My husband cannot, for the life of him, sing a correct song lyric.
The extreme wrongness of the words he chooses instead of the actual ones are so shocking that I’ve given him a lay diagnosis of some sort of chromosomal abnormality.
Today we rode along in the car, and Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” started playing on the radio.
I squinted my eyes as we came to the second run-through of the chorus when I realized what he was singing, full of conviction, passionately.
“Oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh….Darling, a bad romance….”
He tapped his fingers out his window to the beat.
ME: “Babe, what are you singing? Are you singing, ‘DARLING, a bad romance?!
That doesn’t even make sense. Not even at all.
It’s ‘CAUGHT IN A bad romance.’
Do you even ever listen to the words that you sing?”
HIM: “It totally makes sense.
She’s saying that she recognizes that what they have is a bad romance,
and she wants him to also see it.
Like, see, ‘Darling,’ *acts as if he is displaying something like he’s a Price is Right model*
‘A bad romance.”
I shook my head, smiling, and thinking back on all the times he’s gotten the words wrong just as woefully.
Singing wrong lyrics is so much a part of him that we even incorporated it into our wedding after news spread far and wide that once on a date, when we were out dancing, he had started pawing at the air wildly almost like he was hallucinating.
I could not understand what he was doing, and it confused me so much that I stopped moving my own feet, just standing there still for a minute, wondering what was even happening, and if I needed to call a medical professional or something.
The song had been The Clash’s “Rock the Casbah,” and it took several seconds of me squinting and lip reading to determine that what HE was singing were, instead, the words, “Rock the CAT’S PAW.”
Ah. That explained the air pawing.
He was rocking the cat’s paw.
That was now plain to see.
His dance that night was somewhat like he was in Thriller, except there he was:
My prince,
The one I would pledge my forever to,
blissfully rocking little imaginary toe-beaned feet.
Word of that spread, along with smirks and side-eyes, and that story led to our friends staging a full-blown “Rock the Cat’s Paw” flash mob at our wedding.
There was the time we had been dating for over a year when I got invited to take part in a Super Bowl sing off contest in front of hundreds of people.
I had chosen Etta James’ “At Last” as my song, and I decided to use that time on the stage to sing of my love to him. You know, really make him FEEL ME.
All eyes were on me as I sang the chorus with power, and emotion, but when I opened my eyes I noticed him just chomping on a handful of chips and looking around like he was completely unattached, casually.
My feelings were hurt as to how he could be so callous to my very obvious song directing right to him.
I even won the cash prize for the contest,
and went to find him as everyone else was congratulating me and cheering.
ME: “Why did you act like you couldn’t care less about what I was singing? I was singing that to YOU.”
And then he said it –
HIM: “I just don’t get what’s so special about an underwater city.”
ATLANTIS.
He thought the words were “ATLANTIS, My love has come along.”
He couldn’t figure out why some underwater, corroding ruins would be such a touching thing.
“Just like the White Wing Dove sings a song, sounds like she’s singin’?”
That man still belts out, “Just like the WILD RANGERS sing a song sounds like they’re singing.”
Who these supposed Wild Rangers are is beyond me.
The most confusing part of this phenomenon is that this is a man that can remember what he was wearing, and lines from a movie he saw one time in 1983.
He will sing every single sitcom theme from his entire childhood, even the most obscure ones, but ask him to sing the right words to a song the radio has played literally every six minutes for the last three months and, frankly, he’s got nothing.
I guess I shouldn’t have expected any different from a person who thought that “I’ve Got the Moves Like Jaggar” was saying, “I’ve got to move my jacket.”
The idea that someone actually wrote a top hit about relocating their own outerwear is still a thing he and the Wild Rangers firmly believe.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
