I always tell people that I should have been an organic farmer. This is how far removed my personality is from the kind that can thrive in a city as loud and fast as New York.
I've had issues around noise, odors, crowds and heat for as long as I can remember. I never played any team sports where the likelihood of a sticky arm touching mine was better than average. So no basketball for me. I grew up with a pool but I found the coldness of the water jarring. Getting splashed wasn't high on my list, either. I never really liked the beach as much as other kids, hating the sand in my bathing suit. So then I move to a city where I constantly hear other people and their appliances as I try to sleep. I can hear them sneezing, coughing next door. I find this absolutely appalling. I go to restaurants where conversations are impossible because of the din. Ambulances scream down the street. People yell into their cellphones about how so and so owes them forty dollars and that mother fucker better pay. Or they're looking down and texting right before they walk right into you. You walk outside your door on a nice spring day and there it is - a street fair - taking up three blocks of Eighth Avenue. A street fair that fills the air with the smell of burned meat, overflows onto the sidewalk with garbage, and is selling what always seems to be socks, t-shirts and corn on a stick. Now your Saturday has begun with the obnoxious hum of generators and hundreds of gawking, slow-moving morons making fast work of greasy mystery meat and funnel cake. It was on a day such as this that I finally lost my shit with the city - when A. and I were walking out of our building and some little bastard threw a firecracker at my feet. It was as if the city wanted to see just how far it could push me, and it knew exactly what it would take to make it happen.
We ended up around the corner from the apartment with me sobbing by a particularly sad tree. I begged A. to let us rent a house in the country for the weekends. I was starting my first of several IVF's at the time, and truly felt like I was going mad. We lived in an apartment above a gay sports bar (the space was empty when we moved in, and had been for several years, and the landlord assured us that he would not rent to a bar or restaurant. Yeah, right.) that played music until three in the morning every night, where people smoked out back and the smell wafted into our bedroom. Our upstairs neighbor was nuts (what else is new), and so were the floorboards in her apartment, which sounded as if ten preschoolers were bowling when in fact it was only the crazy lady walking around in slippers.
I feel like I earned my bones. We now live in a beautiful, quiet apartment in TriBeca, which whatever anyone says about the lack of diversity, the gated community aspect, the banker/nanny-riddled sidewalks, the stick-thin trophy wives jumping out of their black cars and into SoulCycle - I like it here. And I'm not ashamed to admit it. I like that I don't start and end my day seething. That I don't envision dropping bags full of warm urine on smoking gay guys at four in the morning off my fire escape. I don't have revenge fantasies anymore - the kind where I kill someone temporarily, and they wake up from my murdering them to realize that wow, I must have done something really bad and gee, I'll never do that again.
Yes, I was that white woman with two children in the double stroller taking up the sidewalk. Now I am that white woman heading out for a 25-mile bike ride while her little darlings gently play in their over-priced Montessori pre-school.
Yes, I am that woman with one of those trash cans with a sensor that opens and closes the lid so that I never have to manually open with (god forbid) my foot. I am that woman whose kitchen drawers silently close with a gentle push, so (god forbid) I never have to take a second to push it securely closed.
I am that woman that while I will never ask you where you summer, I have been asked that question more than once, and can't help looking a bit dazed when I realize that yes, my family does "summer", and often in the Hamptons or Connecticut.
I am that woman who has help, who has a wonderful partner, amazing children, and who still struggles with the complications and contradictions of living the kind of life I live. Who is trying to embrace what I am, what I have, and what I'm trying to overcome. I live in a constant state of guilt and happiness, worry and contentedness. But I feel that all the things that used to eat at me, all that noise, figuratively and literally, have been silenced by having money, so now I am free to focus on the real issues, like my drinking, my anger, my relationships. I know that most people aren't so lucky. That they have to fight the city alongside the fight to fix whatever they feel is flawed and imperfect in themselves. I don't know if I could have made it, and I have to admit, I think about this all the time. I think about where I would have ended up, if I would have stayed here and suffered or fled to a quieter place. I think about all the turns, right or wrong, that have brought me here. And I feel extraordinarily lucky that I don't regret any of them.
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