These Days by Stephanie

There might be some of you out there who know who I am despite the first name nom de plume. Of course, one clue would be the blog’s title: These Days.I began writing the newspaper column These Days in the winter of 1996. At the time, I was the Lifestyles Editor for a Connecticut newspaper with three little kids (8, 10, and 12) at home in the suburbs of New York City. Mornings began at six a.m.: making breakfasts, packing lunches, gathering laundry, feeding our then four dogs, two rabbits, two hamsters and four ducks (rescued from a classroom hatching project because my kids knew they were headed to be cooked a l’orange and volunteered my services to save them). And in between the morning chores, there was me: trying to dress professionally and apply make-up, not to mention being civil to my husband who had the advantage of a commute to New York City which allowed him to bail at 7 a.m.

I’ve been told that I have a tendency to “over-function.” I know that I wanted my kids to have everything that I couldn’t have as a kid (although one of the “over-privileged” as my friend Jeff calls it) growing up in Manhattan  which included the menagerie. Understand, I am a dyed-in-the wool New Yorker who refers to the day my husband insisted we move to the suburbs as the day I was taken hostage. At the time we made our exodus, we had two kids: two-year-old David and six-month-old Ellie. My husband wanted a house and a yard. I wanted a doorman and an elevator. The transition wasn’t easy, and honestly, it took the third child and then nearly seven more years and going back to work once the third child, Ben, went off to school, to feel at home there. And home it became: Our house was the Mecca for every kid in the neighborhood. The wrap-around front porch in our old Victorian house was wall-to-wall kids once the weather got warm, and the garage apartment was their cold weather hang- out. But the city girl still lingered.

Anyway, during that winter of 1996, there was a snow day —  translating: the schools were closed, and the roads were truly impassable. I also had a blank front page of my section. In those days, email was nonexistent, and the home computer wasn’t linked to the office. But I had a fax machine, and there were the folks up in production. I had to think fast.

So, as the kids were running around the house in pajamas, fighting over which television show to watch, insisting I bake three different kinds of cookies, teaching our four dogs to Cha Cha, and I was slowly losing my mind as huge lacy snowflakes tumbled from the sky and stuck, it hit me: I’d write a piece about that day for the front page. I mean, talk about lifestyles! The piece was called Pizza Wars. I received dozens of letters from men and women who had similar days to mine:  a day when they didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, and These Days (the column) was born: Roughly 980 words on a weekly basis about raising our kids, friendship, marriage, working, running a home…and realizing how much we all share as we muddle through.

Now the “kids” are 21, 23, and 25, and in the last three years, life has changed in many ways. I mean, my oldest son just called to say he ran into an old high school friend who’s bald. I found that distressing (as did he which is why he called). I also find myself a full-time member of the sandwich generation – those of us who are the baby boomers often caught between the lives of their 20-something kids and aging and ailing parents. I didn’t expect my mother to suffer a stroke that would render her an invalid, and leave my father without his wife, companion and friend at the age of 90. Whereas once upon a time I thought the nest would empty and Mark (my husband) and I could trek across America with backpacks, I find myself sadly bearing a responsibility not anticipated when we become parents to our parents. Still parenting our children as they make their way in a tough world is different, palatable, and “normal” (whatever that is). Is it me or do we all long for those salad days when life was not as demanding…when life was led with abandon…when we could put a Flintstone’s Bandaid on a scrape, and snow days rocked our worlds ever so gently. Hindsight is always 20/20, right?

I did think that life would be different once we sold the house and moved back to Manhattan in January 2006. Although I worried about yanking Ben from the suburbs as he entered his freshman year in college, he took to the city like the proverbial duck to water. He loves Manhattan. He navigated the subways long before I had the courage to do that again after 20 years away.

Oddly, I have a love/hate relationship with Manhattan: I love the pulse, the energy, the convergence of the rivers where we live down by the Seaport. Living two blocks from Ground Zero does make those who live and work downtown here a little more gentle, and certainly allows us to never forget. But I see more sadness in the city now than I did when I pushed a stroller for those few years here with babies, and before that as a teenager in the late 60’s and early 70’s when “my” city was Bethesda Fountain and The Fillmore East. Did I not notice the homeless back in my teens? My guess is that I didn’t – I was either a typical self-involved teen or inured since I’d never known any place other than New York City. These days, I miss my front porch, the planters filled with geraniums, the pumpkins sitting on the stoop, the pristine snow-covered lawn. Riding the subway instead of tooling around in my station wagon has advantages (I can people- watch and read) and disadvantages (no more drives with the radio playing to clear my head). Apartment living doesn’t give us the space we had in the house even though, for the most part, my husband and I (and Walter, our six-year-old cockapoo) are the only tenants except when Ben is home for the holidays. It is, in a word, an adjustment. I never realized how much my husband liked to watch golf on TV. I never realized how much I relished the privacy and sanctuary of my “home office.”

As for blogging, this is yet another new forum and learning curve. I confess: When my husband suggested that I re-invent the column as a blog, I had to look up the definition in Wikipedia. It wasn’t that I was unfamiliar with the word, I just had no idea how to go about it and truly what it was. So here is These Days once again and once a week…with some old columns here and there as “Those Days” when it seems appropriate to look back at a glance because sometimes it feels like life happens in a synapse.

