Sunday/Monday Scribblings--Why I live where I live

No, we weren't the Bradys...we just wanted to live like them.

Where I live is a sore subject right now. Come to think of it, it has always been one. I’ve never been entirely satisfied with any place that I’ve lived since I was a little girl. This is yet another inheritance from my parents, who needed to work up a great deal of restless dissatisfaction in order to propel themselves out of the warm family fortress in their walled city. They did this by dreaming of the day they’d walk into their dream and rightful future--the Great American house. You know the one--split level ranch with a two car garage and a basketball hoop. A garden ribboning up the front walk and a lush, grand backyard that always looked effortlessly manicured. And a pool for us kids, of course. This was beyond the realm of their actuality in Colombia (the split level ranch style not being popular in Latin America) but the States were different. Everything was possible here.

My father arrived first and settled himself into one of those immigrant rite of passage apartments--a dingy, dank hole in the wall favored by those who are sending their whole paycheck to another land. He realized quickly, sadly, that the ranch house that dangled so enticingly from the tree branch of their dream was going to be a mite bit harder to find in reality--especially in the urban Latino neighborhood he now called home. So he called a bunch of his friends’ wives and tried his best to lend a "woman’s touch" to the apartment before my mother arrived.

I can only imagine how her face fell, faced with this base, squalid apartment, so different from her hopes. Faced with exposed lightbulbs, the drip-drop of the leaky sink faucet, the skittering roaches. I know (they told me) that my father sacrificed precious lunch money to buy her little luxuries so that she could hold her head high around the other wives when they came to welcome her and nose about--a new rice pot, a wobbly second hand kitchen table, a dilapidated bouquet of flowers in a cracked vase.

I’m sure she wasn’t exactly pleased--she was already regretting their decision to leave everything they knew, their comfort, their families, already cursing herself for being foolhardy and excessively swayed by my father’s brash optimism. But she was young and energetic, and besides, they were still illegal. Surely, the golden gates would swing widely open once they possessed their green cards, no?

Not exactly.

My siblings arrived and we lived in that crowded apartment for another two years, until my parents finally found a house we could afford. It’s strange--that apartment and area still haunt my dreams--vividly. I suppose I had not yet learned to look around me and see only lack.

We took our first steps towards that ultimate house dream by moving into our single family house, four bedrooms, one bath, and an architectural style that can only be described as "Urban Unpretty." Our block was crammed with houses, staggering shoulder to shoulder, up and down the treeless hill ringed by a sausage of parked cars.

My parents continued to watch TV, walk more affluent neighborhoods and sigh, even as they put all of their energy in improving that house well past the point of our affording. I shared my parents admiration for those other houses, better neighborhoods, but in a cheerfully impersonal way, the way I would appreciate a Monet at a museum. Only my house-ugly carpets, false ceilings and all-was home. I lived there until I married.

By the time I had graduated from college, I started to feel stifled by the very place I loved. I saw people lulled into staying there forever, seduced by the comfort of living so close to NYC. I grew desperate to move and made an impassioned plea to TEG while we sat in his car listening to "Born to Run." TEG was the opposite of me--I was looking for a place to transform me, a place to help me create the person I wanted to be. He knew he’d never feel fully at home anywhere outside of his beloved Bombay, so he was open to moving almost anywhere.

And so we started our odyssey, four states in five years. I never found exactly what I wanted because I was afraid TEG would blame me if I grew disenchanted. So I always lived near what I wanted and blamed him instead. I wasn’t dreaming of a ranch house--no, I wanted a cool apartment in a vibrant city, steps from everything I could want. Instead, I lived in a succession of bland, comfortable, generic apartments on the outskirts of great cities.

Until Chicago, that is. I came closest to finding the All I longed for there. But soon, doubt crept in. It was so cold. And we missed hills, and the sun, and the ocean.

So we got pregnant and decided to make good on that long deferred dream--California. I was three months along and moody; it was the dead of winter and "all the leaves were brown and the sky was gray." Again, I was unable to push for what I truly wanted...it seemed even further away now that I was pregnant. So we opted for yet another practical suburban box.

And yet, living in California with its euphoric sunshine and riotous sheets of color everywhere has been incredibly worth it, despite the foolhardy expense of it all. I hugged my growing belly while I took my daily walk underneath that nurturing sun and gloried that my daughter would grow up in this place I loved best. I felt a kinship with my own parents, who had traveled so far to try and do the same thing.

But just like with my parents, it’s not quite working out that way. California is expensive and TEG’s business needs him elsewhere. So I continue to long for that place where I can rest, a new place that will feel old and like home. TEG says I need to find that place in my head before I can find it outside (and that certainly begs the question, "why do I live where I live in my head?). I’m sure he’s right, as usual. But I still scour the apartment listings, looking for that perfect place in our new Cold City. And no more settling. Because I’d like to have a joyous answer to the question, "why do you live where you live?"

More Sunday Scribblings here.