seemed that we had fallen into the mean streets of a television drama. The night was inky: no moon or stars visible, no lamplight penetrating the thick canopy of trees along the Des Plaines River Road from O’Hare Airport.
Poring over a map, my husband directed the driver. I peered nervously into the dark, searching for gunmen hiding behind the oaks. The driver ignored a detour, driving through a mile of roadwork on Lake Street. She woke the kids, crashing into a road barrier and taking out several traffic cones. We arrived in front of our temporary apartment tower, the orange cones still jammed under the limo’s bumper. Where in hell were we?
Oak Park, just across Chicago’s city limits, had the fine prairie homes of Frank Lloyd Wright, Victorian Painted Ladies, elm and oak-lined avenues, and the wide, grassy sidewalks that Ernest Hemingway wrote about with disdain. No nukes, no guns, gays welcome, diversity celebrated—or so we read on the Chamber of Commerce website. Two days later, we headed into the city to explore the Field Museum. Outside the Roosevelt El station was a police stakeout. Helicopters. Roadblocks. A real hostage scenario. This was no television cop drama. We had arrived in America.
All too soon, my husband and second-grader vanished into the secrets of their important work and school days, where they formed fresh relationships and learned new routines. The small human and I were left to get to know our new home. I spent hours staring at shelves of Tide and Purex, o.b. tampons, and Edy’s ice cream, searching for a familiar name.
This was a type of aloneness I had never encountered. No familiar friends to talk to, no colleagues, no meetings to rush to. My husband, who used to meet me for lunch or coffee during our working days, was consumed by his new position. I felt abandoned, by all but my toddler. A limpet, he clung to my leg even when I went to the toilet. This was new. He used to be an independent little boy. Now I always had an appendage attached. We spent hours together—at home painting, playing with fire trucks and reading Hop on Pop, listening to story time at the library, playing at the tot lot, walking the streets searching for a face that could become familiar. He was too young to hold a conversation and he napped every day. Never before had I so many hours without another adult.
On my birthday, I jammed into a Victoria’s Secret fitting room trying on lingerie along with my all-male audience, husband and sons, cheering me on. There were no grandmothers, aunties, neighbors, nor babysitters. In this new life, I set up play dates with moms in a playgroup. The “play date” was new to me. In my old life, friends dropped in unannounced for a cup of tea or called to arrange a beach trip the next day. Now, mothers on the school playground pulled out their organizers to schedule meetings, often a week or a month in advance. We gathered in kitchens that had granite countertops and appliances hidden behind wood paneling. These were middle-class homes that were bigger and fancier and tidier than my friends’ homes in New Zealand. They had mud rooms and multiple bathrooms and more plastic toys than I had seen outside of toy shops. We drank drip coffee and watched our small children tussle over dinosaurs and spaceships. At school PTO meetings, I recorded minutes about whiteboard fundraisers and new playground equipment. I did the splits in mom-and-toddler gym ’n’ swim classes, conquered Play-Doh and hand painting, and learned to make cupcakes.
SPLITTING, SPLINTERING, LOSING my adherence to secure friendships, to identity, to self-purpose. “It is the reality of the self which we transfer into things. It has nothing to do with independent reality,” wrote Simone Weil. When you move away from everything you know, your reality falls away around you. The detachment, the severing, makes the illusion of it all painfully clear. I don’t understand why anyone would seek to be detached, to aspire to see the illusion. Which images faded first? My terraced garden, with its tall plumes of bamboo and birds singing in the flax bushes. Moonlight streaking the magnolia blooms. The camellia tree under which we buried my youngest son’s placenta, to root him in the land. Dear friends, whose children would grow up without my gaze. My son and his pal Eric rolling down the grassy hill in Grey Lynn Park. The drive to work past mangroves and sailboats. Colleagues. Work tasks. Lunching with my favorite client Robyn in a courtyard café. She died of breast cancer several years after I moved.
It becomes harder to summon these realities in any tangible way. They are streaky memories, sometimes defined, at other times receding, blurred, wavering.
ALL THE SELVES I had constructed unraveled like an unfastened bandage. Attributes that I thought were fundamental to my being had vanished. I was no one’s friend, employee, countrywoman. I was not even a citizen. My familiar identities were oceans away. I grieved for what I had mistaken for self. When the bank manager opening our account wrote down “homemaker” as my occupation, I burst into tears. I gnawed the inside of my cheek. Tendrils of my hair fell out, blocking the shower drain and curling across the floor. My self-image as an independent woman faded.
The bureaucratic landscape changed after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. New policies prevented me from getting a driver’s license. The offer of a political speechwriting job slid away because I was unable to get work authorization, despite having a visa to work. Was I sentenced to a life of molding Play-Doh warriors and stringing macaroni necklaces? I left the country a few times—Christmas in London with family, a visit to my son’s godmother in Amsterdam, a trip home—and it was always a relief to let my guard down with people who knew me. But that joy and ease was shredded upon my return, when I was hustled through passport control and sometimes into the secondary room for interviewing. My ethnicity, race, and nationality were scrutinized in a way I had not previously experienced. It seemed that I had erred, but I didn’t know what my crime was. I felt powerless. Resentment glowed inside me, a line of hot lava under smooth black rock. No travel books or relocation advisors could have alerted me to these possibilities.
THE BAY WINDOW of our second-floor apartment looked onto a quiet street with ornate Queen Anne houses and not much traffic. The morning would start with a glimpse of the woman who jogged around our block so slowly we called her the “sloth lady.” Then I would walk my schoolboy to his class, with the toddler in his stroller. Then to Whole Foods for meatballs, bananas, potatoes, carrots, peas, and fish sticks. I’d trudge a mile home with grocery bags hanging off the stroller. After that, make the beds. Unload the dishwasher. Cart the boys’ dirty t-shirts, jeans, socks down narrow back stairs to basement. Start laundry. Make sandwiches for lunch. Cut off crusts. Finger paint. Nap. Race to school to fetch my older son. Watch kids on swings in playground. Walk home. Supervise homework. Hustle down to the basement. Put laundry in dryer. Cook the meatballs. Serve children. Clean kitchen. Pick up dirty socks. Run bath. Yell at boys for sloshing water onto floor, where it threatened to seep into our landlord’s apartment. Watch teeth cleaning. Find youngest son’s blankie. Read The Man Whose Mother Was a Pirate. Turn on going-to-sleep-music—Cassandra Wilson’s Blue Light at Dawn. Dim lights. Go to bed. Get up. Repeat.
EACH DAY I longed for the hour when my husband would return, another adult, familiar, who understood me.
EXCEPT HE DIDN’T, really. Our lives ran on different tracks. His world was expansive, full of novelty, films, filmmakers, and frequent travel. I had no stories to tell. My voice was stuck in my throat. I had expected an adventure, but this was an indentured mess of diapers, fish sticks and chicken nuggets, nose-wiping and whining, the latter mainly mine. How had I become caught in this trap?
“SUBURBAN NEUROSIS” was a term first used in the 1930s and popularized in the 1950s. It described the anxiety and sadness of women who moved from cities to tract housing developments on the edges of towns and fields. When women moved far from their mothers, extended families and local support networks of neighbors, they lost their babysitters and sense of community. They raised their children alone while their husbands worked. Isolated women with “new town blues” became weepy, lonely, and bored. Housework becomes drudgery when you do it alone, when it is the focus of your day.
When I complained about not coping, my husband, in a moment of exasperation, asked, “What do you expect me to do about it?” He advised me to be patient. Used to meeting daily work deadlines, I
