doing this—keeping the peace, managing his feelings.
Some days I want to flip the whole table and walk away. But then I think,
“Fine. I’ll keep going, sweet-talking him in dialect until our black hair turns gray together.”

Then I got a call from my son, who lives far away.
“Hey, son! How’s it going? You doing alright?”
There was a short silence before he replied,
“Mom… is your mouth hurting or something?”