optional soundtrack: Marie Laforet - Paint It Black

I went to visit my sister yesterday, she lives in suburban New Jersey with her husband and their 4 year old son. They recently bought a rancher style home for about $350k, for which you can by a nice garage for here in Brooklyn. Thanks to my friend joint custody I am not legally allowed to live anywhere outside of 15 miles driving distance from a center point in Park Slope, so thats about southern Queens, lower Manhattan, all of Brooklyn and the top of Staten Island. Poor Tom signed up for this when he married me, so no schlepping off to the suburbs in Jersey until Ruby is out of high school in 7 years. For this I think we are relieved not to have to agonize over the option of leaving the city like many parents do, and because we love Brooklyn, and Tom works in the New York Harbor navigating ships, we couldn’t move far anyway. And who is to say that we can’t have a summer home upstate someday besides maybe the bank.
But sitting in my sister’s back yard made me think as to weather I could live in a place like this. And that made me think of how different my sister and I are. The place was great, huge house with two big yards, a big kitchen, big dog, a long driveway to fit their big cars, everything big. My entire apartment could have fit in their “great room”. Erica is really great, she laughs at my jokes, and she is a great Mom, she is a scientist and works for the Department of Environmental Protection inspecting soil and water at power plants and has worked there for close to 20 years and she shows dogs. To me she is so normal its weird. She wears sweatshirts with embroidered dogs on them, and travels to shows with her trailer and flat coat retrievers (black setter-like, really doggie dogs). …not that there’s anything wrong with that. Its just a little odd to me. She has political leanings to the right and at one point voted for Ross Perot. How did this happen? How did I end up so left of center on so many levels and have had such a different set of life experiences than her, and come from the same family? (…and yet we find we often share the same tools for coping.)
At one point I refused to go visit my parents or my sister because it was always me going to visit them. I think my parents had visited me like 5 times in the 7 years that I lived here. And my sister visited twice. And yet they would make me feel guilty for not going to see them over a weekend. So when I had the twins I said that it would need to be more like 50/50, for which I got a lot of hemming and hawing and I was told it was more difficult for them to visit me than it was for me to drive an hour and a half (with two infants) and visit them. I explained that I drive the same distance, pay the same tolls and look for parking when I return so I didn’t quite get that. That is when my sister said that I “pay the price for the lifestyle I choose.” …huh? It sounded as if when one crosses the Verazzano Bridge, they descend into a land of crossfire and hand grenades being detonated. That gangs of wild youth will car jack you and leave you stranded on a deserted street. Yes driving the Gowanus Expressway can be a little hairy, but I felt it was all fear based on ignorance so I just could not support it. So we had a big blow out over it and in the end it was decided that Brooklyn was outside of her comfort zone and that was that.
But it made me think…did I pay the price for my lifestyle? Setting aside the price I pay wherein my family is afraid to visit me…yes, I pay well over $2k a month for my small 3 bedroom apartment, and I have less choices and inflated prices at the supermarket, and I have to parallel park my smallish car instead of drive down a driveway, and am surrounded by lots of people. Eh, I dunno’ I see more benefits really. The city is amazing and so diverse and alive with arts and culture, there is so much to draw from.
At one point during our conversation we were talking about college, and my parents had paid for hers but wouldn’t pay for me to go and she said…”Well, you could have lived with our parents.” And to this I replied “No I couldn’t.” At 15 years old, I could not sit still in homogenized suburbia for one second longer. It made me physically ill to stay there. And now when I visit, the max I can stay is about two days without climbing the drapes and hanging from the ceiling. I get itchy and feel…well, out of my comfort zone. My sisters mentality is that what she has is the ideal and everything else is a compromise. She is the most conservative out of our family, me being the farthest left followed by my father and then mother. She chooses to live life tightly within the guardrails at all times, and I have lived life needing to know where the bottom of the pool is, and just how far I could swim to give strange vehicle and water analogies. To me, giving up 9/10 of my life experience to keep life in the center would be a compromise for me. And I know we both spend equal time finding balance. Her lifestyle was as much a choice as was mine.
Where we land politically is so hard wired into our personalities, and to what level or extreme depends on our life experiences. That is why it is so hard to change someone’s views on things. But it can be done. I have watched people including myself change their views, but this can only be when we take fear out of it, it is too great a motivator.
When I first started dating Tom, some of his family would send me mass e-mails of the religious right/conservative thinking sort, and my sister would do the same. Man, I got kicked off of that e-mail ring pretty darn quickly when I responded that: No, I didn’t think everyone should learn English or go home, or that I felt that if we were so interested in the troops in Iraq there was more that we could do as Americans other than react as consumers and refuse to buy a product or to buy one, or that we shouldn’t listen to everything our doctor tells us to do, etc…I was tossed out on my ear. But it was fascinating while it lasted.
My sister and I get along great, but we didn’t for the majority of our lives. We are respectful of each other’s political views at least, the lifestyle choice respect thing we are working on. Anyway, I am lucky to have her to go visit nonetheless. And until Brooklyn gets gentrified a lot more and gets rid of those pesky car-jackers and grenade launchers, It will be me driving to cozy Jersey.

…and for those who do not know what the hell I am talking about in the title for this post…go into your fridge and open a jar of something, and then come back and read it again.

Your response: