Hi, loves. 🌿

On the joys and perils of (sort of) going home

The first year I lived in New York, I worked at a yoga studio, checking people into class. One of my weekly shifts ended close to 10pm, and I’d regularly close up shop, walk to the subway on the corner of 14th Street and 6th Avenue and then, seeing that I’d just missed an F train home to Brooklyn, start crying on the platform.

I’m not sure when this pattern ended, but it did. One day you learn that you will miss a lot of trains by just a split second and you will have to wait. Another will come along, in two minutes or in twenty. There was, in New York at least, no way to know. When we moved to Vienna and there were markers everywhere telling you how soon the Ubahn, bus or tram was coming, I was shocked. How…civilized.

I told my daughter this story when we were in the city last week, one of many stories I shared as we trudged along the streets that I spent over a decade of my life living on. I was trying to impart to her that she wasn’t the only one who found New York hard, that for most of us — perhaps all of us who didn’t grow up there — there was a major adjustment period, months or years of just trying to survive, of doubting whether you could really hack it, of being just utterly exhausted and defeated by it all, of feeling like everyone else knew how to do this but you.

For all of us that meant something different — could we afford it, could we find a place to live that wasn’t infested with cockroaches or rats or terrible roommates, could we make friends, find community, find a job, make it, could we handle how impossibly hard it all felt? — but it was present no matter the details. It was part of the gauntlet of making yourself into a New Yorker.

And then one day you realized you weren’t crying when the train slipped off just as you ran down the steps. You didn’t feel sad and scared when you came back into the city from time away. You felt most at home riding all those trains to wherever you were going. You, like everyone else, were just living your life, and your life now was right here.

It snowed!

Being a tourist in New York is a whole other project, and being there with your family — whom you never really lived there with — is yet another one. This trip wasn’t unlike the one we took to Paris almost 18 months ago, but this time, the stakes were all too high, higher than we are in Paris, stop fucking complaining. I wanted my kid to love it. I wanted her to see all that I did: the kindness and warmth of the people on the streets, the energy, the excitement and buzz of it all. All the tiny shops and delicious hole-in-the-wall restaurants. The stages she might one day find herself on. The best art in the world. As my friend Luisa Weiss — who also lived in the city without her kids and then brought them to visit — so aptly put it, it’s like they can smell our desperation.

But, like a lot of kids who grow up in a place like Los Angeles — or perhaps anywhere, really, that has space and sunlight and quiet and cars — she was completely overwhelmed, and as a result, I was, too, to some extent. I noticed anew so much of what you learn to tune out when you actually live there: the noise, the grime, the crowds, the rush of bodies, the sheer will it takes to get from one place to another and then another, the homeless people, the many people talking to themselves on the street or yelling at you, the shit on the sidewalks. I could go on, you know I could. At some point, after passing yet another disturbing street scene, I turned to her and said, the secret is to not look. What a thing to say to a kid! Don’t notice the people suffering all around you! I was immediately reminded of a night, decades earlier, when I was walking on the Lower East Side with one of my best friends. This friend had grown up blocks from where we were. When she saw a homeless man sitting out in the cold, she went into a pizza place to buy him a slice. So much for not paying attention.

Eldridge Street Synagogue

My husband is far more even keeled and sane about these things; he is far more interested in offering her an experience than of dictating what her reaction to it should be (and now you know why I need therapy). We have no idea what she’ll say about it all in a few years, he says, and even if she still ends up saying she hated it, it’s fine. Of course, he’s right. And as a person who was scared of New York as a child, and grew to love it so much I never imagined leaving (oops), I know things can change. Or maybe they won’t! Many, many people say: New York? Not for me.

While in Cambridge, we went to London, Paris, Lisbon and Vienna, and her feelings about those places were all over the map and I tried, as best I could, to not get too invested (reader: mostly, I failed). The point was to show her as much of the world as we could. The point was not to make her love any particular thing.

But New York is different. Perhaps because it is where I lived my entire adult life before she was born and I wanted to show her all it meant to me; perhaps it’s because it’s still my barometer for every other city; maybe it’s because while I don’t miss living there, I do still miss it, something about it, something about being part of it, something about my youth; there’s something about that time being irrevocably gone that still hurts. Maybe it’s none of those things, and it’s as simple as: how could you hate something I love so much? And why on earth do I care so much?

And yet, she’s still singing the songs from Hadestown and talking about how amazing the show was. She has worn nothing but the sweatshirt she bought that says “New York” from a shop we had to visit three times; she hasn’t taken off the bracelet she made at a tiny store a few blocks from my uncle’s place in the village. She enjoys telling everyone how much she hated it there, how she will never go again, how happy she is to be back in California. She had an experience. So did I. What else, in the end, can we hope for?

Sending love,

Abs xox

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