How important is it to grow old with someone?
Nino and I sit at the table waiting for Z to come to dinner. He calls out, “One more minute!” from his bedroom more minutes than I can count. But I’m so happy he’s home on break that I wait.
I ask Nino, “Do you remember when you used to count down the months until the kids were old enough to put themselves to bed?”
“Yeah. Does Z put himself to bed yet?”
I laugh.
Is this type of conversation fulfilling enough to sustain me for the next twenty years? Maybe. Nino knows me so well. I’ve seen that when people get old, if they find a new partner, they don’t really get old with them.
My dad’s third wife told him that he’s too autistic for her and, in her own autistic flurry, moved out and told him to move out too so she could sell the house. He thought it was because she’s a real estate agent. We had to tell him it was because she’s a real estate agent getting a divorce.
A person can only grow old with someone they grew up with. Nino is the one I grew up with. Who knew that you can be divorced and still grow up with the person? It’s a huge indictment of divorce, really. You can’t properly raise your kids and get the partner out of your life.
Nino wants dinner by 8:30, and I can tell he’s getting antsy as we wait for Z to do an outlandish display of anxious-attachment with his non-girlfriend.
“Be direct,” I tell him. “You can’t have a relationship with someone if you’re not direct.”
“We’re not in a relationship!”
“Then can we have dinner? Dad’s gonna get grouchy.”
“I’m not grouchy. But I thought Z was gay. I mean, he can be whatever he wants. I’m just asking.”
“She’s not my girlfriend!”
I can see it’s going to be a long night. Z is putting on a clean shirt, which means he’s probably trying to win her back. If he ever had her at all.
I put everything on plates. I tell Nino that I found the drawing some kid made of us in NYC when we were at a pizza place. “Do you remember it?”
“Yeah,” he says.
“It’s a good memory of us going to visit our books.”
“What?”
“We were on our way to New Jersey. When we stored books at my brother’s.”
“I don’t remember.”
I wash dishes while I wait for Z to not come to dinner. I think about how I’m always surprised by what Nino remembers. Or doesn’t. Like how I remember our engagement and he doesn’t. I remember he came to LA on a surprise visit, and I told him that he couldn’t sleep over if we weren’t getting married. Later that day he came to my office with a ring. I was so happy that I can still feel that happiness if I remember hard enough.
Nino remembers when we were at an open mic and one of the rappers asked me if I freestyle, and I said yes. I wish I could remember what I did, because Nino always says I was shockingly awesome. That’s what I think about the engagement: he was shockingly awesome. It’s like we are time in a bottle for each other.
We walk the dog so we don’t have to do it after dinner since it will, at this point, be very late. The dog is always happier with Nino on the walk because herding isn’t fun with one person.
I can choose to think about how Nino didn’t pay child support and still can’t manage his tone of voice. Or I can think about how he’s the only other person who would wait this long for the chance to eat with Z.
We come back and Z is on the phone. I start eating the corn since Nino doesn’t like it on the cob and Z doesn’t like it cold. Then I start eating everything else. Then Nino starts eating too.
Too much later, Z comes in. He complains that everything is gone.
I think about apologizing. I consider going back to my standard worry that I’ll do something wrong and then he’ll stop coming home. Instead, I tell him that we can’t wait for him for an infinite amount of time and that we’d already told him dinner was ready. Twice. “There’s food in the fridge you can heat up.”
He huffs at us about his love life and priorities and stomps out.
Nino says, “You handled that well.”
I freeze. It’s the first time he’s said that in fifteen years.
And now, weeks later, I’m still thinking about it.
That’s what I want for growing old.
This makes me cry. I love my boyfriend but I also hate him because he takes his stress out on my 20 year old. It’s because that’s what happened when his Mother left to a nearby village and he was left with his Dad. He still saw her and his sister often but it wasn’t the same. He helped her get driving lessons ,insurance, his sister’s car when she moved on to a van. I feel he loves her but it’s in a “look what I did for you” kind of way. And she doesn’t want me to leave because she loves him too and also knows he would be harder to manage if I left. Plus she doesn’t want to break up her little brother’s family as he knows it. I mean we joke about tolerating eachother. That’s what it boils down to. What are we willing to compromise on (I have lots of deficiencies) and continuously looking for the things we like in them.
I’m so happy for you family x
This is a very nice story. Thanks for telling it.
Thanks. And it’s so nice to hear from you. Now that I’ve been reading your comments throughout both of our homeschooling lives, and both of our kids-in-music lives, it’s like you and I are growing old together online.
After I read your post this morning, I went into the kitchen and appreciated my family, who were all there, all the more. You know I don’t agree with all of your advice, or all your ideas, but this: “a person can only grow old with someone they grew up with” is a good one.
