Please, More Of This: Couples Who Know How To Hang In There No Matter What

My parents have been married for 60 years, and I've watched every decade with wonder and appreciation.

I love how my dad is looking at my mom like a snack, lol.

I am going to try not to get too emotional as I write this story, because my parents, Benny and Annie Thomas, mean everything to me. I am an only child—not because they didn’t want more, but because that’s just the cards they were dealt. They were also so young when they got married—he was 21 and she was 18 when she became pregnant with me and they decided to go to the courthouse and make it official.

They didn’t always see eye to eye. My dad was raised in a traditional home where his mom did not work, but she had 9 kids, though. So when my mom wanted more independence and decided to get a job so she didn’t have to ask my dad for an allowance every time she wanted to buy pantyhose (lawd help us), there was tension, to be sure. She wound up at what was then New Jersey Bell, but is now Verizon, and worked her way up to a manager position until she decided to retire early and help me raise my own two kids. (Paying for daycare and scrambling to get home from New York City before daycare closed every afternoon was turning my hair grey.)

Mom has always been my shero—a working mom who still made time to come to my high school plays, chauffeur me and my silly friends to the movies and the mall, and sew Halloween costumes from scratch. (I took sewing classes at Singer but ask me if I ever made a costume for my two kiddos—nope. That is not my ministry.)

And I have so much respect for my dad, even though he can still be a stubborn know-it-all Scorpio who insists on having his way, lol. He moved from Fort Deposit, Alabama—where they are both from and where I was born—to New Jersey to find work. He wound up as a mechanic working the assembly line at a Ford plant. He then sent for me and my mom, and we moved to East Orange, New Jersey. He has always been a great provider, doing what he had to do to support us financially. He’s also a softie at heart, but never likes to show it. He decided to become his own boss, bought his own Peterbilt truck and worked for a company hauling groceries to different locations across the tri-state area. He never wanted to do long hauls because he always wanted to be able to come home to us at night.

Here’s what I have observed after years of knowing these two:

• Love almost never looks like what you see in the movies. But it does look like a gesture as simple as offering your arm to your spouse because you know she has trouble walking on her bad knee.

• Couples will argue and lines will be drawn in the sand. But then after a few days, you get over it and move on with whatever else life is demanding that you pay attention to. As my mom likes to say, “Shit happens.” *shoulder shrug*

• There is value in being with someone who grew up with you in the same small town, and who also experienced the same serious racist ridiculousness in Lowndes County Alabama as you did. They both knew they had to get out of there and never come back, and that’s been their bond to this day.

• If you can get through reading two newspapers, watching all the Sunday morning news shows, and reading magazines like The Nation, then debating about everything you’ve read, all at the kitchen table every weekend for 60 years without driving one another insane? Now that, my friends, is love.

There is no way I can do their epic relationship justice in this one small post, but I will tell you this: I have seen the best and the worst of them, but I know they love one another deeply, even if their stoic upbringing (which is a wall of protection they use because dammit life has always been hard out here for Black folks) makes them hold back sometimes. So, here’s to love and, please, more of it.