My Suburban Escapes

“Muddy water,

Let stand,

Becomes clear.”

Lao-Tzu

I’m a Louisiana girl who found her way to NYC to follow a dream as have many country girls before me.  I blinked a decade away, studying and acting, then skedaddled back South before exploding from too much city and not enough wild.  I found wild in spades in Austin and another ten years flew by. I spent my thirties running a river school by day and acting on stage by night, morphing from Tom Sawyer to Stella DuBois Kowalski daily for months on end. I fell in love and married one of the few New Yorkers in town, then motherhood rushed in as I was apparently of “advanced maternal age.” I was pregnant with our son on my last acting job and seven months along with our daughter on my last river trip. My beloved students wrote “Baby on Board” on my huge belly poking out between my life jacket and bikini bottoms. I was relegated from paddling instructor to captain of The Mother Ship, a Huck Finn raft with a trolling motor which ferried gear and scaredy cats, a foreshadowing of impending motherhood.

I had always preferred the company of children to that of adults, and I finally had my own.  When our son was born, I had to learn to slow down, stop the duo-life multi-tasking frenzy. Focus on him.  The stillness and time required for one feeding seemed intolerable, and I had signed on for four a day.  I had no idea what I was doing. Just as I was getting the hang of the first, I had a second.

Our family unit complete, we moved from “Keep It Weird” Austin to its antithesis: Rye, NY, husband’s hometown.  I was cast in the role of Suburban Housewife on the Basic Family Plan: remove husband, toddler and infant from packaging; add starter home and suburban assault vehicle; stir and let simmer ‘til graduation.  

The suburbs held little allure for me. They were a purgatory of sorts, not the city and not the country.  It was easier to find a pedicure than a six pack.  And there was no queso.

The town is gorgeous, a commuter’s dream on the Long Island Sound a half hour north of Manhattan with a direct train line connecting the two like an umbilical cord.  You can see the city skyline from the beach, park and shop on Greenwich Avenue in ten minutes and fly out of Westchester Airport rather than the chaos of La Guardia and JFK.  It epitomizes the suburban holy trinity: great schools, close to the city, safe.  Yet it lacked the holy trinity I had heretofore embraced: mystery, mayhem and margaritas. Or so I thought.

The rhythm of the South runs deep in my veins, its social forces tugging on me like gravity. The seasons are guided by hunting and fishing, football and festivals, intense heat and flood.  It’s a tapestry of opposites which I inherently understand – a rich culture rather than a culture of the rich.  I had envisioned raising kids there, a passel of porch monkeys climbing grand old knobby oak trees, riding four wheelers and horses in the woods and roaming like free-range chickens ‘til dark. Boat rides on the bayou. Crawfish boils in the back yard. Laid back, lovely living. 

Instead I found myself smack dab in the middle of a Forbes Top Ten brimming withcaptains of industry where all the women were strong, all the men good-looking, all the children above average and few would understand this reference. To my blind eye there was nothing to do except lunch.  I felt like a thirteen-year-old boy trapped in the body of a 44-year-old housewife and thrown into a strange land.   I spent the first year drinking too much whiskey, reading too much Cheever and feeling sorry for myself, a sentiment foreign to my demeanor.  I knew I was fortunate to be a stay-at-home mom for a while, and I was thankful. I really was. It’s just that a never-at-home mom was more accurate. I spent the bulk of my time packing and unpacking as we moved to a different house every summer. Days were spent rushing around to get stuff for the kids or house, hopped up on caffeine and always late for something.  I existed in a perpetual state of nesting.  To borrow a phrase from Dolly Parton, “If you don’t like the road you’re walking, start paving another one.” It was high time I started.