~ Killing My Captain Off ~

So here’s a little something about me that you’re going to find disturbing.

Well, more disturbing than all the previous stuff.  (Ahem.)

Whenever My Captain leaves us to work a shift at the firehouse, especially an emergency shift, like today’s snowstorm has been, I tell the children to say goodbye extra sincerely because he could die!  HE COULD DIE!  (And then I sing ‘Dun, dun, DUHN!” very dramatically.)

Of course, on any given day, any one of us could die, and our goodbye could always be our last.  And my kids often tell me this.  But I argue that we just don’t want to get caught with our pants down.  We don’t want to find out he’s been killed, and not have said our final “WE LOVE YOU!” and feel like we Shoulda, Coulda, Woulda done it.  I hate the Shoulda, Coulda, Wouldas.  Some people refer to it as REMORSE.  But I prefer to say it in rhyme, because I’m very artsy fartsy, in case you have not yet noticed.  And focused.

Where was I?

Right, so My Captain describes my dramatic goodbyes as if I’m trying to kill him off.  I am most emphatically NOT trying to kill him off.  But if he DOES get killed off, I want to be able to say, “Well, at least I got to say ‘Good-bye’.”   I just like to be prepared.  It’s the Girl Scout in me.   (Though, in the interest of full disclosure, I was never really a Girl Scout.  I was a Brownie, but they never let me progress to full Girl Scout, after that whole Thin Mint Cookie Eating Incident.  But let’s leave that in the past, shall we?)

So, like it or not, we have a tradition of dramatic ‘Good-Byes’ in our house.

With Varmint, it’s a sweet hug and a squeeze and an especially endearing, “I love you.”   With me, it’s considerably more than that, but not in front of the children, AHEM.

With Sir Monty of Stinky Butt, it’s a cuddle that melts me.

Who doesn’t melt watching a manly man hold a wee widdle kittie?

No one, that’s who.

But with Critter, it’s this weird male/testosterone/violent thing.  They start with a smack down.

Then it goes into this smarty-pants eye-balling eachother thing,

which morphs into

a sly-brow.

And then it finally ends

into some kind of weird masculine pretzel hold.

But it works for them.

If My Captain doesn’t come home one morning, Critter will be able to hold his head high, not feel a single Coulda, Shoulda, Woulda, and say, “At least I got one last pretzel hold in.”

Because the love is strong in our family….in a weird, contortionist sort of way.

So tell me, what weird traditions do you guys go through every time you say good-bye to your loved ones?  Pretty much the same thing, right?