In Spite of Everything
Page 15
Astonishing. Same thing with the case of another friend, “Stacey.” Mother of three in Glendale, California, Stacey grew up in Hawaii and was active in Protestant youth groups, even as her Catholic-born mom dabbled in Buddhism. Throughout her twenties, she herself practiced Buddhism before she decided to adopt her husband’s faith, Judaism. It was the richness of Jewish family traditions—celebrating the Sabbath together every Friday night, attending temple as a family, Hebrew school for the kids—that compelled her to convert. Stacey’s connection to God, Lord of the Universe, the Higher Power—all that—was already firmly entrenched in childhood.
So, my question for first- and second-campers has always been: Is it necessary for one’s connection to God, and the spiritual/religious customs that one might adopt for the sake of family bonding, to be strictly intertwined? To the observant, this probably sounds like straight-up sacrilege. You can’t just swap out religious tenets because you feel like it! What’s the point of religion at all, then? But if erstwhile nihilistic Gen Xers turned parents do, indeed, want to include a sense of faith and tradition in the raising of kids—but need it to feel real, authentic—then another point is: If you believe, then it’s all good.
In the case of Cal, this point had stuck hard, even as it backfired. A lapsed Catholic, he couldn’t countenance the Church of his upbringing. At the same time, no other religious tradition felt legitimate. So when, in a fever of seeking, I ultimately found and joined an ultraprogressive Protestant church whose mission we both supported, Cal could never bring himself to go. “I know it sounds dumb, but it just doesn’t feel real without the Stations of the Cross,” he said. You might think that his is an extreme example of a first-category camper: someone whose faith was stripped, leaving him with only with religious trappings. But here’s the interesting thing. Of all my friends and family, Cal was perhaps the most grounded in faith. In fact, when I was in my twenties and having panic attacks about life after death—wildly grasping at any answer—it was his sureness of the soul’s eternal nature that quelled my terror. For him, this was shoulder-shrugging territory.
What first- and second-campers have in common is that they’re bilingual, in spiritual terms. Even if they tinkered with, or scrapped, their religion of origin, they know the milieu of higher communion the way they know English and another foreign language. They can pick and choose whatever customs and traditions feel good and right for their families because their relationship with a Higher Power is already real and authentic. If I wanted real and authentic, I’d better train up. At least, that’s how Martin Buber might have thought about it. Buber, if you’re feeling a little rusty in the freshman philosophy department, was an Austrian-Israeli-Jewish philosopher, and his seminal work, I and Thou, argued that most of the time we relate to other people, things, and events in the world as “it”—that which is fundamentally outside ourselves—which he characterized as I-It relations. In our communication with God, however, it is the deeply personal, mysteriously interconnected relation of I-You that is activated. We cannot pursue that relation, because it is already within us; the only requirement for connection is the willingness to listen.
I’d found comfort in this, because I guess it made me feel like (a) I had a shot at the God thing, and (b) I didn’t have to do, or grasp at, anything that felt unsettlingly like bullshit. I could just be open to the conversation as it unfolded. For me, it began with my first child’s birth. I’d always been a fourteen-hour-a-day working reporter, the essence of a nonbeliever. But the moment the doctor placed this little boo-boo at my breast, and we gazed at each other, I was hit with The Big Love. When my second child was born, I was struck again. I knew right then that love was the secret of durable pigments, and because of it, none of us were alone. Not even the worm.
But I still wasn’t sure that I was an okay mother. With Cal assuming so many of the traditional maternal functions, I was a little lost in my thoughts about what kind of mother I should be. It now occurred to me that my friend’s sexist comment about staking out my own territory as the mother might be weirdly sensible. Still, I thought I brought a few things to the table. I knew, for example, that I definitely wanted to be a full-time stay-at-home working mom, and within that oeuvre, a regular mom. I wanted to have a home in which my children would feel cozy and protected, in which they could see all kinds of work being done: housework, professional work, hobby work. I wanted them to see that while each had its pleasures and irritants, work was an enriching, important, and inevitable feature of life. I wanted them to discover the kind of work that brought them pleasure, as well as to learn how to do the kind one simply must do but can learn to find pleasure in doing nonetheless.
In my particular idiom of maternal desire, I recognized something: I was more or less gravitating to the habitude of my upbringing. For all her eccentricities, my mom had demonstrated a pretty good work-life paradigm. I did want this gene encoded on my maternal DNA. But I didn’t want to be the awkward, cerebral, workaholic mom, either. Because I wanted our family to be a part of the community, I wanted the other mothers not to regard me as a freak.
