the mild side

I am no longer a Brooklynite. I've hung up my urban chic for a walk on the mild side. This sociological experiment will test the boundaries of identity. Will I still be cool if I can't say I live in Brooklyn? Is my personality geographically bound? Was I ever cool? Oh of COURSE. But I have children now. Cherub-cheeked children who have just left their routine, their daycare, their preschool, their friends, their bedroom, their neighbors. But they are young and resilient and love green grass and fresh air. They love running in circles in the still empty rooms, shrieking at the tops of their sooty city-born lungs. 

We're outside Philadelphia now, closer to my family, in the neighborhood where I spent my twisted childhood. I think of this as a do-over of sorts. More importantly, we've gone from a gritty one-bedroom existence to a four-bedroom bungalow set on a quarter acre. We had an Easter egg hunt in our back yard.

This morning Hamish and Stella filled baggies with budding red flowers that had fallen into our driveway. They collect pine cones and poke earthworms on a daily basis. I bought a used Little Tykes car, the kind a toddler can ride in, for Stella at a Church rummage sale. We have gone whole hog here. Spying bluejays and cardinals and chickadees in the yard. Finches and junkos and robins galore. It's like being on vacation. Stars in the sky. The smell of firewood. Our own firewood in our own fireplace. I know the mailman by name. His name is Mike. He's lovely! But I still wear all black. Skinny jeans. Hair covering one eye just like in high school. Only now my scowl isn't from teen surliness but from having to endure fifteen foot-stomping meltdowns per day (not all of them mine) I listen to Lily Allen on the iPod, albeit in the mini-van. So you can take the girl out of the city... 

We're still living out of boxes because we own next to no furniture, but so far so good, and now that I'm online again, I almost feel like my corrugated cardboard existence is settling down into a peaceful flow I could get really used to.   

the one

After twenty-six years of apartment living, and after four months of searching, after crying to Bryan's parents that at times I think we're drooling lunatics for even thinking of leaving Brooklyn, we found the ONE.

It came on the market Thursday, we raced down to see it Friday afternoon, well I was going to go solo Friday morning but after five hours' sleep and nerves jangling, for the first time ever went sun-blind moving the car at 8:30AM for street-sweeping and crashed into a double-parked car and even though the rheumy ancient fellow sitting in the undamaged car waved me away and said in broken English to forget about it I went hysterical and was too traumatized, dramatized, stressified to drive, so I had a nap and dragged Bryan out of work early, we drove down in the in-laws' Camry, me tucked safely in the passenger seat, walked in and immediately knew it was Our House and that anyone else who made an offer would essentially be stealing our home, we just had that Feeling, that one you hope for when home shopping, so we fell all over ourselves filling out paperwork, made a bid over asking price because we were finally serious, nearly had our heads explode waiting to hear, but then finally they accepted our offer after some late-night back and forth over certain things back in Brooklyn Friday night, and then Saturday morning the sellers signed the contract and, and so we are in contract.

Breathe.

It has a big (by our urban standards) yard, four bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms, a master suite including an office for my writing pleasures and a master bath with a Jacuzzi tub. It has a full basement with another little office area for Bryan’s musical frolickings, AND it’s in the school district I was yearning for, AND it was reasonably priced, within walking distance of one of my oldest and dearest friends, and just by blogging this, I am acidic with fear that somehow it will still slip through our fingers, even though it's already passed inspection and we are as in love with a pile of stone and plaster as anyone could be.

I would and possibly should be using a buttload of exclamation points but I can’t find them. They are lost or hiding among the thousands of boxes making mini skyscrapers all over this apartment, stacked in front of the windows, eclipsing the sunlight. Anyway, I want to denote my state of mind, which I will call “exhausted disbelief, mixed with hungry excitement and irritating irritation that we’re not living in the new house yet,” since our apartment is currently a frigging mess—those boxes, clothes not put away, dried kernels of rice scattered across the kitchen floor... It’s like, not our apartment anymore.