For sure, life is different “These Days.” The places have changed, we’re all that much older, curves have been thrown, storms weathered, the kids have moved out and onwards and upwards, and I’m still muddling through…Aren’t we all?

On January 25, we left our house for the last time. The rooms were empty. Floors “broom clean.” Stains on carpeting, and impressions where furniture once set, were glaring reminders of what once was. There were two things that made me cry the day we left: when a good friend came to say goodbye, and of course, as we stood in the kitchen for the last time before closing the door behind us. Nothing surprising. It wasn’t a sense of grief. It wasn’t even sadness, really. It was just emotion that comes with change. Moving is such an emphatic expression of putting a part of one’s life into another place in time, going so obviously from past to present, with the reality of the future coming with such immediacy. It all happened in that rapid synapse as we walked out the door. It was an oxymoron as memories flooded through us like a tsunami, and yet there was also a sense of slow motion, although we couldn’t bear to linger. Our swift exit seemed both an eternity and a a quick goodbye.

The first week in this New York City apartment was fraught with “The Move.” Deliveries, furniture assemblies, and repairs brought a constant flow of people. Finding places for dishes and clothing, finding the aisles in the unfamiliar supermarket, learning to use my new stove, racing around to the Department of Motor Vehicles, the post office, the bank, the hardware store. And most of all, trying to figure out exactly where we live on this southern tip of Manhattan where east side meets west side and tiny, twisting streets converge and merge, and then abruptly end. We live one block east of the Seaport, and four blocks due west of Ground Zero. The narrow cobblestone lanes are filled with obstacles: construction crews erecting new condos and still repairing damage from the terror, and concrete barriers against intruders.

There is a juxtaposition of peddlers and tired storefronts next to tony shops like Brooks Brothers and Abercrombie’s (an Hermes is opening in the Spring), and if you walk close to the Seaport, there is still the faint smell of fish in the air on a warmer day. The neighborhood is the epitome of the Melting Pot. Above all, as old meets new, and east meets west, there is a palpable sense of courage and gentleness in this part of Manhattan unlike the rest of this island. Despite the bustling about in what is the high-powered financial and federal districts, and an obvious police presence, there is a strong sense of community witnessed by signs in nearly every shop, and on every pushcart, that say ” We Won’t Forget.”

When we first moved to the suburbs in 1985, I was lost. I was born and raised in Manhattan, and all points that required a bridge or a tunnel were unknown to me. In 1985, my first two children were two years and six months, respectively, and I didn’t have the social contacts of school. It was also the dead of winter. A neighbor directed me to a shopping area that was, I later realized, Central Avenue in Yonkers,  a drive that took forever, and strip malls that overwhelmed me with mega-stores. In search of something tamer, I ventured out one night with the babies after they had dinners and baths, bundled them in their blanket sleepers, nestled them in their car seats, and drove the roads. It became my nightly routine, and ultimately I found a small supermarket, stationer, nail salon, dry cleaner, drugstore, and toy store…The drive was also my companion, as my young husband worked late hours building a practice: the deejays chatting in between the hit parade on the car radio were welcome company for me as the babies slept.

But now, I look back and wonder: where did I get the nerve to go out at night, no cell phone, not knowing where I was headed with two “babies on board?” But it was an adventure, and the nights would have been lonely without the drive,  and I had the courage of youth.

Once again, I am finding my way in unfamiliar territory. There appears to be little rhyme or reason to the streets with names rather than sequential numbers. But I am learning, though just shy of tossing bread crumbs behind me. I walk endlessly. This morning I timed my 10-minute walk to a dance studio (oh, how I missed my old one)  after not having danced in nearly a month, and mustering up the courage to try a new place where I would be neither a new “girl” nor just one of the “girls” who had been there forever. I brought the average age of the class up to roughly 22, but I danced.

So, the question is, can you take the girl out of the suburbs and take the suburbs out of the girl? Giving up my car was a sure sign of letting go of suburbia. Unlike the other pedestrians, I find myself waiting patiently at Don’t Walk signs, and proceeding with caution when I can legally and safely step off the curb.

Maybe it isn’t a question of taking the girl out of the suburbs as much as it is a question of finding the girl again since she’s been relocated. I truly do have to find that inner “girl” because she had a fearlessness when it came to the Unknown that the woman, wife, and mother has lost to some extent. I think we lose our sense of abandon when our children start walking and ducking the corners on glass tables, then driving, and going to parties, and having boyfriends and girlfriends: we remember what we were like as teens and wonder how we ever made it through those years unscathed.

And so, I literally put one foot in front of the other as I try to memorize the street names and figure out which way they’ll take me. I duck the “crazies,” knowing that it’s best not to walk under those cloistered construction scaffolds if someone who’s ranting and raving is heading toward me. I remind myself that I really can’t get “lost” and that if I do, it will only be temporary since all points meet here in the middle. I keep reminding myself about those nights I drove around a vast unknown with babies in winter. And this morning, at the new dance studio, as I looked around realizing I was old enough to be everyone’s mother, I told myself that no one was looking at me anyway…I was there to dance.

And that’s what it all boils down to, really: This is yet just another new dance. It’s just a question of learning the steps.