I wouldn’t be 20-something again

of knees and friends

TLW and I took some guests who stayed on in New Hampshire after Daughter #1’s wedding up to see the iconic Cape Neddick Light (AKA The Nubble) last week. The Nubble sits by itself on a rocky little island separated from the shore by just a hundred feet or so. If you want to get get as close as possible, you can scramble over rocks to get to the water’s edge. Scrambling over rocks on Maine beaches was always something I did without much thought until relatively recently. In my fifties now, I find that sometimes my knees have become occasionally unreliable at bearing weight if I suddenly ask them to bear up at an odd angle. Or when I climb the stairs. That becomes highly problematic when scrambling over large rocks with big gaps rocks and sharp edges and places where if you slip, you will break something. I used to really love rock hopping, and now I find I must be much more deliberate, and that takes some of the fun out of it. It’s still fun, but I have to go slow, putting a foot down, then checking to make sure the knee will agree to support the angle. It’s just part of getting older.

At Daughter #1’s wedding last week, we invited a number of our Army friends - couples whom had been part of Daughter #1’s life growing up. SInce we were far from home for the vast majority of my Army career, these were people who were like a second family to us, and to our children. Two of the couples were from our very first duty assignment in El Paso, Texas. We were all far from home, we were all newly weds, and we were all working full time for the first time. We were at the very beginning of making lives for ourselves. We were 20-somethings together, going through a period that human development scholars call emerging adulthood. 

Emerging adulthood was originally thought to include the years 18-25, but now scholars say it extends to 18-29. It is a period of exploration and transition as we try to find our initial place in society. We look to break free of our parents and establish our own financial independence, we look for a life partner, and we start to define who we are. While we are breaking free of our parents’ influence, we are also looking around us to see what other people our age are doing to get advice and to have an example, and to help gauge whether we are succeeding or not. These two couples go all the way back to that time for us. We spent time together navigating what it meant to be adults, to be married, and, for the guys, to be Army officers.

One specific task during this period is the school-to-work transition. Whether you leave high school and go to work, or you delay by going to college, you eventually finish school during this period and enter the workforce. For me, and for my friends, that meant becoming Army officers and learning what that meant. Two of us were ROTC grads and one was a West Point grad, so we had all been told what that meant, but being trained and actually doing it are always two different things. 

My journey through those early career years was rocky. Had TLW not gotten pregnant toward the end of my first tour, I would have left the Army to pursue other opportunities. Being a good lieutenant involves a lot of attention to detail and project management-like skills that I can comfortably admit now are not my strong point. While I did well enough, I did not enjoy the work and did not feel the natural reward of being good at something. It wasn’t until some years later that I found my way. During that time I did begin my business education, starting to take classes in accounting and later finance, and without knowing it, was launching myself on my journey to being a business educator, though that would come some 18 years later. At the time, I didn’t know it would all work out. At the time I worried constantly that I would not find work that I was good at, that I truly enjoyed, and that would allow me to take care of a family. At times, I felt like I was going to fail. But it was with friends like these that we navigated those times together. We talked about work constantly, figuring out how to handle situations as a supervisor, consoling each other in the frustrations of learning how to deal with the emotional toll of those challenges. But we also talked to each other about being young husbands and young fathers. The women were all pregnant together and supported each other through that profound transition to motherhood. None of us came from wealthy families, so we were learning things like how to save money and invest for the future so we could climb eventually into stable middle class lives.  

As much as we supported each other, there was a degree of competition as well. I think this is healthy at that stage. We pushed each other and looked at each other as standards. If one was achieving in some way, the rest of us tried to follow. Even the women were in a bit of a competition to see which of them could get pregnant first (we won). It was a virtuous competitiveness that was tempered by - and I can say this now because I am so much older and remembering - love. 

I look back now with calm at that turbulent time in our lives. It’s a calm that comes from having come through to the other side. To have crossed the rocky passages and not have fallen, or at least to not have fallen so far or hard that we couldn’t get back up and keep going. It was fun and exciting and scary and at times disappointing and at times exhilarating. I hate to admit that we hadn’t seen each other as couples for more than a decade, but it was absolutely magical to spend time together again at this next life event, as our own children navigate their emerging adulthood and begin to take the steps away from us that we took together.

Being young and having good knees gives you the resilience to hop from thing to thing. If one thing doesn’t work, you can pivot to something else, and you can keep doing it until you find the path you are meant to be on. In our mid-fifties now, we’ve mostly become the people we are going to become. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t excitement and growth ahead. Every stage of life presents its challenges and opportunities. Yet, we aren’t blank slates anymore; we are well-worn novels, with cracked (crackling) spines. Seeing my old friends again helped me remember how important they were during those years. One thing notably gone when we came back together was the sense of competition. Our lives have diverged in such fundamental ways since those years in El Paso when we were essentially blank slates that it would be irrelevant today. Instead we were able to share our successes and failures with love.  

I wouldn’t be twenty-something again. It was hard. I would like my twenty-something knees back, though. But I will accept the trade off of creaky knees in exchange for having arrived where I am at. When we said goodbye to our friends, we promised we would not let so many years intervene again. The journey is important, but who you choose to bring along with you makes all the difference.