My wife was fifteen, and I was nineteen, when I first met her. We have, separately and together, been through a lot since then. Now my son has finished college and is working on his next step, my daughter is preparing to go to boarding school for high school, and we see an empty nest on the horizon. So we are seemingly turning the corner to growing old together.
I’ve sort of known you for a while now too. I can’t remember how young my kids were when I stumbled onto your site, but I know my son was elementary-school age and I was homeschooling him, and you were living on the farm in Wisconsin. There have been many twists and turns since then.
And, hey, you know what? The kids are alright.
I feel incredibly fortunate that I found someone I am compatible with at 45, after living essentially alone for 10 years. I was very set in my ways and had all of my routines well in place. I fall apart without my routines. Anyway, we’ve been together for 12 years now. After going through hell with a few of our kids (we have 7 between us) we finally set a deadline for the last of them to get out of our wallets and stand on their own two feet. We just bought a new house that we’re slowly moving into. We told them we will always feed them when they come over, and if they’re in a pinch they can surf a couch for a couple weeks, but none of them gets to live with us anymore. We feel like this is a new era in our lives, one that’s finally about us.
I could have lived a happy enough single life had I not met my wife. I like living alone. Dating in general was unpleasant enough that I very much considered keeping it that way. But having a compatible companion really is better.
Thank you for talking about giving the kids a deadline for being out of the house. I’m always thinking about will they come back and what will I allow/not allow. Y is moving in with a boyfriend. I want to be like, not so fast, you have time, blah blah blah. But I’m also like, hooray hooray! A boyfriend with rich parents! You’ll never have to move in with me!
But I just THINK that. (And say it to you.) I don’t know how I’d say it to to a kid. And don’t even really feel strongly – yet – that I wouldn’t let them live with me. I think the kids must have to be a lot older. I like seeing that you’ve set a deadline. It gives me a little comfort that I’ll be able to do it if necessary.
I wonder about whether we will ever put down such a deadline, or feel that we’ll need to. I don’t think we will. I’m the same age as you, apparently, but our kids are younger. We are encouraging our son, who is 20 and has finished his BA, to get a job and to move out, but we understand that this is a process with some back and forth,. i.e. we expect it’s likely he will move out for a while (maybe for the service) and then move back in for a while (maybe for grad school), and it’s hard to know when that stops.
My approach to this is that if he still needs to live with us in five years, we’ll convert the garage into an ADU and he can live there. Or we’ll move abroad and he can live in the house. And that’s not even considering his sister, who is only 14. I just don’t see a clear point when they are both never moving back home. I’d be happy if at some point one of them lives in this house with their family (maybe then _we_ would move into the ADU).
I grew up as the child of two runaways who got divorced before I was even conscious. I am well into family togetherness.
I met my husband when I was 23 and he was 22. We were married just over a year later and everyone told us how stupid we were for getting married. But soon it will be our 18th anniversary and some of our loudest critics in the early days are now on their 2nd divorce. I wish I could say it is always sunshine and rainbows and unicorns but really, he is the only person who was ever willing to stand up to my parents and I was the only person who didn’t care he had been raised in a cult.
When things aren’t great, it is easy to remember the way he piles his dirty socks in the kitchen when he takes off his boots at night or how the car inspection still isn’t done after 7 months of discussing it. When things are good, it is easy to remember how he cleans up animal messes so I don’t have to or how he signed up to be a leader in one of the kids activities even though he didn’t want to so he could spend more time with our teenager. When things are great, it is easy to remember that I drive him absolutely insane with my half finished crochet projects, hoarding tendencies with books all over the house, and how I angry I can become when someone in the house decides to fill a freshly cleaned space with things I didn’t know they had hidden somewhere else.
When we do chores together, like handwashing all of the dishes because we didn’t buy a house with a dishwasher but thought it was okay because we were going to renovate it 15 years ago, I make us tell each other the stories about us. About big and little moments. About the good and the bad. I really hope our children hear us and remember that this is what matters.
Some of my dearest friendships are those I have had the privilege of growing up with. I met my husband at 15, and we’re growing up together still as we enter our 30’s.
And this story feels so authentic 🤣
I love everything about this post – mostly because I can picture and feel it.
Jeff and I were 19 when we met – and we 100% grew up together. And we 100% are both the same people while also not being at all the same people we were then. I love growing old with him.
And I also remember a kid coming home from school for holidays but caught up in “college life” (so they are physically home but not entirely mentally home), but you take what you can get because THEIR HUGGABLE BODY is in your house!
I know a couple who were widowed before meeting each other. They were in their 70s when they came together, and while they are physically growing old together, they still have the ghost of their other spouses with them. It’s an interesting dynamic to see. They are comfortable sharing their life together, but the people they really “grew old with” are still part of it. All those years matter so much more than people realize.