Sunday, April 19, 2009

Love

I love my husband.
Which may have something to do with why I married him, but anyway. Sometimes I don't like him. Sometimes, the last few weeks, I have wondered why we got married. Rob and I have very different belief systems and values. It is sometimes hard to see how the two can ever be reconciled, but they can, and they will.

Last night I realized again why I fell in love with him, somewhere dark under a cloudless sky, twenty-seven firefighters and a number of chiefs and a bunch of EMTs and two paramedics and a car down an embankment and four patients, I remembered why I fell in love with him. Because no one else has ever understood me so well. No one else is going to know what compells me to run out the door on my day off, six hours before I have to be back at work, to answer a call for a second paramedic to the scene. No one else is going to know why I can work 72 hours a week and be so happy; why I can be content with no hobbies, and so few friends(none of which I ever see), and everything else I have given up in order to be a firefighter-paramedic. He knows how lonely I get sometimes, and he understands. In the back of an ambulance on a rough call, he doesn't have to ask what I need, Rob just knows. He is starting an IV while I am holding pressure on a head wound; I spike the bag without him saying a word. He knows when I want two IVs in, or when I am thinking the patient is having a stroke even though the patient has no complaints or weakness or usual stroke signs. Rob was such a good BLS partner, I tell him, that I wanted to keep him around once he becomes ALS this June, so I married him.

EMS is not what we do. It is not a hobby, and it is not a job. It is what I was designed to do, even though I often cast longing looks at law school. There is much in life Rob and I do not share...but what we do share is in our blood now, buried deep within our bone marrow, and is part of who we are. It is what makes him my other half, the other half I spent 26 years of my life missing, without even knowing what I was looking for. And, yeah, there are a lot of differences in the way we approach life. The way we think about things, the way we want our children raised, the values we hold dear and want to instill in them--we have totally opposing views. And yet that's okay, that's what makes us human, and that's what makes life interesting. I cannot imagine my life without my husband.

We had a love so strong.. that is just seemed like we were one. I would get ready to tell him something and he would open his mouth and say the very thing, that I was fixing to tell him. And then. there were those moments when I would lay my head on his chest just to listen to his heart beat. And then one night. I realized that his heart beat, matched mine. I have had an opportunity that few people ever get on this earth. God has blessed me to share time and space with a man that he designed himself just for me. I’ve not only been blessed… I have been divinely favored. (Tyler Perry)

1 comments:

Trina said...

it's so cool that you two can work together, using the unique connection God gave you to be an excellent team.

I hope you don't mind me reading your archives and commenting on so many old posts - I just felt like I wanted to get to know you, and this seemed like a good way. :)