I gave a little prayer of thanks this morning as I walked my dog in the still morning dark.
Thanks that my husband made it home last night.
Was he gone on a business trip? No.
Pushing limits on a drunken bender? Oh, that’s a funny one, if you knew him.
So was he somewhere I should’ve been worried about? Not at all.
He was — are you ready for this? — at his first baseball game of the season.
Every spring he pulls out the bat, mitt, stretchy pants, high socks and baseball hat and joins his men’s baseball league.
Baseball means once a week when he leaves for work I won’t see him until the next morning because he gets home from these games way past my bedtime.
Have I really turned into Her? Forever single gal, now a couple years into marriage is now Clingy Wife.
Hardly.
I love that he has a thing.
Just for him. Pure fun.
This is simply another lesson that marriage has taught me about love.
Simply, it’s easier to be the one who leaves. The one who walks out the door. Who gets to go.
For you, too, Dear Reader? You, who probably knew this even without marriage. I’m just slower than most figuring this stuff out.
The more you love, the harder it is to see that love walk out the door. Harder to be the one who watches your kid get on the school bus.
Easier to be the friend who goes on the journey, rather than the one who stays behind to worry.
“Be safe,” Husband will say to me as his final words whenever I leave the house, be it to drive one of the kids across town or meet a girlfriend for coffee.
“How silly,” I think to myself. I feel safe when it’s my turn to be the one who leaves.
I’ve been around the world and back in my days as a TV news anchor and reporter. Never once worried that I was going to be OK. I do have faint recollection of my parents and friends worrying as I covered a war in the Middle East or volunteered at an orphanage in Africa.
I was fine because I could see I was fine.
I was the one who got to go. I had a faint idea that it was harder for the ones left behind.
Now, that I’m married and a mom, I know this to be true.
So, when the neighborhood owl hooted me awake this morning, first thing I did was look over to the other side of the bed.
There he was, husband, snoozing away, probably dreaming of almost beating the best team in the league last night.
And so I smiled as I walked DarlaDog down our street in the final moments of darkness.
He was just gone for a small thing.
And he made it home.
Safe.
When you love someone, that’s no small thing.
