Love Letter to NYC
These streets will make you feel brand new
Big lights will inspire you
Every time we return home to NYC from elsewhere, our kids request “Empire State of Mind” (Alicia Keys only lol) be playing as we emerge from the bridge or tunnel and the streets and skyscrapers of our *home* come into view.
As a Philly native, I had no dreams of living in New York City. In fact, I was a proud hater. We have a bit of a chip on our shoulders, the little brother down 95 that’s bursting with love and culture and vibes, but without the glitz and glamor of NYC. And then I saw Gossip Girl! And, I was like, “maybe…” I tried it on for size as I was navigating my college process with a visit to Columbia, which only served to reinforce my previous feelings.
Eleven years later, married, with twin three-year-olds, I found myself a New Yorker, with simultaneously myriad and no expectations. On this 5th anniversary of our move, I find that I’m not so much changed, as I am the best possible version of myself, due in no small part to the freedom I’ve found in this place.
My family moved from Philadelphia to South Jersey when I started second grade. I went from there to boarding school in rural Connecticut, to college at Princeton, at which point my parents returned to Pennsylvania, up the turnpike to the Lehigh Valley, where my mom grew up. Drew and I married, and I followed him to Los Angeles, where he’d already begun grad school. Twins unexpectedly had us packing up a 5’x8’ U-haul trailer with our few newlywed belongings worth transporting, hitching it to the back of our Mazda 3, depositing Baxter in the backseat, and setting off for the Lehigh Valley ourselves. Three years later we put down roots in, arguably, the most transient city in the world.
As a mixed race, or bi-racial, woman, a member of a blended family, carrying solo the last name of my biological father, identity has always been a tricky question for me. Then, this internally nomadic eight-year-old girl, was introduced to white Jesus, and well, that book may come one day.
Motherhood is really something. Coming into motherhood at the age of 24, while most of my Ivy and grad school peers were traveling the world and pursuing more intense post-grad studies the MPH I chose over medical school, was something else. While I’ll be the first one confess #teamnonewfriends because my introvert self can only keep up but so much, even I have to own the value of community, and the requirement of a village for one’s own sanity, much less the journey of parenthood.
Drew took a job on the pastoral staff of a church my parents were attending, a church I had visited on my breaks from school but was not, admittedly, intimately familiar with. An exclusively white church, save the fewer than a handful of individuals who were one-half of an interracial marriage. A church comprised of a lot of folks with whom I shared little in common on the surface, except our similar church upbringings – navigated in verrrrry different bodies – and parenthood. But, he needed a job, and we needed a plan, and I was suddenly surrounded by moms, by community.
I am both grateful for many aspects of that season, and the women who were friends to me, while I’m also able to recognize, at this distance, my profound loneliness over those three years. On the one hand, my closest friendships were with the group of women I befriended at Princeton, my first group of girlfriends ever, my deepest relationships with Black peers ever, formative in the general sense of how those four years are especially formative for all, and utterly transformational for me, as these friendships scaffolded incredible personal awakenings regarding Blackness and womanhood, personal boundaries and future goals. But, they weren’t moms. On the other hand, I was experiencing the community of women with whom I shared none of the same sorts of things in common. Many of them came from more traditional family structures, had different experiences with and relationships to education, and were, and I mean this completely neutrally, very white. But, they were moms. And, in the midst of, especially particular iterations of church culture, baptized in white Jesus and patriarchy despite good intentions and claims to the contrary, a woman’s entire identity gets disturbingly easily whittled down to her status as a mother. Motherhood should have been enough for me. (Have any of you read The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan???) Becoming a mother was something I always intended to do, and it was a vocation I assumed would come naturally. Why wasn’t it enough? Why was it all so difficult and lonely?
