Adjusting to our new home hasn’t always been easy, and I don’t think it suddenly will be from here on out, but I’m coming around and getting more comfortable. There are things that’ll likely take me forever to get used to — the population density (I was raised in the ‘burbs), the horrendous traffic, the different class dynamics, the crazies, the certain smells — but we’re navigating well, and I no longer gravely doubt my ability to adapt.
I had a revelation when my mom came to visit and spent much of the weekend bitching about family drama back home in CT. Every detail of my day is no longer dictated by the idea that my family may somehow be judging me. I can comfortably live by my own rules here. It’s an awesome, freeing feeling, but it also makes me realize, in a more profound way than ever before, how much I allowed myself to be tied down by my family’s expectations. I’m so used to living in a shadow and having somebody to measure myself against. Now I’m actually learning to live without guidelines — at least ones I’m uncomfortable with.
I’m starting to realize how useless it is to continue to be angry at my family. They — specifically my aunt and uncle — just closed on a house in Miami that they had been in the process of buying for the past two years. While I’ve already been skeptical of them ever coming out to visit us, this pretty much cements my doubt. This is something I’ve been mad about since living here in my college years, long before Hugga was even born. And I moved back to LA knowing that it would be my responsibility to keep up with everyone back home, that if I wanted them to care and stay updated, I’d have to make all the effort. I’m tempted to still hang onto that anger — it feels comfortable, it feels like a last tie to my family somehow, but it isn’t going to get me anywhere.
As mentioned before, my family had always held a high value on keeping everybody close together, and I had always imagined that we’d all be raising our kids together in perfect harmony, but those values were totally contradictory to my experience. At first I wanted to raise my kids around my family because I thought it would make them feel like they belonged somewhere, like they were supported and safe, even though the opposite was true of my experience. Once I went off to create myself, I no longer fit into the puzzle, and up until now I’d been spending my adult life pointlessly trying make the puzzle fit me.
I sometimes (okay, often) wonder if I took something away from Hugga by bringing her here, if she’ll miss out on an amazing experience because we’re not close to my family. But I saw a similar dynamic emerging between her and my niece, and I realize it just took a lot of time for me to come around to the fact that the reality of my life is nothing like I envisioned.
A lot of the positive changes are unrelated to the proximity of my extended family. I have no commute and Hugga’s preschool is so close, so it just feels like there’s more time in the day. But an unexpected side effect of being away is that it’s made the three of us tighter as a family.
Clear on the other end of the spectrum from many of the privileged white women of the world talking about how awesome it is to be a mom is my family, where parenting, while it’s a natural progression and a marker of adulthood, still basically sucks. There was always this attitude back home that it was impossible to get any normal shit done with kids — you couldn’t clean with kids in the house, you couldn’t go grocery shopping with kids, you just couldn’t do the things to keep your family running with kids around. It sounds silly — how else would anybody with kids do it, right? But my cousins were forever leaving the kids at home so they could resume their lives as normal. My mom also espoused this idea that parenting was supposed to change your life in a negative way — once you became a mom, you just weren’t supposed to have fun or want fun anymore. My mom obviously sacrificed a lot to give me a privileged life, but sometimes I feel I’m held to the same standard of loss and misery. The focus is somehow always on the things we can no longer do now that we have all these damn kids. That, if something seems like fun to us as adults, it must not be good for the kids to get involved.
Because I always had babysitting to fall back on back home, I could keep parenting a separate task from everything else I had to do. It was convenient, sure, but I never really learned how to incorporate or juggle, and I just developed this ugly attitude that parenting was a burden, that it was just the natural order of things. Until now, I’d never associated parenting with possibility.
Being here without guidelines, without people constantly whispering their opinions in my ear, means I get to make my way to the middle of the spectrum. I’m clawing my way, but I’m getting there. I’m learning that it’s entirely possible to not only shop for groceries with a little one in tow, but to also make it an enjoyable experience. I’m also learning that being a mom doesn’t automatically mean that I have to give up things I enjoy doing on my own, or that I have to feel guilty if I don’t. Not to say that I believe parenting could be all sunshine and rainbows or that I think it’s supposed to be easy — I’m just trying to acknowledge that it’s not all gloom and doom, that I can actually experience some joy in this outside of the requisite “Children have made my life more complete” mantra, and not be lying to myself.
I know now the new things that are possible, the new things that I’m capable of. Like I said, it’s not always easy — coordinating my free time with the husband’s schedule without my family to fall back on has been one of the bigger pain points — but we’re actively making this work. I can’t explain that, the feeling that you’re flying with your own wings. It’s opened up the entire world for me.
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