My Husband & I: The New Terminator Team

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Long story short, my husband and I found ourselves at an arcade on a very rainy night recently. It had been a super stressful day and there had been a lot of tension, even though we were both really trying hard to get through it with some grace.

This was a pretty small arcade. We weren't up for attempting to grab a stuffed animal out of a rigged machine. Some of the games didn't even work. So we somehow ended up at a two-player Terminator game.

We ripped it UP! I don't know what it was but that plastic arcade game gun felt good in my hands and it felt good to blow away some bad robots from the future. We worked really well together and were blowing things up left and right. My husband is an expert ranked marksman, which I am only now really beginning to appreciate. I had no idea that military qualification could be so much fun in an arcade.

There was an excitement and sense of power to reload and start shooting again. To cover for each other when one ran out of ammunition and to occasionally get a chance to launch a grenade. Looking back now I see a very real allegory in our experience about how we work together to defend our marriage, our family and push forward to our future. But at the time it was pure fun to burn off pent up stress and energy. And I did pretty well for a girl who knows very little about guns. I aimed, I shot, I blew up bad guys. All the while my husband was yelling instructions to me. "Go for the heads, go for the heads!....You have a grenade, use it....Okay, right now you only have a shotgun."

At the end my husband mentioned, somewhat humbly (I say that laughing) that he really had my back and helped me out a lot. While I think I held my own pretty darn well for the girl that I am, all I could think was, "Of course you did, you big stud. And I wouldn't have it any other way!"

I could have played that game with him for hours. But at arcade rates, after a few "continue playing" extravagances we stopped and forced our way back to the real world. But it was so much fun, such a great stress relief, kinda hot and looking back a great lesson about what a dynamic duo we are in the game world and even better in the real world.