Tonight, as I was putting Jackson to bed, which has now become an almost nightly occurrence, he asked me a question which totally caught me off guard. "How do you know when you meet the person you want to spend the rest of your life with?" In those nanoseconds after he asked me, I'm sitting there on his bed trying to figure out how to explain to a 12-year old how I'm going to explain how I knew that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with his mother. My immediate response was, "Well, it's hard to explain, but you just know. It's a feeling that you get." I was hoping that would confuse him enough to stop the conversation. And then he really threw me for a loop, because he immediately followed it up by asking, "Is it when you picture yourself as an old man sitting next to her in rocking chairs on a porch in the country with rings on your fingers?" I can't speak for everyone on the planet, but for me that's about the best way I could put it, and I can't lie and say that I haven't had nearly that exact same thought about his mother. And as I'm sitting here writing, I'm completely amazed at the line of questioning and the similarity that this 12-year old's picture of what true love must look like to mine. Is it that basic of a human instinct? To want to spend the rest of your life with someone that you truly love and grow old with them and sit on a porch in peace rocking the day away with a symbol of your love displayed on your wrinkled fingers?
The longer I sat there with him, listening to him tell me about his burgeoning middle school romance, I was trying to figure out a way to explain to him that he's got a long time to worry about such things as "true love" and the "rest of your life" in a way that wouldn't scare the crap out of him. I mean let's face it, how many people find that ever? How many bad relationships have I endured before I finally met his mother? How long did that take? How do you explain to a 12-year old, that before you find the person you truly want to be with, you truly need to know yourself? And in order to get to know yourself, sometimes you have to go through some incredibly hard and painful periods of growth? How do you explain to someone who cannot understand that you can spend years just trying to find out who you are and that for a good number of those years you're really just not that intelligent? That your self-perception evolves over those years and that hopefully you never stop evolving, and the real key is to find that person who will evolve with you? And honestly, I cannot stress this enough, how do you tell him that it wasn't easy, that it didn't magically happen, that it wasn't wanted or planned, and that it wasn't instantaeous like it is in the movies? You can't tell him any of those things. All you can tell him is that "you'll just know."
Because it just happened. It wasn't all at once. It came in phases and instances. But when I knew, I knew. And once I knew, there was no turning back. And that realization was more powerful than any I have ever had. And once the knowledge hit me that this 12-year old's mother was the woman I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, I did imagine that we would someday be sitting on a porch, surrounded by our grandchildren, and telling them stories about each other and how we met. I always imagined a porch swing, but that's close to a rocking chair. I've always imagined myself in the country when I'm old.
Of course, by the time I realized that I couldn't tell him all of the difficulty it took me to get to this point, and that it took me over 33 years before I met the "one for me," he had finally moved on to less serious topics of discussion like how great he is at baseball and how he can't wait to go fishing with his friend and his dream about trying to kill terrorists but accidentally killing the president. So, hopefully, as far as he's concerned, I've confirmed his porch-vision, and informed him that "you just know." The rest he will figure out on his own. Just like I had to do.