I’m itching to trick out the new place, already recklessly tearing pages from Domino Magazine… but don’t worry, Good Buyer! We will clean the place for you. I will even wipe down the fridge.

Oh…wait, I think…Holy Shit! WE BOUGHT A HOUSE!!! Okay, there are those exclamation points. I knew they were around here somewhere. They’d fallen between the piles of files and the box of dusty toiletries we haven’t touched since 2002 but still might need someday.

It’s a 1925 Sears & Roebuck Bungalow kit, which is cool, right? It's funky and quirky with that magical flair that speaks to us.

The master suite, which is not pictured, was added in 2002. The fireplace works. The kitchen’s not eat-in, but we love it to death still. It looks thoughtfully planned, not like it was slapped together by a cheap'n'greedy seller, you know, the ones that boast "granite countertops!" but look schlocky and cheesy but you hate to swap it out because it's brand spanking.

We’re planning to move in mid-March, after Hamish’s birthday, even though we close on our apartment in mid-February. We like the idea of living on the streets for a couple weeks. Oh well, actually, we'll be staying with the grandparents.

What else is there? Our beloved realtor (no that's not an oxymoron, we LOVE her) keeps warning us about buyer's remorse, but so far we are stupid with glee, and hopefully I'm not jinxing it by telling you this. As much as we've been stressing over outcomes and fearing that everything will fall apart if we blow on it, things have gone as smoothly as we could have hoped. Thanks are in order, to each other, our realtor, our buyer, our seller, the fates... THANKS BE. And there's a guest room for YOU.

pockets

It's official. Our buyer's buyer got approved for his mortgage, and last night I accompanied our buyer, the soon-to-be tenant of the apartment in which I sit typing (she even wants the desk!) to the bowels of the building to meet with the board and win their overwhelming approval. We hugged three times afterwards. I'm in a loving state of mind. What can I say, I guess beneath the almost crippling anxiety about leaving Brooklyn, I am excited to embark on this latest adventure. We close at the end of February. Hopefully we will find a house to buy by then, not that I mind rooming with the in-laws, but well, you know.

Amidst my fears that there will be no like-minded people where we're headed, but only Republican-reared sugar- and TV-addicted spoiled smartmouths, I had a revelation that wherever you go, if you look long enough, you will find pockets of people you identify with. This is the epiphany that will allow me to sleep at night. I am misty to leave my friends and family, and fear being isolated and alone. That's my biggie. Not worrying about whether Bryan will find a job or if the schools will satisfy. I worry about my social life. I gotta put my stress somewhere. Oh and I worry that somehow any coolness factoring into my identity is all tied up with being a New Yorker, granted a New Yorker who seldom ventures into Manhattan, but still. But I believe that truism that wherever you go, there you are, and so I know that I will take the cool with me. I will put it, and you, the thought of all you cool cats here who I adore, and stuff you into my Sevens, and take you with me. Stella will stuff you into a lucite box and stow it on her head, because she's her own kid, but I will do the pocket thing. And while you're in there I will begin to pack the cardboard boxes I started collecting this morning, which makes it all feel so finally, heart-thumpingly real.

either way i'm okay

This morning I hosted my first preschool tour for prospective parents (it was lovely and informative) and chatted afterwards with one of the current parents, a cool-cat musician. We asked after each other’s families (he just had a baby, mazel tov), and he asked about Hamish, who has finally climbed out of his clamshell to the point that he didn't even kiss me goodbye this morning, but ran straight outside to play ball with the older kids (I kvell!).

He asked about the status of our move, and how my husband Bryan (also a musician) is doing, and as I began to answer, the tears came pouring out. That cathartic cry I’d been hoping for in my dark lonely moments at home arrived instead in the sunlit cubby area of my son’s preschool. What are you gonna do?

