Heartbroken

I'm heartbroken that no one has shared any of their family traditions!  On the heels of all that jewelry talk (that so many of you had so much to say about!), I figured for sure a few of you would chime in.  But that's OK, I'll live.

Seriously, that's not the reason I'm heartbroken, though.  I'm about to dive in to some really sad stuff and I had to start off with a little bit of levity.

It's no surprise that our husbands see the lowest of the low on a regular basis.  That's part of the job description.  I realize that I hear very little of what my husband processes every week on the job.  I used to lap up every tidbit of information he would share after shift, but as time has passed.... I don't get as much info anymore.  There are plenty of reasons for that.  It's more "normal" now.  It's second nature.  "Everything" is not new and exciting and crazy and I don't desperately wonder about every moment he is on shift any more, and he has even less of a need to share it now.  I can count on him sharing the highlights, but other than that, I know there is lots of stuff that just goes by.  And I'm OK with that.

So when my husband walks in the door after shift and starts spewing words of the venomous kind before he even has his shoes off, I immediately know it's been a bad day.

That happened recently, and it was heartbreaking.

I'm really proud of my husband, in that he thinks like a "bad guy" all the time, even more than most other cops we know.  He drives me nuts sometimes.  He's always thinking tactically -- the best way to approach on a car stop if he wants to give the bad guy the easiest way to kill him (and he promptly does the opposite); why you should or shouldn't enter a building this way or that way... honestly I can't even think of all the things to list here because I've heard them so many times, I just kind of let it go in one ear and out the other.  Lots -- but not all -- cops do this, too; but they all should.

So when he came home and was sharing heartbreak after heartbreak, it really got to me.  I wouldn't say "mistake" ~ because I am 100% against doing the whole "Monday Morning Quarterback" routine on any well-trained individual who has a fraction of a millisecond to decide if he should do x, y, or z before killing someone or getting killed himself. In every situation there are plenty of other, better options you can think of after-the-fact.  It doesn't matter.  It was all heartbreaking.  Every few minutes he would pause and say "Hm, I probably can't tell you that..."

There's no one in my life that would understand all the things he told me.  And besides, with all those caveats he kept throwing in I wasn't sure what I could and couldn't say to anyone I would talk to.  So I'm telling you.  I'm heartbroken.

Hug your special people tighter.  Send your special one off to work with extra love.  And support them when they spew their venom.  How else can you help them see the best of life, when all they regularly see is the worst?

Photo credit JerryFergusonPhotography on Flickr