The other mothers. Much has been written and broadcast about the junior high school social phenomenon that takes immediate effect after one becomes a parent. Many a tech entrepreneur and award-winning documentary filmmaker has been brought to her knees on entering the mommy culture. Abandon here all the credentials you’ve spent years stockpiling on your résumé. You have to make all new friends, which often means entering the sticky social dynamic of a “new moms’ group,” a circle of strangers whom you may or may not end up even liking all that much but who share in the most intimate nuances of your early life as a mother. You’re savagely vulnerable. Your hormones crash through you, one jolting tsunami after the next. You call each other a lot to compare notes. You see each other’s transformed breasts a lot. You talk a lot about your new sexuality. You complain about your hormones. There is a lot of one-upmanship, conscious or not. There is a lot of time spent just hanging out with these people. In other words: junior high school.
Some of my closest prebaby friends prudently circumvented the intensity of the new mommy culture once they had children, either by working full time or just deciding to opt out. I couldn’t do either. For one thing, Cal and I had reorganized everything so that we could stay at home with our children and work, so as viewed through the mommy culture lens, I was neither fish nor fowl. For another thing, we lived in Park Slope, headquarters of diverse, progressive family life in New York City. Long before we had even considered having children, I had lobbied Cal to move to Park Slope because I secretly felt that it was precisely the kind of neighborhood in which we could someday create such a life.
In 1994, Park Slope was still weird. It was a genuine mix of ages, races, and socioeconomic strata, a neighborhood of activists, writers, therapists, and people who joined the food co-op because they believed in communism, not just because they wanted cheap organic cereal. It was like Berkeley, only better because it was in New York. And I fit in. In fact, I didn’t even seem like a freak except that maybe, because, like my mom, I loved clothes, I might have seemed a little fancy. Then again, I felt Cal and I both seemed a little fancy because we had a three-bedroom apartment with an eat-in kitchen—by far the nicest, most adult place the two of us had ever lived in New York and the perfect place to raise our child. But in the nearly seven years that had elapsed since Cal and I had moved to Park Slope, much had changed. I hadn’t realized it until I joined one of the neighborhood mothers’ groups, and I was utterly unprepared for what I encountered.
People our age with children owned their own homes.
* Andrew Singleton, et al., “The ‘New Man’ Is in the House: Young Men, Social Change, and Housework,” The Journal of Men’s Studies, vol. 12, 2004.
* Miller, p. 2.
FIVE
THIS MUST BE THE PLACE:
MAKING A HOME
In all the years that we had been together, it had never occurred to Cal
or me to buy property. That was something that you did in the suburbs, or maybe in places like Washington, D.C., Houston, or Los Angeles. Not in New York City! That’s what rent control was for. My aunt had lived on the Upper East Side her entire adult life without ever buying, and she was a fancy person. My godmother bought her longtime one-bedroom on East End Avenue only after the building went co-op, but she was a bona fide grown-up by that time. Another auntie owned her penthouse apartment on Riverside Drive because she was an heiress who had been married to an heir and had won the apartment in the divorce. Regular people, certainly people in their early thirties, didn’t own New York City real estate.
Yet, yes, they obviously did, and they weren’t crappy places in “transitional” neighborhoods. They were beautiful old co-op apartments and brownstones in our neighborhood. Not only that, but people our age were doing home renovation. They were hiring architects to redo their kitchens. They wanted the kitchens to be the heart and soul of their homes, the place where the family cooked together, ate together, nourished itself as a warm cocoon together. Where the hell had I been, all happy with my third-floor walk-up?
One low point with my mothers’ group came when we all agreed to meet at one woman’s house well past my bedtime so that all six of us could cook homemade baby food together in her eye-wateringly expensive kitchen. As I sat scraping fresh organic corn off the cob into a Le Creuset dutch oven perched like a smug grandmother atop the front burner on a six-thousand-dollar Viking range and oven, I felt like the new scholarship kid at an all-girls’ private school, invited to a slumber party at the rich girl’s house. Shit, I remember thinking. How did I get back here? I’d already been that kid. While I realized at that very moment that I was once again going to be the weirdo, I also knew two other things. First, my children were not going to be that kid. Second, I definitely wanted them to have their own soulful kitchen, too.
When I came home that night to our once-beloved rental apartment, I was twitching with shame and disgust. We were unbelievably shitty, irresponsible parents, I told Cal. We had bet the bank on stock options, minor players in the tech economy that we’d been. All that had gone up in flames. What were we doing to invest in our family’s future? Were we really going to fritter it away by buying thousand-count pima cotton sheets and Gucci bucket hats? What were we thinking? We had been engaging in blind, desperate consumerism of the most pathetic order! Now, it seemed so obvious: By buying a home, we were investing in the health of our family as well as our financial future. He, stunned, agreed immediately. We should start looking tomorrow. But where would we get the money? How was everyone getting these mortgages—and how were they paying for these kitchens? Were we the only losers?
Much, much later—toward the end of 2008—I was reading about the mortgage credit crisis for the ka-trillionth time, thinking rancorously: Who are these people who got us in this freaking mess? Why didn’t it occur to them that the banks were dangling fool’s gold in front of them? You could maybe understand naïve, hopeful American dreamers getting sucked in, but what about all those educated white-collar assholes who took out jumbo mortgages with five-year ARMs and then HELOCed themselves to the hilt to finance remodeled kitchens with Sub-Zero refrigerators and soapstone countertops? What’s their story?