I spent three years trying to make it fit, make me fit. I spent the latter half of that time, the time after emerging from the fugue of new parenthood, processing all of the ill-fittingness in therapy, and with the aid of anti-depressants. My life before college was a lot of trying on for size in the hopes that my Goldilocks moment would come if I just bent enough in the right direction. My time after college was characterized by a degree of acceptance that that moment might, read probably, never come, and my best efforts to simply make the best of my circumstances.
New York fits.
I was talking to a friend at brunch a few weeks ago about how NYC is the best thing that’s happened to our family. The impact it’s had on Drew and his vocation is more obvious: friendships, opportunities, connections that wouldn’t necessarily have found him in a different place. Equally obvious is the positive impact of being raised here on our children, children with whom I’m able to chat about disability and accessibility, homelessness and country houses, all manner of family structures, varieties of religious experiences, children whose favorite park experience during their summer Disney trip with the grandparents was Epcot (love my little nerdies) because it “reminds [them] of home.”
For me, the impact has been so much more from the inside out, difficult to name and yet impossible to overstate. I feel at home in my skin, in my questions, in my interests, in my relationships, including my relationships with family and friends not physically here, in a way that is brand new, because in a lot of ways I feel brand new because in a lot of ways, I feel free to just be who I’ve probably always been. Much of this is undoubtedly thanks to my husband. My relationship to church and my working out of my identity have been inextricably linked since I was 8-years-old, and more often than not, for the worse. However, we moved here because Drew was planting a church. I knew from the time I met Drew when we were 13 that he felt called to pastoral ministry. And, at that age, despite my massive crush, I maintained that we couldn’t have a real future because I saw what the role of “first lady,” entailed and that couldn’t be me. But, here we were. I felt terrified that all the bad of church leadership could potentially consume and destroy him in the ways that it has so many others. I also felt cautiously optimistic that all the things I loved about him, the reasons I still married him despite my earlier vehement protestations, and the ways it seemed obvious God was working in him, would preserve him and this could maybe actually be something good and restorative and beautiful. Drew imposed zero expectations on me. It took much longer to let go of those that I had internalized and used to suffocate myself. On a broader scale, our community seemed to attract folks who were also actively pursuing liberation, both their own personal freedom from any manner of things, including much past church hurt, as well as our collective freedom. As a result, they seemed much less interested than previous fellow congregants in imposing, even unintentionally, expectations on me. As the source of so much of my own past bondage and floundering, experiencing this kind of healing in a church setting was monumental.
New York is not an easy place to live, by any means, and I recognize our place of relative privilege here. Despite the, in many ways, inhospitable nature of this city, there is also, if you can see it, a pervasive hospitality, a universal welcome, to come and just be. Somehow, in the midst of a culture of striving, I have ceased striving. In a culture of hustle, I have more readily embraced rest. In a city characterized, perhaps more than almost anywhere else, by scarcity economics, I have found room, have come to believe all the more fiercely that there truly is plenty to go around. New York has challenged me like no other environment has, to put into practice the things I say I believe. When we became parents to twins at 24, Drew and I were faced with the extent of our limitations in some really tangible ways. There are indeed only so many hours in a day and each one is important. If we are spending that time doing something, it usually means we are not spending that time doing something else (multi-tasking is a liiiie!). Being confronted with that reality prompted much more intentionality from both of us about how we spent our time, how we prioritized work and other commitments, what our budget communicated about our values. Life in NYC has offered us a similar invitation. Life here is often a competition between time and money, challenging when both seem to always be in far shorter supply than feels comfortable. Several times a day we make choices, choices that require intentionality, choices that ultimately reflect our values, whether they be the values we hope to espouse, or our true loyalties when the rubber meets the road. This city is constantly holding up a mirror, not in a punitive or judgmental way, but as a love-filled invitation to consistently examine, to remain awake, to take steps rather than to drift, to be more fully alive.
New York may not always be the right fit for us. The pace and cost, financial and otherwise, may become untenable in a different season of life. But, for now, at least, it is home, and I am grateful to be able to take this continually evolving but all the more *me* version of me into whatever’s to come.
