Would YOU Move?

Our apartment is filled with piles. Of books, toys, legos, CDs, puzzles, backpacks…Some of it is the subject of “please put that away,” “please put that away,” PLEASE put that AWAY.” But lots of those piles are not interim piles, oh no. Those are permanent piles: that’s where those things belong: next to the desk, behind the couch, alongside the already full bookshelf, under the TV.

I daydream about more space. About having one of those kitchens where people sit and chat while I whisk together some lovely meal that we will eat in a separate dining room while my children are in yet another room watching TV, thus allowing the grown-ups to have dinner without also having to listen to the theme song from “Spongebob Squarepants.”

Ahhh....more closets, shelves, extra rooms, maybe even an attic where Husband could stash all those Very Important Spare Computer Parts…more space would solve all our problems, right? That’s what I thought, until yesterday, when Husband and I were offered jobs at a relatively prestigious academic institution in the Midwest—the Midwest that is not Chicago (a city I love). This was it: we could escape to the land of many closets and cheap real estate, and leave dirty, crowded, vertical Manhattan behind.

Why do I live here with a family, I asked myself on the jam-packed 14D bus, glaring at a teen-ager sprawled across a seat while my kindergartner stood in the aisle hanging onto a pole for dear life. Why do I live here with a family, I wondered, as I forked over approximately a gazillion dollars for two tiny bags of groceries. What am I thinking raising children here, I thought, as I walked home with my 4th grader after school, past a newstand bedecked with magazines advertising “BIG JUGS” and “BUTTS.” 

Of course we’re going to move, I decided later, as I walked to another after-school pickup, down on the Lower East Side.  Living in New York with kids is insane. Certifiable.

But then…notice something about all this shlepping? No cars. And I know for a fact that it's almost impossible to function in the non-Chicago part of the midwest without a car. Do I really want to haul people all over town in a car? I know, I know, you get used to it and my friends who have decamped to the ‘burbs assure me that it’s not that bad and the car becomes a little living room on wheels.  But is a living room on wheels really what I should be aspiring to?

As I walked from Union Square to Avenue D, where my kindergartner goes to school, I went by any number of community gardens and then through Tompkins Square Park, where a hawk has made one of the tall plane trees his winter home. I passed the newly opened pretzel place, Sigmund’s, which smells so good that it takes every ounce of willpower NOT to go in and buy a warm gruyere and paprika pretzel. I got a text from the babysitter asking what time she should come over and I remembered that Husband and I wrangled tickets to the opera—the real-live Met, not the HD-TV simulcast. Then over the long weekend, the boys have a skating lesson at Bryant Park; the older boy has a (free) dance class as part of the National Dance Institute, and we might spend Monday splashing around in the waters of Spa Castle, in the heart of Queens. Or maybe we’ll spend time doing the kindergartner’s favorite thing: perusing the armor at the other Met, the Met with the chariots and the mummies.

Does that range of choices balance out the fact that my kids don’t know the joy of a summer night in a small town, running across the damp grass in their bare feet? Or the sense of peace that comes from watching trees go still while purple thunderclouds build up along the horizon?  Urban friends claim that those things—running barefoot, summer thunderstorms—can be purchased for the cost of a beach rental, but that you can’t rent the ability to go from opera to skating to mummies in one weekend.

They might have a point. But all those choices don’t help me find a permanent home for all those piles still decorating my apartment.

This is an original NYC Moms Blog post.