Does My Best Self Live In Queens?

If we are what we prioritize, then 2016 will be the year that I find out what I am.

In 2016, I am going to (god willing) give birth to a second child. Yet my ideal is for my life to remain more or less the same. Ben and I will get to keep living where we live, among friends we love, in an apartment we love, in the best neighborhood in the most vibrant and dynamic city in the world. We will get to keep doing what we love even though neither of us has a lucrative job. We will continue to be Good Enough Parents, partners who engage in loving and supportive ways with our offspring and each other while also occasionally remembering to practice self-care.

We will somehow figure out how to pay over $600 a month each month for my new Platinum health coverage, and $33 a month for my shiny new life insurance coverage, and child care for both a toddler and a baby. We will do all of this while retaining our sanity and senses of humor. We will do all of this and remember to shower once in a while. We will do all of this and not collapse.

Alternatively, something will give. I can say with perfect truth that I don’t know yet what that “something” will be. Maybe I’ll go back to some kind of office job and sacrifice a certain amount of professional fulfillment in order to be able to contribute to the family in a more material way. Or maybe the whole family will transplant to Bay Ridge or, more likely, given the available options, a neighborhood in Queens, where we will exchange the community we have in this borough for the easy commute, affordability, and space that would be available to us in that one.

“I don’t know if I can do it,” I told Ben recently, in our thirteen-thousandth conversation on the subject. “Neither of our moms is here. The social network we’ve built in this neighborhood is all I’ve got. How can I have a new baby in a new place, where we know no one? How can that possibly compete with this?”

“But this just won’t work,” he told me, using the voice parents everywhere use to tell children a beloved pet must be put down. “You know that. It won’t work.”

Oh Brooklyn. You’ve been my home for over a decade. Despite your affectations (an entire store dedicated to mayonnaise?) and your ugly condos spreading everywhere like an allergic reaction, you are everything I want: walkable and intimate but endless; vibrant and verdant, too, dense with trees and dogs and stately houses. And yet we are at a point where even a superhero in Avengers: Age of Ultron says, “I don’t think I can afford a place in Brooklyn.” He’s not even complaining. He’s stating a fact. This borough is too darn hot.

I don’t mind peeling off the brand; I’ve never been much for labels. What I mind leaving is the people.

Sure, there are new parents everywhere. But the kind of rueful, wry, and blessedly non-judgmental mom- and dad-friends I’ve found here who understand that ambivalence is as much a part of parenthood as unconditional love? Will I find those people in Jackson Heights? Do they congregate in Kew Gardens?

My child-free friends — an impressive number of whom live within walking distance of my house — are precious to me too, and not just because some of them even babysit from time to time. They remind me that I’m more than a mommy. They invite me to holiday parties and panel discussions, to book readings and bars. They come over in the evening after I’ve sung Babygirl to sleep with three lullabies and tucked her in alongside her 26 stuffed animals and talk to me the same way they would if I had just arrived home from City Hall.

Because of the paucity of inter-borough transportation, Queens may as well be Iowa, or the moon. The neighborhoods we’re looking at are not remote from Manhattan; all roads lead to Manhattan. But they are inaccessible from here. Aside from occasionally meeting up in the city, my real-life friends would become my Facebook friends.

Staying in an increasingly expensive Brooklyn for the people is a costly proposition. As Mike put it, when I discussed this conundrum ages ago with him, “Those would be some really expensive friends.” And of course there’s no guarantee the friends themselves will stick around. The borough is doing its damnedest to kick all of us out and replace us with hedge funders and trust-funders. Eventually everyone gets displaced. The wheels of city life grind on.

Moving to Queens would take a certain amount of pressure off. Selling our current place and buying a larger apartment there for less money would mean more room and good schools for the kids while both adults could probably keep doing what we love.

Moving to Queens, then, would mean prioritizing parenthood over personhood in a new, more direct way. It would mean making actual sacrifices which, because I’ve been lucky, up ’til now I haven’t really had to do. Am I ready for that, in 2016? Is that what being an adult is?

I do know that we need to decide soon. Babygirl starts Pre-K in September, which means that, between end of January and beginning of March, we have to give the city our answer. Where will we be: squeezed, in more ways that one, into the safe and familiar, or spread out in the new?

This article is part of The Billfold’s 2015 end-of-year series, “Our Best Selves in the Coming Year.”

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