I told my friend that Bryan is sleep-deprived, done with Brooklyn, burnt out from his 9-5, and ready to embark on a new adventure. And me, apparently I’m Waterworks Miller at the mere thought of pulling Hamish out of preschool to move two hours south. Suddenly hostile car service drivers seem charming. Dog shit dotted sidewalks bring out the hopscotching nature enthusiast in me. “Ooh look! That one’s marbled! Orange and green!”

This conflict of interest creates a gap between my husband and me. This is the first time I’ve really articulated my feelings, and we’ve been snapping at each other lately. Of course it doesn’t help that Stella’s been waking at five A.M. most mornings to nurse.

An Atlanta-bred dad I met in the playground the other day, a network analyst, put it plainly that he can’t wait to leave this overcrowded, dirty urban patchwork for greener, cleaner climes, But even his sane anti-Brooklyn argument didn’t register in my brain as I wept to my new friend this morning. Because Hamish’s preschool is spoiling the shit out of me. Everywhere I turn, there’s another artsy, scrappy, down-to-earth, easygoing parent, and I have convinced myself that such people, in such dense numbers, simply don’t exist anywhere but Brooklyn.

But I still want to leave my immediate hood, and I still can’t afford the ones I want, and a check-in with myself upon returning home revealed that I am possibly making a mountain of misery here out of the simple belief that I will feel like a lonely misfit anywhere else. And in a way, I’m okay about it, because I know it’s not supposed to be easy, and it’s a good thing in a weird way that I’m sad to leave, it reassures me that I’m not running away, but running toward, and even if I don’t know the answer now, it’s out there, waiting patiently. The decision will get made with or without my interference, the outcome has already revealed itself in an alternate universe and either way, I’m okay.

Bickering aside, Bryan and I are united as a unit can be, and we won’t make a decision that doesn’t satisfy both of us. We’ve been together what, almost eighteen years. We must be doing something right.

white knucking

We accepted an offer on our apartment last Saturday. Then, giddy with hope, we drove southward and looked at seven houses, three of which were fifty-thousand dollars over our price limit, but of course we can offer anything we want, and even though there are no current job openings at Bryan’s firm, we gave tentative notice at Hamish’s preschool that we’d be pulling him out in mid-February, only to learn within minutes that our buyer’s buyer is still waiting to be approved for a mortgage.

We frantically IMed each other, seriously considering walking away from our buyer, or any buyer, until April, so that Hamish could finish the school year and give me that childcare break, because once we start paying a mortgage, childcare goes down the tubes. Am I insane to choose a driveway, parking lots, trees and a back yard over first-rate childcare? Part of me thinks I am insane for giving it up, mid-year no less, and my Jewish guilt knows no bounds regarding the good people we’ll be leaving at the preschool, but part of me thinks I’m insane to walk away from a decent offer (the buyer’s buyer will most likely be approved), and have to re-clean, re-list, and re-chew my cuticles hoping we’ll cultivate some new interest in our place.

This triangle of things we must accomplish—sell, job, buy—has eddied into a tornado. But we got on this stormy ride, and at least in this moment, we’ve decided to see it through. When we played Hamish that R.E.M. song the other morning, "Everybody Hurts," I wept over Hamish's half made sandwich and Bryan admitted later that he shed a tear too. My knuckles are white from all this holding on for dear life.

don't sell, michelle!

We finally got it together with a couple and their kids for brunch yesterday. Now that we’re steeped to our nostrils in all things kid-o-phile, our social lives have become a swampy series of reschedulings and postponements for dinners, brunches, lunches and playdates. So we felt really accomplished to sit together in our friends’ apartment catching up on our real estate conversation and munching toasted bagels with cream cheese and juicy tomatoes from their local farmers’ market while the kids practiced sharing toys.

