A Thousand Quiet Thank You’s

The day isn’t different.

I won’t wake up tomorrow magically more in love with you than I was today.

You will still get up before me and I will still crawl out of bed 5 minutes before I leave for my run, yelling at the kids all the way out the door what they need to have finished before I get back.

Chances are you will have left for work by the time I return, and I will finish packing lunches, shove a total of 74 Valentines into their respective child’s backpack and kick them out the door.  If it’s a good day, I won’t have to lock the door behind Monster, or drag him down the street by the arm the whole way to school.

The I’ll shower and you’ll do whatever it is you do at work.  I’ll head to a meeting and you’ll, I don’t know, do some army thing.

We might meet up for lunch.  Because we can.

And we’ll look at each other and laugh because neither of us cares the slightest about Valentines Day, or any other ‘special’ day for that matter, but there we will be at lunch anyways.

Every once and a while I love going out with you in uniform.  You look sexy in green.

And then after work and school we’ll head out to the gym and the kids will go to MMA and you and I will go to kickboxing.  On the way back we’ll rent a movie and we’ll eat the pizza I made in the afternoon and watch it together.

Maybe we’ll even find one for the two of us to watch once they are in bed, too.

And around 11 we’re going to get into bed.  Hopefully not already too tired.

And a Valentine’s Day with you actually home will come and go this way and next week I will forget it.

You won’t buy me roses because you learned when we were 20 and I found out how much that bouquet you always got me cost, that I think it’s a colossal waste.

I haven’t bought you anything, either.  And you won’t care even a little.

But as I write this, it’s still tonight.

And tonight I lie in bed

And I think of you,  the man who last month who held that tiny little kidney dish at the hospital for me to throw up in, while still in his DEUs.

The one who carried my shoes and eventually carried me.

Who brushed back my hair, argued with the doctors, carried my vomit bowls and ripped nylons and an extra kidney dish, just in case.

It’s the same man who shaves in the downstairs bathroom in the morning so the noise the hot water pipe makes when it runs upstairs won’t wake me up.

Who brings extra water to the gym because he knows half the time I forget mine.

The one who has carried my love with him into combat and back so many times, never letting us go no matter how much has seperated us. Holding on even when that seperation seem to still be lingering afte he was home.

The man who pushes me when I need it and is a gentle place for me to land when I crash.

And when you got home yesterday from a few days away and walked in the door to me scrubbing dog puke in the front entrance and 2 kids on time out streaming from their room, you didn’t even skip a beat.

Because love isn’t about the time when you go out for a quiet lunch, get breakfast in bed or chocolates and cards.

It’s about those times when you are mad at the world and want to hide under a blanket where no kids can see you watching Community on your phone.
And you are willing to let him come, too.

You are the one who has instincivly stood between me and anything that has ever had the potential to hurt me, since I was 13 years old.

And who I can trust to continue to be under that blanket with me in 50 years.

I could never have deserved this, but this is what I got.

And there are nights like tonight when I take a moment to realize what I got out of this deal, that make up for 100 forgotten, underused, uneventful and  disinterested ‘todays’.

No more happened today than will happen tomorrow.

But for me, romance has never been found in roses.

It’s in those tiny, quiet thank you’s.

Comments

comments

Related posts:

Cold is When You Write About It At Least The Barracks Box Goes With Him The peace and quiet would be nice if he wasn’t so sick… Some People’s Daddys Didn’t Come Home