Don't Take the Girl

It was a Monday night.  The whole family was making dinner together and discussing sad country music songs.  When someone came up with one, another pulled it up on the phone and played it.  My husband said to my daughter, “Do you know what song was playing when they rushed your mom into surgery?  It was ‘Don’t Take the Girl’”.  Now I don’t know if it was actually playing on the radio at the time, or it just played in his head – but that’s how he remembers it.  My daughter turned on the song and my husband pulled me into a slow dance in the kitchen – complete with a few turns, spins and dips while he sang it to me. 

For some reason, the sweetness of the moment, the idea of him being so scared as I was wheeled into an emergency c-section or him dancing with me in the kitchen for my daughters to see – I was moved to tears that came from nowhere as he snuggled me and danced.  How in the world did I get so lucky?

I tell myself every day that I’m the luckiest girl to have found someone as wonderful as him.  He’s the sane to my crazy.  The quiet to my loud.  The rock to my sap. He puts me into focus when I spin into a crazy fog.  He’s been the one to make the transition of our girls growing up look normal, when all I want to do is wrap them in a blanket, snuggle them and sing them to sleep – just one more time.  And when I strain to remember when the last time was, I can’t come up with it.  The last time they curled up in my lap and slept, I surely didn’t realize it was the last or I would’ve cherished it. 

I’m sure he tires of my hysterics when I worry about things that I have absolutely no control over.  And he never rolls his eyes when I cry over things that were none of my business to begin with.  He always tries to fix it, even when I can’t even tell him what it is that’s crushing me at the moment.  Sometimes fixing it means letting me cry it out.  Or laugh at how ridiculous I sound.  Or tell me that it’s part of life and we can’t change it.  But he never makes it sound harsh or unforgiving, he points it out and makes it look normal. 

He is my world.  The love of my life.  And by virtue of the badge he wears, people hate him enough to kill him.  I find myself taking mental snapshots of the moment, or the song, or the day – just in case it is the last.  At least I’ll have it to cherish. 

It’s not something that I stew about or worry about or lose sleep over.  Not at all.  It’s just a part of our lives and a possibility that exists.  But I never give myself the luxury of being mad, because in the scheme of things – anger is pointless.  And if loss comes, it will be permanent.  I would rather have slow dances in the kitchen logged in my memory bank, than anger filled words playing back. 

If it were my song, I’d change it up just a bit.  It would be called, “Don’t Take the Man”.