Afterwards we went to the playground in our friends’ desirable nabe and as I boosted Hamish onto the spider-shaped jungle gym I realized with lightning speed that I was standing across the paint-chipped bug’s abdomen from a movie star. Yes, yours truly, the writer of Star Craving Mad, had the sacred privelege of sharing playground time with a very pregnant L____, who it turns out, has just bought in the neighborhood, which is most auspicious since Heath Ledger has flown the Brooklyn coop for concreter pastures (and supermodels!) in Manhattan. I heard there was a hilarious Times article about everyone and their brother pretending not to give a damn that Heath and Michelle had moved in, and now we’re all going crazy pretending not to give a damn that he’s moved out. I know I was not so secretly devastated to learn of their divorce. Poor Matilda. Poor shmashilda. Poor us, not being privy to star sightings anymore. Please don’t sell, Michelle! Ooh that sounds like a bumper sticker…I did catch them once on the street last year before Michelle gave birth. With skin lumenescent and dewy just like we demand of our stars, Michelle rocked a navy top! And Heath’s womanly wide hips still managed to be studly and carressable in baggy-butted Levis.

So (ahem) now in the playground to my delight was L____, pregnant out to here, all in stretchy black, with her hair piled into a rubberband. Very modest. Very downplayed. Was that for our benefit? So we wouldn't feel so bad around her sparkly famousness? Like an urban soldier, I went to work ignoring her and staring at her simultaneously and the pure distilled conflict of it all had my back in spasms. Did she notice my kids? My outfit? What a cool mom I am? Did she notice my nonchalance at her existence in my universe? That subtle studied wrist-flicking hip swivel that says, “I don’t give a shit what you think, I’m not sure I even recognize you?” Or could she see how dork-frothed with star-struckness I was? Did she cringe in self-protection against the possibility that I might sidle up to her and pat her belly, ask her what gender her fetus is and does she have any names picked out, I won’t tell anyone? Did I gesture too dramatically when I conversed with Bryan? Did I talk too loudly when cajoling Hamish to be brave on the curly slide? Did I brush the sand off Stella’s jeans with too much bravado? Could she tell I was performing for her? Did she give me a standing ovation? No, she didn’t.

Instead, she talked with her friends and shoved her hand down her greasy-haired boyfriend’s four-hundred dollar jeans’ back pocket and squeezed his ass. And her artfully dishevelled beau, who I have to tell you, didn’t strike me as keeper material, I really don’t think my mom would get a good vibe from this guy, grabbed a handful of L___’s armpit, which I thought was so perverted in my newfound curmudgeonly mom-itude. And when their hands commenced exploring each others’ sides and backsides like horrible teenagers, when the boyfriend ran his meaty hands over and over her belly like a genie might fly out of her mouth and grant him three wishes, I concentrated on keeping my jaw shut and continued to stare-but-not-stare, reassuring myself that, oh yeah, this is a recipe for disaster. These two are all over each other which means they’ve obviously known each other for two months tops. It’s all over before the kid turns one. These poor little famous kids. They don’t stand a chance. I’m so lucky I’m not them.

Which got me thinking, part of my fear about leaving Brooklyn is wrapped up in the very real possibility that I will no longer have celebrity sightings. Which is a pathetic reason to stay in Brooklyn, I know, not that we are, but the thought did cross my mind—do I actually believe that I am more validated as a human citizen if I live in close proximity to celebrities? And how sad does that make me? Especially knowing that they live in the most desirable, beautiful neighborhoods in huge lofts and townhouses while I languish in the working class ugly outskirts stressing out about square footage every time I schlep home a twelve-pack of budget brand paper towels. I do believe this on some level, and it’s shamefully comforting that others do too. Maybe by moving I’ll show myself that I don’t care as much as I think I do. Or maybe I’ll just have to start watching TMZ.

it's official

Our apartment is officially for sale. Craziness. And wouldn't you know it? It has its own blog: http://coop4sale.blogspot.com/

fixer upper

I don't know if it's the fact that Hamish is starting preschool in two weeks or the fact that we're still seriously considering leaving Brooklyn for Philadelphia, or the fact that it's getting so cold so soon, or the fact that it's getting to be time to night-wean Stella and transition her into her crib, but I feel like I am freaking out mentally every other minute. I'm cursing under my breath and rushing around even if there's no hurry, dropping my keys and bumping into doorways.