Behind many a good trucker is a woman who can do just about everything else: accounting, home reno and child rearing.

She’s a woman who knows how to spend Valentine’s Day alone and a woman who can keep the flame burning for someone she sees less than the mailman, or the pizza delivery boy, or the guy who lives next door or down the hall or at church on Sundays.

She’s someone who can endure financial hardship and someone who can find a way to manage when she’s hurting and there’s no one there to give her a hug.

She’s a woman of incredible faith, if not in a God per se, then in life and love and herself, because she’s able to believe in her relationship even when the bills are piling up and there’s no one to open them with.

Over the course of my past year here at Truck News, I’ve had the privilege of speaking with more than a few truckers’ wives and partners, people who’ve been frank about the despair they’ve sometimes felt, while at the same time proud of their enduring relationships and their hard-working husbands.

They’ve made it clear that they are Truck News readers and that what they have to say matters.

And in response I’d like to say that I do think what they have to say matters and I want to hear more from them.

And that I couldn’t admire them more.

These women are often isolated, living in a rural setting. Some of them don’t even drive.

None of them knew what they were getting into when they first set up house with their trucker husbands, but they quickly learned, when the toilet backed up, when the roof started leaking and when little Johnny came home from school beat up, that they would have to fend for themselves and their families more than they’d ever imagined.

Some have even gone so far as to pay the bills while their husbands set up business, working so their partners could go out on the road and eventually start bringing in money themselves.

But there is no explaining why any woman would do this. No explanation that I can come up with anyway.

Except that they’re at least as hard-working as their husbands, and they share a fundamental belief that hard work pays off eventually, if not in cash then at least in their belief in themselves and the strength of the relationships they’ve built within their communities and their families.

Here’s hoping they’re right.

And here’s hoping those trucking wives (and husbands of female truckers, if they’re reading this) are getting the credit they deserve.n

– Ingrid Phaneuf can be reached at 416-442-2091 or iphaneuf@trucknews.com.