I HAVE A HAPPY WIFE. Susan is brimming with bubbles. She’s a real joy to be around. To the layman, she may seem the same Susan you’ve known all these years, but people have a public face that is much more constant and convivial than their private face. She’s been carrying some serious weight.

Susan is happy now because she found something valuable, and she can’t stop playing with it. Susan has found time.

People who know Susan as a teacher, as an active Benicia parent, and as candidate for city council back before we met in the early 1980s, will be able to nod in agreement if I liken her to Boxer from “Animal Farm.”

Susan has always been tireless, indefatigable, wearing those multiple hats of daughter, mother, sister, wife, friend, employee. She was always on the go, grinding out her daily deeds for others, for the good of the order, because it was the right thing to do.

If I were to pie-chart her time commitments for 24 hours, minus sleep, there would be a sliver for herself. You know that old saying, “If mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy”? Susan wasn’t happy unless everyone else was happy.

As her parents aged into infirmity, as our kids grew up and made new kids, as I became more cantankerous and edgy, Susan didn’t back off from her responsibilities, she embraced more. Year after year her self-assumed responsibilities have grown.

She’d jump up at a phone call from her 95-year-old widowed dad and drive to Vacaville with urgently needed toenail clippers. She’d drive to Sacramento to pick up grandson Jack from play practice and drive him eight blocks home because the parents were busy.

She came running to the rescue of our son Adam who was stuck in Sienna, Italy because his schooling had ended, but he didn’t want to come home, and he had no money. She and I flew there, got him and brought him back. No hesitation, no regrets. Hey, we had fun. It was Christmas in Italy.

She met my dear, sweet, impoverished mother back in Pennsylvania long ago, discovered that all my mother’s limited money was going toward huge credit card interest payments and not for necessities, and Susan took her through a bankruptcy. It was a monumental undertaking involving mountains of paperwork and every credit card advertised on television. Sue neither blinked nor flinched.

And now, finally, at last, things are easing up for her. She’s had a slow increase in freedom over the last few years. Our children have grown independent of us and don’t need favors nearly as often. When we go visit now, it’s to party. Our grandsons are growing up and having social lives.

That gave Susan a bit of wiggle room. The next plateau came when her parents passed on. She was their My Gal Sal, running their errands and interceding with doctors, caretakers and bankers full time. When they passed, we celebrated their long and full lives and Susan inherited a huge basket of time to fill with her own toys.

She started reading more. She opened her own Netflix account because my selections are always action-based and she wants drama. She got one of those wrist doohickeys that counts your steps, your sleep habits, your vitals, your moods. Each morning she puts it on. “I must do my 10,000 steps today,” she says and marches off.

She’s dedicated to this 10,000 steps thing. She’ll go downtown and walk, come home, plug her doohickey into her phone, realize that she only walked 8,000 steps, and go back out for another loop.

This fall she reached another grand plateau. Susan went “Willie Brown.” That’s the nickname for the ruling that allows teachers near retirement to work a shorter day without any loss of benefits, just a smaller check.

Susan is now working a 60-percent day. She is finished teaching every day well before the noon hour. She gets to drive off campus peacefully before the lunch stampede. She can eat slowly downtown if she wishes. She takes her long walks then. She wanders through the grocery stores guessing at food, eager for conversation.

It’s a thrill for me to come home shortly after the lunch hour — I’m Willie Brown too and work just an hour more than my wife — and find her car in the driveway. Throughout our teaching careers, I’d never seen her car in the driveway before mine, never. She’s Boxer. She’d be in her room grading by candlelight.

Now I come in to find her stretched out on the living-room recliner, a recent magazine in her hand, relaxing. Van Morrison is already playing. Frankie the cat’s been fed. Now, besides me, Frankie is her only big concern, and he lives outside.

Yesterday, she drove to Sacramento, not to pick up dry cleaning or take a kid to soccer, but to get her hair done. She found a stylist she likes. She got this great wind-blown cut. She looks always like she just got off a bicycle, like she’s moving forward, like, “Come on world. It’s my turn to play.”

Next summer we’ll both retire, Frankie will likely be gone, and Susan’ll have only me to care for. “Honey, where are my boxers?”

Steve Gibbs teaches at Benicia High School and has written a column for The Herald since 1985.