Then, as I gazed wistfully around my crappy ghetto house, where I’d recently relocated with my children after my divorce compelled me to sell my beautiful, freshly gut-renovated brownstone in a nice neighborhood before the bank foreclosed on it—because there was no way, given my place in the national financial fiasco, that I was going to be able to afford the jumbo mortgage monthly payments alone—it came to me, as in the final scene of Angel Heart: I am those people. Many other Xers are those people, too.
It turns out that while we may have disparaged commercial culture as teenagers (“I don’t buy anything that’s advertised!”), we sure spend a ton of money as parents. We have created what is called the zero-to-three market, a $20-billion-a-year industry representing the first segment in “cradle-to-grave” marketing. My friends and I used to snort at yuppies for their cornball conspicuous consumption: the ludicrous flaunting of yachts, sports cars, caviar, cigars (I always think of that 1980s commercial for Gallo jug wine and its ascot-wearing spokesman smarmily asking “How do you think I got so rich?”). But according to market research, X spends more than yuppies ever did on luxury goods, especially if it has to do with home. Indeed, Gen X’s rapacious need for the perfect nest drove them take out more home equity loans and spend more on house remodeling, per capita, than any generation before. In the mid-2000s, housing research analysts from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies to the U.S. Census Bureau tracked our mass, and massive, investments in charming old houses in urban and outlying areas; banks now notoriously overextended to us subprime mortgage loans and home equity lines of credit so that we could remodel them into the homiest possible homes.
Marketers understand these spending patterns to reflect Generation X’s desperate moves to invest in “home” and “happy childhood” before all else, even at the expense of retirement savings, health care, and political involvement. All this is, in traceable and ineffable ways, the fallout from the mass divorces and family breakdown of the 1980s. We may not be sensible to the precise qualities of these undercurrents, but we discern them in some murky, disquieting way. The numbing, frigid desert of deep space: We can feel it there, lying in wait just beyond our back doors, which are equipped with antiqued, nickel-plated Restoration Hardware knobs, latches, and hinges—amulets against the void.
You know the story. The scenario for today’s prototypical middle-class Generation X homeowner follows the same drumbeat. We’ve already covered the rogue childhood, so let’s just fast-forward to: you, having a solid career (which you did your own way, without toeing the line for anyone), getting married much later than your parents did (their first time, anyway), and having your first baby. Nothing in your life prepared you for how utterly white-light an experience holding that little biscuit would be. If nothing had ever been all that clear in your life, it was now: You’d do anything for this creature. By now, it was the late 1990s, early 2000s, and maybe you’d gotten at least a little whupped by the market crash in 2000, or more than a little by the downturn post-9/11. You were freaking: You needed stability, solid ground. You had children. Then interest rates dipped, enticing mortgages were unveiled, and the solution materialized like a fairy godmother: A home! Not the psychospiritual SRO of your childhood but a homey home. You’d invest yourself, your money, your family’s financial future—your whole idea of familyness—in it. You jumped in, headfirst. You’d always been so self-reliant, so wary of easy schemes, that you didn’t see at the time that you were getting in over your head.
Cal and I did, and we were, as it turns out, in generational company. In the fall of 2005, Generation X had higher home ownership rates than any previous generation, in spite of the recent housing bubble. In 1983, when older Baby Boomers were in their thirties, more than 60 percent of them owned their own homes; a decade later, that number dipped to 55.8 percent for younger Baby Boomers in their thirties. In 2005, more than 61 percent of thirtysomethings, now Generation X, owned homes. Why? A major reason, the report pointed out, is that Generation X was much more likely to look at their home as an investment than previous generations, owing largely—you guessed it—to having lived through the ’90s recession, followed by the stock market losses in the early years of the twenty-first century.
For those of us crawling our way out of the wreckage of the dot-bomb period, that’s what made those low or no down payment and ARM mortgages so irresistible. Indeed, surveys conducted by the National Association of Realtors show that four out of ten first-time buyers used no-money-down mortgages in 2005 and 2006; the median down payment for first-time buyers in those years was just 2 percent. What this seems to mean is that the collective feeling was, basically, screw stocks, invest in a home, and pay for it when you get back on your feet.
Far be it from the banks to have disabused anyone of that notion. That was Cal, me, and, after months of home hunting, our bank. In fewer than six months after the late-night baby-food-a-thon of shame with the mothers’ group, Cal and I became hard-core yuppie real estate porn addicts, compulsively hitting the refresh button on the New York Times real estate section online a jillion times a day, taking walks in our neighborhood not for the fun of it but to scout the FOR SALE signs of low-rent Brooklyn-based real estate firms that might offer better deals than white-glove Manhattan-based outfits. Everything was getting so damned expensive! We despaired. We should have bought something years ago! Maybe we just had to face it: We couldn’t afford to live in the city anymore.