the toxic impulse of nostalgia
“…I consider nostalgia to be a toxic impulse. It is the… yearning delusion that the past was better [than the present]…” - John Hodgman, in Vacationland
Last night, we opened a package of cookies from the Publix bakery and my husband made a pot of coffee. A young couple, both in their early 20s, sat on the couch in our living room. They are getting marred in a little over a month. My husband is doing the wedding, and when he agrees to perform a ceremony, he asks that the couple engage in four sessions of premarital counseling with him (and me, if they agree).
There is nothing like two people who are about to get married and are excited about getting married. Their enthusiasm is contagious, and for a few minutes last night I wished I could travel in time back to when Christian and I were in the same spot. We were both 22, and the whole world was ahead of us. We had almost no money, we both had entry level jobs, and we couldn’t have been happier. We didn’t have kids yet.
But upon further reflection, I realized I didn’t actually want to go back to that time. Life before kids was simpler in a lot of ways (although for us, that season lasted only nine months). And not having much money does make some decisions simpler, such as whether you should go out to eat (no, you shouldn’t, because you only have $200 to spend on food this month).
And yet—we were children then. Christian’s prefrontal cortex was not fully developed, and mine was only barely. We had been out of college for a year, and while both of us had lived relatively independently when in college, we had little experience living as adults in the real world. In the best possible sense, we had no idea what we were doing, but even worse, we had no idea that we had no idea what we were doing.
Case in point: We were not using any form of birth control. We knew the process by which a baby is conceived. We knew that without prevention, this process could theoretically happen at any time given the right set of circumstances. We felt we were ready to be parents and were excited about having kids. And so, when I got pregnant only a few weeks after our wedding, we were too dumb not to be excited.
Not that a new baby isn’t exciting, of course. I had done lots of babysitting and nannying and had two younger siblings. Christian loved kids and they loved him. But we didn’t have any idea what it would be like to be two quasi-adults, married, in a tiny duplex, with no money, and another human for whom we were one hundred percent responsible.
We shared a car, and our jobs were close to each other, so we’d get ready for work together each morning. Christian would drop me off at my office and drive to his job. After work, I’d wait on the sidewalk for him to come pick me up. When the frequency of my doctor’s appointments increased, I’d drop him off for work so I could have the car. I learned how to cook by trial and error and we scrimped and saved so we could fully pay off Christian’s student loans from college before the baby came. We didn’t have a TV. We didn’t even have a bed frame until a month before I gave birth, at which point my mother-in-law came to visit and insisted that my husband needed to buy a bed frame so it would be easier for his pregnant wife to get out of bed to pee in the middle of the night. She gave us money to buy one, and we did, and we used that same bed frame until only a few months ago.
Our tiny duplex had almost no insulation, which was OK in summer and fall in South Carolina; we turned on fans when it got too hot. Our electric bill would have been astronomical if we had used the thermostat. But when winter set in, the hardwood floors were like walking on ice, and my increasing middle-of-the-night bathroom trips felt like sitting on a frozen throne. Eventually, Christian’s mom also convinced us to turn the heat on. (I do want to note that I was the one who didn’t want to turn the heat on.)
The day we brought our firstborn, Stephen, home from the hospital, I carried him into our room and set him on the bed while Christian brought in everything else. I had been using a body pillow to sleep more comfortably. It was in the middle of the bed, so I set tiny Stephen on top of it because I assumed he would be more comfortable with more cushion underneath. I turned to get something out of my bag, and when I turned back around, Stephen was no longer on the body pillow. He had somehow maneuvered his 2-day-old body in such a way that he flipped off the body pillow onto the bed. He was now face down on our bed on the other side of the body pillow. That was the first time I felt a sense of panic and confusion that hospitals just let two random people take a living, breathing baby home from the hospital without any kind of vetting process.
It is easy to romanticize those early months of marriage now, and there is nothing wrong with that. They were full of joy. But I do not want to go back. If I did, think of all the things I’d lose. Our other three children. All of the mountaintop experiences Christian and I have shared. What about the sorrows? No, I wouldn’t trade those either. Because although the pain has been deep, and the bruises and scars remain, we went through them together. And by God’s mysterious providence, our suffering did not tear us away from each other. It knit us together even more tightly, as we experienced at times feeling like the only person we could really trust was the other.
Nostalgia is not always a toxic impulse; there is value in remembering the past and looking at old pictures and sharing memories of what feels like a different life. But to wish to return to the past is to wish away the people we’ve become, who contain a library of knowledge about ourselves, about our marriage, about each other, carefully transcribed over a decade and a half.
Now we are old, at least compared to when we had our first baby. That baby is now old enough to get his learner’s permit, and the other kids are all past sleepless nights and potty training. Everyone can put their shoes on and get themselves buckled into the car.
I think I’ll stay here in 2025, even as our bodies begin to fail us and we mostly just are tired all the time. I’m not sure we know what we’re doing much better than we knew at age 23, but there is one key difference: most of the time, we know we don’t know what we’re doing. We just keep moving forward, one step at a time.
Oh my goodness, this is so good! Definitely touching a tender heart this Monday morning. ❤️