If You Lived Here You'd Be Home by Now

by Christopher Ingraham

  We looked into selling our home and renting a place closer to D.C. The problem was there was no way to increase our square footage without drastically raising our monthly housing costs, and even then we’d be stuck on the fringes of some dodgy area like Laurel or Odenton, almost certainly living in cramped, factory-style quarters like we’d done in California. The only difference now would be even higher rent, and we’d have kids to manage to boot.

  We looked at going in the other direction—what if we moved waaay out to the fringes, to the very farthest reaches of where the MARC train traveled? Make peace with the long commute, embrace it even. Live in say, Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and cajole the bosses to let me work from home two days a week. The problem was that unless we got way out into the boonies—like six-hour-a-day commute instead of three—the home prices were still insane. Even in the easternmost reaches of West Virginia, a $300,000 single-family home is a rarity.

  The truth is that that phrase—single-family home—meant little to me before the kids came along. I had absorbed and understood all the urban-lefty critiques of single-family home ownership that are so prevalent on the coast: high-density living, in condos and apartments and town homes, is better for the environment. It fosters interpersonal communication, and creates urban spaces better suited for humans than for cars.

  But I had come to suspect that much of the urbanist critique of single-family home ownership was really a critique of suburban single-family homeownership. My time in Southern California had certainly illustrated the limits of the “planned community.” Despite the “master plan” governing Irvine and much of Orange County, the area was still a riotously unpleasant place to live. The landscape was shredded into pieces by heavily trafficked roadways, a necessity due to zoning regulations mandating that the places where people worked, gathered, played, and shopped be rigidly separated from the places where they lived.

  The suburbs’ pitch, in theory, is that they offer the best of both possible worlds: reasonable proximity to urban centers with all their options for work and play, with a little bit of space to stretch out in and call your own. In reality, I began to suspect, many suburbs were just offering the worst: high-density, high-traffic neighborhoods rivaling the most congested urban areas, wedded to rural notions of car ownership and resource consumption.

  After the kids arrived I wanted that single-family home. I wanted the yard, the space, the lack of neighbors sharing walls. But I didn’t want the suburban version. I didn’t want Southern California, or Columbia, Maryland. I didn’t want a city, or a suburb. I wanted a town. A village. Hell, a house in the country miles away from anything, I didn’t care. Whatever its faults, the town I grew up in, Oneonta, New York, was like this. We lived in a medium-sized house on a main road at the west end of town. There was an auto body shop on one side of us and a Dunkin’ Donuts on another. Just down the block and off the main road lay the quiet residential neighborhood where most of my friends lived growing up. We had free rein of the place pretty much as soon as we were old enough to pedal a bike. We played hide-and-seek in the cemetery, built forts in the adjacent woods, biked to the nearby Ames to buy candy, and terrorized the servers at our local Ponderosa. It was a childhood that was completely unremarkable, except for the fact that anything like it now appeared to be unobtainable anywhere within one hundred miles of a typical city.

  I wanted that kind of childhood for my own kids, which is another way of saying that I wanted them to have that kind of childhood for myself. I wanted to live in a place where the economic, physical, legal, and cultural conditions all came together to make it possible: affordable homes. Reasonable commutes. Neighborhood spaces where you could walk, play, explore, get lost, maybe even get into a bit of trouble. Adults not accustomed to calling the cops every time they saw a kid unattended. Enough people to look out for one another, but not so many that crime was an issue.

  As I was working through these issues, Briana was getting burnt out at work. She spent day after day in meetings and on conference calls, talking around in circles with career bureaucrats who seemed to be checking off time until they collected their pension. She wanted to make things better, but the federal bureaucracy didn’t make it easy.

  She’d get home exhausted at the end of the day and hear about all the wonderful things Jack and Charles had done with Heather, the nanny. Jack took his first steps. Charles said his first words. They went to the park, to the aquarium, to McDonald’s. Milestone after milestone passed by, hours and days of priceless early childhood bonding outsourced to a third party while we labored to keep a roof over our heads, memories left unmade while Briana sat in conference rooms and drafted emails.

  Early childhood is another realm where Americans have grown accustomed to going against their own best wishes in the name of paying the bills. In 2016 the Pew Research Center reported that about 60 percent of Americans said children were typically better off with a parent at home. This belief cut across political as well as gender divides, with majorities of nearly every demographic group holding it. Yet in close to half of two-parent households, both parents work full-time.

  The actual research into the question of whether kids are better or worse off when both parents work is mostly a wash. To the extent that any effects are observed, they appear to stem from far more fundamental questions: if life at home is safe and stable and generally free from economic woes, the kids are probably going to be all right.

  But the research has less to say on the nonquantifiable aspects of early child-rearing: how do you assign a value to the hugs missed, the boo-boos unkissed, the songs unsung, and the experiences unshared? Most of us don’t become parents in order to celebrate the outcomes tracked by economists and developmental psychologists: the endgame of parenthood isn’t a 90th percentile PSAT score or an above-average place in the national earnings distribution.

