I love where I live – just outside of Washington, DC. I have access to an enormous array of cultural activities, plenty of outdoor adventures, and wonderful urban life all around me. I live in a great community which is politically active and very liberal, and neighbors here look out for one another. I am fortunate enough to have a beautiful house, a great family, a loving spiritual community, a bounty of good friends and satisfying work. I feel very lucky that I have a place where I belong. This is my little niche in the world.
But I never really thought I would leave my hometown, and I still miss it. There's a part of me that feels like I am doing my children a disservice by not raising them there, and another part that can’t believe that my children's hometown is going to be different from my hometown.
My home "town" happens to be New York City. I was born in Manhattan, lived in Queens until I was seven and then moved to Brooklyn where I lived until I left for college, returning for five more years after that. So I was both a child of 1970s New York (bankrupt city and public schools, crime ridden and graffiti-strewn streets and subways, and dirty, grimy, 42nd Street as hooker heaven), as well as a young adult making my way during the early 1980s (crack galore, muggings, sky high rents with low salaries and multiple roommates, liquid dinners, rampant homelessness and no chain stores yet infiltrating downtown.)
I wear those years growing up in New York like a badge of honor. The streets of the city are part of my DNA. Whenever I am back, I feel like I've recaptured something essential to me as soon as my feet hit the pavement. My nose knows where to go, and the sights and sounds and smells are familiar. It always takes a while for me to readjust to sleepy, suburban DC when I return.
This feeling of displacement is complex, and I imagine that it's true for anyone who has ever left home and returns only occasionally. I am torn between wanting to be a part of what I deliberately left behind, especially since it's such a vibrant, exciting place -- a place where many people set their wishes down and strive to live -- and being in a place where I've established my adult life.
My husband knows that whenever I come home from even a quick trek to New York, it takes days to shake it off, to wash the scent off of my skin and to stop ruminating about what it might be like to live there again. Would I be as successful? Would I find my niche?
One of the things I love so much about DC is that I feel very present and substantial. In New York, I feel like a tiny cog on an enormous wheel of machinery. And while I have long moved past the simultaneous fear and desire that everyone is looking at me all the time, I feel that, living in DC, I'm a little more noticeable than I am on the D train in Brooklyn.
My yearning to be back home returns me to thoughts of my children. How do they feel about their hometown? Will they have the same sense of pride about where they grew up when they are adults? And does it really matter, so long as you find a place in the world where you belong?
And most importantly, will at least one of them live in New York so I can get my fix on a regular basis?
Photo by ugod via Flickr
My parents recently found an old cassette tape, made when I was seven - the same age my daughter is now - as part of an ongoing correspondence we had with closely family friends who were temporarily living in Australia. I was struck by how at seven I totally sounded like Brooklyn (or a LI version of Brooklyn) but even more struck by the fact that my daughter doesn't sound that way at all! I, too, often miss the vibrancy of New York but have come to love living with my family in our current corner of the world.
Posted by: Stacy | Saturday, February 05, 2011 at 09:35 PM