its good to have goals

In my house we are very goal oriented. On the wall is a chart for “Good Listening” and a chart called the “Poop Chart” where you get a star whenever you make a poo in the potty. If the kids fill up the chart they get (tons of praise) and a special treat of their choosing (within reason, usually ice cream from the ice cream truck). We have words of praise for speaking without whining and using your words well. If you eat your dinner, you get desert. For Ruby, if she cleans her room, is respectful and honest and keeps in close contact, she gets more freedom and trust and sometimes more stuff she wants. If you sit down and talk to her about what she wants to do with her life, she will say that she wants to be a famous actress and if that doesn’t work out, a writer. But first she will travel for a couple of years before college. Eh, well maybe she figures out how in time… But right now she lacks the practical skills to understand that it takes things like money to travel. I think I dread those days (years) the most when she will get a reality check after high school. I did the same thing. I was pretty sure I would go off to a big college and be famous somehow. But harsh reality and lack of privilege blew that out of the water and I resorted to plan B which was pretty much survival. Still there was something in me that made me feel that I would not be satisfied with mediocrity (suburban Jersey) and was determined to get ahead in a career and live in the biggest city I could find (conveniently an hour away). I don’t think it was that I felt I was better than other people, but I knew that I would never be able to sit still in a small town and not need to know what else was out there.

The other day my family and I were driving down Route 286 to go celebrate my Mother’s birthday at my sister’s house. From the third row of the Durango Marlowe said “I hava go pee pee”. And we pulled over into a parking lot of a condo development circa 1980 something so that we could bust out the Pottette right there on the fertilized sod separating one line of parked cars from another. Ruby looked out and said “What is this place… people live here?” For her it was as if we had landed in some alien landscape and she expected the cast of Yo Gaba Gaba to pop out from behind the shrubs and waddle towards the car like zombies. “Um, those are condos, pretty much where most people in the United States live”. She was honestly amazed and said that it looked depressing. This is from my Brooklyn 13 year old who said upon return from summer camp of her co-campers in Pennsylvania that a Brooklyn 13 year old is like a PA 14 year old. And I wondered who was the one more sheltered. I hope she does get to travel after high school, but I hope that she drives across the US and gets a sense of how most people live; and see farms and small towns and industry and get that feeling (as all traveling should) that she (and New York) are not the center of the universe.

As we were parked in the parking lot I watched a woman leaving her brick fronted condo that was next to about 50 others that looked exactly alike, I wondered what her life was like. She looked like she was dressed for work in polyester slacks and a blouse and she got into her old crappy car and drove away. And I wondered if she owned the place or rented. And was this for her a nice home that she had worked hard to buy? Or was she resigned to the fact that with her salary, this was the most that she had hoped to achieve. Or was this a place that was a stepping stone to what she felt was her true potential which was to own her own house someday. I didn’t know this woman or anything about her, maybe she had overcome great obstacles to get to where she was in life. Maybe she was happy and house proud and it didn’t matter at all that her house was the exact same lay out as her 49 neighbors, and that she heard the sounds of the highway and that the area between the sidewalk and the curb was her lawn, and the parking lot in front of her house butted up against a Wallgreens. Maybe it was just enough.  But I judged her anyway and titled (pigeon-holed) her a representative and advocate for all dwellers of early eighties constructed condos everywhere. Maybe because I have spent the better part of a year looking at homes to buy and going through all of the hoop jumping associated with trying to buy one, my mind is focused on this kind of thing. And maybe I make the wrongful assumption that everyone wants to buy a house also. Tom and I would look at houses and decide that one house or another wasn’t good enough, or wasn’t in a good enough neighborhood. We would feel a little guilty walking through a house knowing that it was probably someones prized possession and wasn’t something we would ever consider living in. It was so much easier to look at properties without the owner home. But we had a list of criteria and decided to stick to it and be willing to compromise on some things (like aesthetics, distance to shops, the model of house we preferred, etc) and not on others (like space, school district, busyness of street, neighborhood, etc). Maybe some of it was just where we saw ourselves within a class. And some of it was just a matter of taste. Some part of this decision also had to do with how we were raised and taught what was of value. They were some tough questions to ask ourselves… What does moving up look like and how high up can I get? What qualities of life and standard of living do I think I deserve?

Last year in March the airplane poked out from under the clouds and in its decent, flew a loop around Rio just as the sun was rising. It was a magnificent sight. All of the windows of the endless high rises reflected orange and gold. There were miles and miles of high rises sticking up from the trees below. My face pressed up against the glass of the airplane window while my daughter slept in the seat next to me. The off white apartment buildings ran up and down the hills from the ocean to the mountains. I had never seen anything like this, I had no idea there were so many people who lived here. I imagined the people inside, waking up one by one to start their day. Their whole lives complicated and filled with relationships and histories. I wondered what motivated these people individually to get up and put the coffee on and start the day, what things did they have to do and what achievements did they hope to reach. Maybe a generation or so ago someones ancestors came out of the jungle, or from a small town or up from the south out of slavery hoping for a chance at a better life. People came to Rio because that was where the work was. And this is how they live here. There below me passed a million stories of success and failure, and of achievements and dropping out. If I lived in this town I would live in a high rise too, maybe a newer construction up on a hill, and that would be the best I could hope to achieve. I could not live in a high rise apartment in New York. I don’t care if it had a view, a weight room – sauna and pool and a doorman… it would make me uncomfortable and depressed. I lived in hotels for many years and all that convenience is a little bit sterile for me. I keep thinking of Fight Club and the flaming yin/yang coffee table. Not enough individuality in the cookie-cutter floor plan. Too much Ikea and recycled air.