  Rather we do it for more primal, fundamental reasons: biological necessity. The thrill of creating a new life. The human experience in all its agony and glory. Perhaps above all, love.

  Yet those are the very things we deprive ourselves of when we outsource child-rearing to a third party.

  Briana and I were both feeling that loss acutely. What if, instead of moving, one of us quit work to be home with the kids? What if we reclaimed that full experience of parenthood? To actually be there to watch our sons grow up?

  Yet again, the math didn’t add up. Our salaries were similar at the time, which meant that regardless of who left work, our income would be halved. Yes, the child-care expenses would disappear, too, but it wouldn’t make up for the forgone income. Between the mortgage, student loans, and various credit card debts incurred in the first expensive years of the boys’ lives, one income in the D.C. area was simply out of the question.

  We were back at square one.

  It was October, and by this point the answer was practically staring us in the face, although we didn’t realize it yet. And we wouldn’t, until one long weekend when my mom and stepdad flew in from Tampa to visit their grandsons.

  The boys were in bed and the four adults were unwinding in our tiny living room, glasses of wine in hand. Seating-wise that room accommodated little beyond a two-person love seat—my mom was sitting on a footstool, and I was squatting on the floor.

  Briana and I were talking through all these issues—the boys, the house, the jobs, the commutes, and how we couldn’t find a way out of any of it. In the end, my mom was the first one to come right out and say it: “Well, what if you moved to that nice little Minnesota town Chris visited over the summer?”

  We all laughed.

  “No, really,” she said.

  The room went quiet.

  For me, in that moment, suddenly all the pieces fell in place. One of us would work from home. The other would take a break to be with the kids, which we could afford given the low cost of living. We could get a bigger, cheaper home. There would be no more commute.

  “I don’t know,” I said, suddenly. “Maybe this i
dea is—”

  “Ridiculous,” Bri said suddenly. “Who moves to northwest Minnesota?”

  “No, wait,” I said. “Let’s talk about this.”

  “We’re gonna, what?” she asked. “Buy a house in the ugliest county in America?”

  “I mean . . . it’s not like we have a lot of other options at the moment.”

  “Mm-hmm. And how cold does it get there in the winter?”

  “Uh . . .”

  This had the potential to be a problem. I don’t mind the cold but Briana is notoriously pro-heat and cold-averse. A big part of the reason that Red Lake County, the place, became Red Lake County, America’s worst place, was its bone-chilling winter cold. I prevaricated.

  “Maybe it gets like, a little bit colder than upstate New York,” I admitted.

  “Forget about the stupid cold!” my mom said, coming to my rescue. “Buy some sweaters, for Christ’s sake, who cares. Think about the time you’d have with the boys! Think about raising them among all those nice people you said you met there.”

  “It’s true,” I said. “I hate most people, but those were some of the best people I’ve ever met. You’d love them, Bri.”

  Bri raised an eyebrow. I realized this could be a fruitful line of persuasion.

  “Now, wait a minute, just how cold are we talking?” my stepdad interjected. Goddammit, Jeff, I thought.

  “Cold winters, warm hearts,” I said, sounding like an idiot.

  “How are we going to work out there in the middle of nowhere?” Bri asked.

  “I can work remotely,” I said, not sure if I actually could. “It’s the perfect place—the Post will want a correspondent in Real America for the election year. And you won’t have to work at all!”

  “I’m not sure if I want to not have to work at all,” she said.

  She had started building her career when we lived in Vermont, first as a disability adjudicator with the state’s Social Security office (we both applied for the job shortly after moving; she was the one who got it). From there she was recruited to the home office in D.C. and worked her way up to the front office, where all the big policy decisions were made. Despite everything she hated about it, by 2015 her career was a big part of her identity. She liked making more money than either of her parents did. She liked having an identity independent of her husband, her kids, or the rest of her family. The job was a pain in the ass, yes, but it was also independence, financial security, a seat at the world’s table.

  Now she was supposed to throw all that away and what, move to a tiny midwestern farming community, sight unseen?

  We didn’t make any decisions that night. But over the next few days, as we intermittently talked it over, the plan—if there was going to be any plan—gradually came into focus. It would obviously make the most sense for me to work and her to stay home. My job traveled—99 percent of it was done via phone and internet, which meant I could do it from anywhere. Hers did not—it required lots of meetings, lots of face-to-face time, access to government terminals that existed only within the physical confines of a specific building.

  Beyond that it was clear that I simply liked my job a whole lot more than she did, at the moment at least. So if we went out there, I would work.

  We grappled with what that would mean for a typical workday. Well, she’d be home with the kids and I’d be there, too, ideally sequestered away in something like a home office. But I’d be there to help get the kids up. To help with meals. To take over when work was done and she’d had about as much of them as she could reasonably handle.

  We tried to run a more thorough accounting of the numbers. We figured that relative to our current baseline, each month we’d be able to save . . .

  $3,000 in nanny wages

  $1,000 in reduced mortgage/rental costs

  $250 in train and metro fares

  $100 in gas

  $150 in workday meal costs

  All told it added up to about $4,500 a month, which, while it didn’t exactly account for the loss of all of Briana’s after-tax income, sure made up a big chunk of it.

