The Suburbs & I Make Peace

Now that's an orchid. My mother has a knack for them, it seems.

We go on a mission to Target, to pick up a trunk-full of diapers for my sister. Most all the commerical areas nearby are different, but the same, from what I remember. "Did this used to be Wheaton Plaza?" I ask my mother. The answer is yes, now it goes by some other name, a corporate conglomerate that has bought and renamed most of the shopping malls in the area. The Target is new - newish. I guess it's all old now, I haven't lived here for over 20 years.

My mother tells me that this shopping mall is now a little "scary." Asian and Latino gangs, apparently. I am reminded about the other side of suburban communities: the immigrants, the poor. My mother has just told me that "anywhere there are still rental apartments" (everything has turned condo), you have new immigrants and the poor - and a prevalence of violence and crime. At least the sort of crime you hear about on the evening news. She lists off a few isolated neighborhoods here and there to illustrate, and a few recent incidents. I ask my mother why these groups settle in the area, especially given the increasing unavailability of affordable housing. "Jobs," she says. Right. There are so many amenities here for the wealthy, someone has to fill out the service sector: housekeepers and nannies, grocery stockers and baggers, landscapers, waiters and busboys and dishwashers. They come for the jobs, but there's nowhere for them to live.

My father is a physician. He came, too, as an immigrant, having pulled himself up by some pretty tattered bootstraps (in fact, as a child, his family sometimes did not have money for shoes), but he came with professional skills, at a time when doctors were in great need, so it was easy to get the necessary work visa. Because of some psychological and social skill issues, my father could never work well with others, so he set up a private practice (managed by mom, who has super-duper social skills). These same issues, along with an inherent racism (stronger back then than now) towards a foreign doctor with a thick accent, landed him practicing in one of these poor, apartment-full areas, almost exlusively African American (the immigrants came in waves later).

I share all this mostly to remind myself that the suburbs are a complicated environment, despite the neat-and-tidy surfaces, the sheen of perfection that sometimes suffocates me when I visit. The time I spend with my family - every few months, a few days at a time - is usually tense, fraught with the discomfort of my having made life decisions so far outside their scope of understanding, their world. To them, suburban life - the neatness, the put-togetherness, the stability and path-of-least-resistanceness - are everything a solid adult person should strive for. Why would anyone pursue - or claim to thrive in - difficulty, or messiness, of any kind? It troubles them. More and more, as I get older, and as my life evolves in a less and less conventional way. My father, I think, is even a little afraid of me. They are not sure how to speak to me, what to talk about, who this strange woman is who once was their comprehensible (if a bit moody) daughter; and I am not very good anymore at keeping smooth surfaces intact, at smiling pretty for the sake of it.

But something occurs to me as I am driving back to New York. The drive back is usually a time of decompression for me, a great relief, easier breathing, a kind of deep and wide happiness unfolding. I am returning now to my life. It's not that I dislike my family; on the contrary, I love them, and ultimately respect them, deeply. Still, there are people you love better from a distance, and for now, this is the case with me and my family. What I think about is how easy it would be to assume that what they want from me is capitulation and conformity; that they want me to be neat and tidy, stable and "normal," just for the sake of appearances. It would be easy to underestimate them in this way, and to grow defensive and angry.

But really, what they want, what I know in my heart they want, is for me to be truly, deeply well, in every way (and what I want for them, too, by the way). And because I want this too, because I know in my gut that I am pursuing deep wellness in the way that makes the most sense for me, for the way I'm wired; I take comfort. The tension may always be there, and the sense of dissonance may only increase when we spend time together. But in the end, we all really do recognize and desire health and beauty: we want the orchid to live, to bloom, to flourish.