At my sister’s house my sister asked me if I wanted to stop by a local farm and buy some milk, it was almost two dollars for a half gallon. It wasn’t organic so I said no even though it said on the carton the cows were not fed hormones. I told her I spent $5 for a half gallon of organic milk, and we went through one of those a day in our house. My father who was listening to us said “I don’t know how people can live like that.” And I told him that we didn’t have any choice. That was how much it cost if you wanted to buy organic milk in the city. And people live there because that is where the jobs are …and people’s families.” And that I couldn’t live anywhere else (oh, and that I legally have to live within 15 miles of Park Slope). We make the most of what we can within the parameters we have to work with.

On the way home from  my sister’s house we took Route 202 in NJ back up North. Along the road were older houses that were not set back at all. Tom said that he could never live in a place where the highway was going through his front yard. I said that chances were that those houses were there when the highway was a dirt road. I thought about the people who lived in the houses, and how maybe the house had been handed down within the family over a hundred years and the family was proud of the house and living next to the sounds of the highway was all they had ever known. My home in Brooklyn is just a row house  in a half working class Irish and half yuppy neighborhood. There are mosquitoes breeding on my roof, my street is getting more and more busy with truck traffic, I have no yard and I pay too much rent. There are many, many people who wold look at my house and wonder how I could live here, and I know that judgementalness hurts. Even though, by Brooklyn standards, I have a big apartment in a coveted neighborhood. My new neighbors downstairs have been showing the place off to friends all week. I would not last more than a week in a rural or suburban setting, I would feel out of place and get terribly bored. For Tom and I, our big goal in life has been to find a nice home to raise our children. This is where we are at. Adults with adult goals. Our own goals take a back seat to what we need for our kids to be healthy and happy. We make decisions that enable us to continue to feed our family before our egos. But still, there is a bit of ego in buying a house. A bit of a declaration of Who the hell do I think I am?

I have been told that one of the ways to stave off depression is to set out attainable goals and achieve them little by little. Start small and eventually build up your self esteem and confidence and eventually get yourself out of the mindset that everything is just an exercise in futility and that life is just pushing a boulder up a hill only to have it roll you over in the end. I am thankfully not depressed these days, but I really should be, considering. My life seems to be a series of lists of stuff to do that never gets anywhere near finished. When once I had a job where I could plow through 300 e-mails a day and practically do two jobs and get shit done yesterday… I now am lucky if I get a shower in once a week. And I am lucky if I get one thing done off of my list over the course of three or four days. I have been stuck in the fast forward passage of time and the molasses of movement that pregnancy/infant/toddler land puts you in for about two and a half years now. I am as task oriented as I was as an Administrative Assistant (I think I was called that), but now I am my own boss and my hours are more, the pay less and now I only eat lunch standing up. Making too many lists of goals seems to be half of my problem, I can’t get past the “shit I gotta do” let alone get to the goals (stuff I wanna do). I used to tell people who were new to being a parent that if they got half of what they wanted to get done, they were doing good. With three little ones, it is now more like less than a quarter if anything off the list. This has been one of the hardest things to get used to. I no longer set myself up with unreasonable goals such as “I will floss everyday” and “I will set my alarm for 5am and do yoga every morning.” As lifestyle choice-y and just plain maintenance as those things are, I can’t ever get it together to do those things daily. I lack the discipline. Strangely enough, I would have a better chance of raising money for and completing a walk-a-thon or organizing the logistics for a world tour for a 25 person traveling party or birthing two large twins than taking a vitamin every day (needless to say, I am not “on the pill”). Some discipline might make me a happier person perhaps. But for now, ill stick to trying to reach 1/4 of my goals. I finished one out of four books I had set out to read this summer, so I am right on track. But the goals to complete a NY Times crossword, jog (or is it called running now) and learn a language has moved so far down the list that I think they have fallen right off the page.

Honestly I have long term goals and a plan and all… but my big personal goals these days are just to try and be a good parent, and raise healthy and happy children. And to try and be a more patient and peaceful person. And to write, and write and write. Without a creative outlet I get depressed. Sometimes a week will go by and I haven’t had the chance to write and I can feel the uneasiness and irritability start to creep in. At this point I know my nature and I should not mess with what gives me balance. The big challenge is that the urge to write and never seems to be at the time when I have a window of free time, and when I do get a window, I feel pressure to hurry up and be creative. As much as I would like to drink a bottle of wine and write by candle light listening to old PIL albums at 4am, thats just not a good idea. I don’t lament the time when I was single and young, now I look forward to being old and my kids are grown and I can catch up on all my reading and writing.

Tom and I have goals set out for the family. Places we want to take our kids and traditions we want to have with them. Right now we have been thoroughly obsessed with buying this house we settled on. We are at the end of the process and half in boxes ready to go.  We found something that fit everything we wanted, now its up to the bank to decide its worth what we are willing to pay. Its a long process, once we are past it we will have taken a huge step for our family and the house will be the foundation (no pun intended) for many ideas and memories to spring from. Even though I will have one foot in semi-suburban NYC, I will still be 4 minutes to the ferry to Manhattan. During the whole house hunt,  Tom and I had the same or similar opinions on nearly everything. It was a relief to feel the same way about where (and how) you wanted to raise your children. Thankfully he never said he loved something that I found awful. And we almost always found the same things to dislike about a house. I am excited to have a house with him. There is so much we could do to make it “us”.  But at our rate of achievement these days, it will take years. And something about us taking our time and growing with the house makes me happy. We already have lists of things we want to do. But there is no rush, nothing on the long list is anything we have to do. And I don’t care if we ever finish really, I will enjoy adding a little every year.