  Plus, we’d be gaining time: fifty hours a week for her, and fifteen for me. We assumed that each of those hours had a dollar value equal to our respective hourly wages. When you added those up and factored in the decreased expenditures we came out way ahead in the ledger.

  Eventually we talked ourselves into the view that it would be fiscally irresponsible of us to not move to Red Lake County.

  In the end what it boiled down to for Bri was that she needed a break from her current job, and she didn’t want to miss out on any more of the twins’ childhood. Whether this was a long-term thing, whether she was abandoning her working mother identity to become a stay-at-home mom, whether this amounted to a betrayal or renunciation of all she had worked so hard for in high school and college? She didn’t know. She would figure it out. What she did know was that this was what she needed right now, what felt right for her and for her sons.

  I assured her, over and over, that she’d love the people in Red Lake Falls, that it was a totally different kind of community than the hardscrabble upstate New York towns we’d grown up in.

  “Tell me about this Jason Brumwell guy then,” she said. She saw a photo of him that had run in the story of my visit, all scruffy beard, dark glasses, and baseball cap. She wasn’t impressed.

  “He looks like . . .” she trailed off uncomfortably.

  “A redneck?” I asked.

  “A redneck.”

  “He’s not a redneck.”

  “Honestly he looks a little scary.”

  “He’s neither scary nor a redneck, and definitely not a scary redneck. He’s a nice, sweet, thoughtful, educated guy. And everyone there is just like him.”

  “So they’re all scary rednecks?”

  It was a tough sell. The cold was another factor. I had to promise a lot—flannel sheets, warm mittens, a well-insulated house with a fireplace, if possible. “Remember, there’s no such thing as bad weather!” I admonished glibly. “Only bad outerwear.”

  I knew, finally, that Briana was on board one day when I opened a package that had arrived in the mail and found two sets of Minnetonka slippers inside, one for each of the twins. “So wait, we’re doing this? It’s officially happening?” I asked.

  “Yes, let’s do it,” she said. “But first go talk to your boss.”

  That, of course, was the remaining piece of the puzzle. All I had to do was convince Post brass that I should be able to stop showing up to work physically and instead live and file stories from a virtually unheard-of farming community 1,400 miles away from the action in the nation’s capital. Easy!

  In reality, it wasn’t as crazy as it sounds. Newsrooms, perhaps more so than most other organizations, are ideally situated for remote work. At any given time the Post had perhaps dozens of correspondents filing stories from far-flung corners of the world and country. Some were traveling, some were based permanently in newsmaking regions like Silicon Valley and the Koreas, and some others had simply negotiated remote work arrangements upon hiring in order to stay in their current cities, chief among them New York. Telework, in other words, was already part of the fabric of the organization, and the Post already had the infrastructure—online meeting software, remote log-in capabilities, and the like—to handle it.

  I was particularly fortunate in that my beat, such as it was, wasn’t tied to any one exact place. If you’re a Hill reporter, for instance, a big part of your job is wandering the halls of the Capitol and getting in-person quotes from policy makers. Being physically there is part of your job description.

  My beat, on the other hand, was data. And in this day and age, data lives primarily on the internet, so that’s where I spent most of my own time. Instead of roaming the halls of Congress, I spent my days digging through federal and academic websites looking for statistical diamonds in the rough—that’s how I ended up with the ugly-counties story in the first place.

  So in the middle of
October I nervously scrawled some notes on a piece of paper and made the pitch to my editor: we’d move to Red Lake County in the following spring. I’d keep writing as I always did, via a home office that included a landline and high-speed internet access. Hell, I could even write periodic longer, data-driven feature-y pieces of interest to a national audience on life in rural America. I could come back to D.C. as needed.

  We’d set a time period of a year, at which point we’d reassess: Were we desperate to come back to civilization? Was my work remaining consistent (or, ideally, improving)? Would we want to stay another year or move back?

  And of course, we’d have an escape valve: if there was a sense that, God forbid, my work was getting worse as a result of being out of the office, I’d be willing to take any steps necessary to fix the situation—including uprooting everyone and heading back to D.C. for good, if needed.

  My editor, Zach, was quiet throughout my whole spiel and when I was finally done he said, “Okay, sure, why don’t you put together a memo and we’ll run it up the flagpole and see what happens.” There was neither pushback nor encouragement; the man reacted no differently than he would have if I’d asked for something completely routine, like an afternoon off for a dentist appointment.

  But I wrote the memo and sent it to Zach, who sent it to his editor, who sent it to his editor, in a chain of editors reaching all the way up to executive editor Marty Baron, whose generally gruff no-bullshit demeanor can be summed up by the fact that the same actor who played Marty in Spotlight, the 2015 Oscar winner about the Boston Globe’s efforts to uncover child abuse in the Catholic Church, also played Sabretooth in 2009’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

  “So basically Sabretooth decides whether we go to Minnesota?” Bri asked, when I mentioned how the proposal was being received at work.

  “That’s correct, yes.”

  A month later the official word came in—we were going to Minnesota.