City Mouse
Do we stay, or do we go?
We had been at my in-laws’ house for two days when my then three-year-old daughter announced that she wanted to go home. “I want to go back to Nora’s City,” she told my mother-in-law, conflating her name (Nora) with her hometown (New York). I was holding Nora princess-carry style at the time of the announcement. Wrapped in a plush bath towel post-tub, her tiny feet peeked out. Her toenails were painted a deep plum, a color she had conspiratorially told my mother-in-law was called “raspberry”.
My in-laws live in the suburbs, only forty-five minutes outside Philadelphia, but they have a large yard, and we sometimes see deer scampering through the vast lawn in the dewy early mornings. Nora has no concept of suburbs yet and so, she deems my in-laws’ house “the country”.
“Oh no,” Nora’s grandma said, tapping a gentle finger on Nora’s nose. “You want to go home?” My mother-in-law asked, softly rounding over the “Os”, deep Pennsylvania (or “Delco”, we teased her) accent style.
“I sorry Grandma,” Nora said with a little shrug. “But I just a City Mouse.” We all cracked up, of course (one for the books, I noted), and I carried Nora to the guest room, where we would continue on with the never-ending routines of bedtime. Still, that night, I went through the eternal routines with a tiny bubble of pride between my chest and my throat. My girl’s a City Mouse, I thought to myself, smiling a private, closed-mouthed smile. I’ve lived in New York City for over twenty years but my kid is born and bred. The real deal.
There’s a nonsensical feeling of satisfaction I get each time I tell someone I’m from New York. It makes me feel cool, scrappy. Only the strong survive. I say nonsensical because New York is expensive, crowded, hot and smelly in the summer. And yet, saying I’m from here has a hand in shaping my identity. I guess it has a hand in shaping my daughter’s identity too.
Nevertheless, the question always looms: “Are you going to stay?” At every park date, every birthday party, every daycare graduation, this question will be asked. We’re always checking to see if our peers are heading for greener pastures, if we are making the wrong decision by raising our child in this hot and smelly mess, if we are being left behind.
I’m prideful about being from New York, but I still ask myself this question all the time, too. On a recent family vacation up to The Adirondacks, we stopped for lunch in Hudson on the way there and again on the way home. I daydreamed. I opened Zillow, tapping furiously on my phone, as though I could summon a reasonably priced Victorian home with a working fireplace and a clawfoot tub simply by continuing to stretch my thumb and forefinger apart, enlarging my screen.
“We’re moving here, August 2022,” I announced to my husband as I speared a forkful of locally grown arugula and farm raised goat cheese. We were having lunch at a sidewalk café. My husband didn’t disagree. We began to craft a life for our family one-hundred and twenty miles North of the City, the conversation continuing in the car. We admired how the yellow and purple wildflowers dotted the median on the highway back home.
One of my arguments for continuing to raise Nora in the City is that I’m convinced kids are nicer here. I teach middle school in Queens and I am consistently floored at how open my students are, how accepting. They speak amongst one another about anxiety and depression and questioning gender identity with a passion I had reserved for talking to my middle school friends about my favorite member of New Kids on the Block. They casually bow out of after-school plans, letting their friends know they can’t hang out because they have a therapy appointment. I love it. It makes me believe that if we continue to raise Nora here, she will grow up in a place where she will never have to feel as though she’s an outsider, where she will never have to feel isolated and alone. When I was in middle school in the suburbs, everyone played team sports. I never made the cut because I could barely huff my way through a twelve-minute mile. I’ve always hated sports, anyway, but I kept trying because I so fiercely wanted to belong. Each day of middle school, I got teased mercilessly about my weight. Looking back, I was only a size eight. Maybe kids outside of the City are more kind and accepting now, too. I can’t be sure though. It still makes me nervous.
Nora will begin Universal Pre-K in the fall. The process to get in was a hustle. The day the acceptances were announced, all our parent friends texted us frantically, Did you get in? Where? Do they have afterschool? How much? We exhaled gratefully when we found out that Nora will be in a school with her two best girlfriends. The program is at a Catholic school. Even though we had received our acceptance letter, I still called the school’s main office, terrified that Nora would have to be Baptized in order to attend, that she wouldn’t get to be with her girlfriends. “I’m Jewish!” I wailed, “My parents will kill me if we have to plan a Baptism!” The patient secretary on the other end calmed me down. Universal Pre-K is a public program. All are welcome.
Nora is excited for school in the fall. “My Pre-K!” she yelps each time we walk by the church that houses her future adventures. She’s already bought a backpack. Pink with a sparkling rainbow.
Each weekend morning, Nora rushes to get ready for the park. The one near our house has a huge splash pad that she likes to race through in the summer. Usually, we meet friends but if they’re busy, she always finds someone who is willing to play. Last Saturday, as I packed our bag for the park, Nora waited for me impatiently, one hand holding the knob of the front door, the other pulling at her tankini bottom. As I finished loading up the last of the plastic pails and cracked shovels, Nora turned to me. “Mom,” she said, “I love our house because upstairs, it’s our home but downstairs, it’s the city.” She unhooked her fingers from her tankini bottom and held them up, spreading expansively. “I love it too,” I said. Another one for the books.
So right now, I think we’ll stay. We’ll stay here a little while longer.
