The Spinster's Soliloquy

The family business of growing old.

My parents are getting old. Real old.

When I think about it for too long, I get a little queasy.

I’m incredibly fortunate to still have them in my late 40s, and they’re both relatively healthy in their early 70s. They’re still sharp. They use smartphones. They know how to spot an internet scam. They have social media accounts. My mother can send a GIF. My father can accidentally start a political argument with a stranger in three comments or less.

Their friends and relatives are dropping off one by one, which is a grim milestone of aging, but they’re handling it reasonably well.

Mostly.

I help them with their internet, streaming services, smart TVs, cable boxes, passwords, email accounts, and the mysterious technological phenomenon known as “it was just working yesterday.”

My father recently had his yard certified as a butterfly sanctuary. He takes this responsibility seriously. There are flowers planted specifically for pollinators, intentional puddles of water, and detailed updates on butterfly traffic patterns.

My mother, meanwhile, is preparing for either Armageddon or nuclear fallout. When questioned she nods and says, “It’s the end of times.”

Yikes.

The fact that they both watch approximately six hours of Fox News a day may or may not be influencing this prediction.

My father is nurturing butterflies. My mother is preparing for societal collapse. Somehow, they’ve remained married for over fifty years.

My brother is considerably less involved.

For years, he has operated under the assumption that our parents are being cared for by a magical invisible force. Apparently, that magical invisible force is me.

He rarely volunteers to help. He rarely volunteers to pay for anything. Recently, I’ve started nagging him into participation, which has produced modest results.

My parents don’t want to bother him.

Me, however?

Apparently, I exist solely on standby like a customer service representative.

“Can you come look at the TV?”

“Can you set up my MLB account?”

“Can you help your father move something heavy?”

“Can you explain why Netflix is asking for a password?”

No one ever asks if I’m busy.

I think there’s an assumption that spinsters simply wander the earth waiting for assignments.

Never mind that I have an ambitious summer reading list, a vegetable garden, and one of those elaborate lighted book nook kits sitting in a dusty box. I’ve been meaning to build it for months. At this point, I suspect I’ll finish it sometime after civilization collapses and my mother’s bunker is operational.

Meanwhile, my brother spends much of his free time drinking beer, watching movies, and corresponding online with women who are almost certainly not women.

I feel like he can take one afternoon away from his internet girlfriends to help Dad trim the tangelo tree.

Just one.

I’m not asking for sainthood.

The funny thing is, despite all my complaining, I love these people.

All three of them.

They’re strange. They’re stubborn. They’re occasionally exhausting.

But they’re mine.

Lately, I’ve found myself wondering why my life turned out so differently from what I expected. Why I never married. Why I never had children. Why I’ve spent so much of adulthood circling back to this family.

And when I think about it long enough, I find myself imagining that maybe this was the plan.

Maybe God looked at these three lovable weirdos and thought, “They’re going to need supervision.”

Maybe He looked at me and thought, “She’s the one for the job.”

It’s not the life I imagined for myself when I was twenty.

But when I picture my father tending butterflies, my mother stockpiling supplies for the apocalypse, and my brother getting catfished by someone claiming to be a 27-year-old swimsuit model, I can’t help thinking:

Yeah.

Maybe this is exactly where I’m supposed to be.