Suburgatory (2 page)

But despite not having a family member or friend murdered, 9/11 had a cumulative effect on me: watching people cry in the streets holding “Missing” signs; seeing half my local firehouse wiped out; waking up to the smell of burning rubble for months after; being evacuated after a bomb threat with my boss screaming, “Everyone Get Out Now!”; writing endless stories about it at work; watching field producers come back from Ground Zero looking stricken; having guys in puffy hazmat suits walk around the office while my only protection from possible anthrax was an old, ugly Ann Taylor outfit. It added up, as I'm sure it did with countless other New Yorkers.

I vowed—quite uncharacteristically for a cynical sort like me—to take a chance on life, clean up my act, and have a baby. Steve said, “Sure, what the hell.” I think 9/11 affected him too, though in a different way. His foul-mouthed daddy lion voice spoke to him saying, “There's no fucking way I'm raising my kid in this crime-ridden terror trap.
Roar!
” Not that we even had to debate the question. I knew I couldn't be a mom, keep my sanity, and continue in the Screamatorium; and we couldn't afford to stay in Manhattan on one salary. So off we went to the first of three suburbs over the next four years.

Within months of shvitzing in the Screamatorium, I found myself marooned in suburbia. Now, years later, with a happy son; a small house overrun with his brothers from different mothers; a select group of trash-talking friends; and Zoloft pills a-poppin', I see it as the birthplace of my new life as a thirty-something mom. I have a new set of satisfactions and, of course, a bigger ass. But at first suburbia seemed like nothing more than the graveyard for my twenty-something dreams. (
Sooo overdramatic, spoiled whiny white mommy! Trying to score the Pulitzer Prize for Overwriting? Good effort!
)

I had gone from 80 miles an hour to zero, and I had vastly underestimated the crash this staggering deceleration might cause. My landscape now included Wal-Mart on one end of the class scale and Whole Foods on the other; and crossover between the two looked nonexistent. Nearly everyone was white (
see
Whole Foods), except nannies, cleaning ladies, and yard workers (
see
Wal-Mart), and all the dads and the working moms I never met vanished on the 6:04 a.m. train.

Suburbanites seemed to me to have one-track minds, and mighty clean ones, too. They were about one business, and one business alone: baby and then child-raising. On paper, I didn't look so different from the other stay-at-home moms. They were mostly former professionals, too, some from Wall Street trading floors, which are easily as rough and tumble as any newsroom. But whatever edge these type-A women might have had now seemed gone, replaced by a version of hyper-vigilant parenting that was, to me, brutally boring and faintly absurd. They blathered on and on about how people without kids “just didn't get it.” They seemed busy busy busy and, most important to me, appeared very short on laughs. One day I spotted some obscene playground graffiti and I was the only one even willing to acknowledge it, as in, “Look, that slide says VAGINA on it!” I wished I could share my glee with my potty-mouth ex-coworkers, since my new “coworker” moms had no interest. But they were back in the newsroom slamming a show together, while I was soon to establish myself as that weirdo mommy at Gymboree.

I knew very quickly that moving to the suburbs was a mistake when I realized that I missed my New York City doorman I'll call Rob, who was such a cliché of the portly, klutzy, up-in-your-business doorman that no self-respecting comedy writer would ever dream him up. (And in fact, one of the world's most successful comedy writers lived in my building as he, too, became a parent and eventually left for the suburbs: Adam McKay. How do I know this, since I've never met Adam McKay? Because Rob told me all about him, what a great guy he was, his nice wife and his adorable baby and his latest fantastic SNL sketch and. . . .)

Even at 11:30 p.m.—no,
especially
at 11:30 p.m.—when I was coming home to the East Village from work at CNN, exhausted, Rob would start in on an obscure Civil War fact, or deliver the results of the game he listened to on his handheld radio, or describe the latest outing he had with girlfriend “Gladys” (her real name, like Gladys, is straight out of an old-school sitcom, just like Rob himself). Rob could and would talk about anything, and he would still be talking as the elevator doors closed. Years later, he's surely still talking. If Rob had suddenly found himself in my suburb, an army of concerned mommies would have dragged his fifty-year-old ass in for a special-ed evaluation, because Rob might well have had Asperger's.

So it was while pushing a baby stroller through a suburban mall (my new “town square”) that I started missing not just my urban friends and job, but especially Rob, my go-to conversation machine, and all the other random faces I would bump into, sometimes literally, going about my city life. I had gone from living vertically with dozens of couples or single people in the same building (using the same elevators, clogging the same trash room), to living horizontally, families cut off from other families in their own cocoons: self-imposed segregation in a most concrete way. Feeling so cut off surely magnified a nasty case of postpartum depression and the crushing loneliness that came with it. That's when I turned into, well, the stay-at-home-mommy version of Rob.

I began talking to everyone, anywhere, anytime, all the time. Were people's facial cues telling me to back the fuck off, you crazy mommy? I didn't care. I followed a circuit of library story times with the devotion of a Dead Head (story time for tiny infants, mind you, who still don't know the difference between you and their own hand). I ate at the same diner every morning, ordering the same two-dollar egg sandwich until the waitress busting her ass recognized me. Yeah, she recognized me alright, as the spoiled mommy bitch who didn't have to work and wouldn't stop smiling at her, attempting pleasantries. I became an avid student of nanny culture and racially profiled them to find the most talkative ones. My inappropriate, sweeping generalization is that Caribbean nannies seemed the chattiest, and often cattiest, and therefore most desirable to me. I swear one favorite nanny showed such contempt for the parents of the boy-prince she was caring for that I thought her eyes were going to roll out and drop on to the park bench.

I attended a ragtag sing-along at a bookstore that usually attracted just a few passersby and me, the sad-sack regular with her quarrelsome baby. The sing-along leader was Jean, a sixty-something sweetheart, who was so scattershot I thought she was either drunk or mis-medicated. She would sort of punt on her kiddie playlist after just a few highly awkward songs and one day even said, “Linda, you take over.” She seemed more unhinged than me, and that's saying a lot. (Jean didn't have a car, I learned, when I saw her blowing around in the rain waiting for a bus on a hugely busy, dispiriting commercial thoroughfare. I picked her up. A suburbanite without a car: the ultimate outcast.)

And, as I mentioned, I joined a Gymboree class. That's where I met Bridget, Luv, as I called her in my head. Bridget, Luv, of course, was Irish; an older woman and a local legend among the baby-raising set for her savant-like knowledge of newborns. In my haze of postpartum depression, I had five of the worst seconds of my life in her class, when I actually forgot my beloved son's name, Frank. After class, I was so distraught I didn't want to leave Gymboree or Bridget, Luv, who said to me, “You have the bad baby blues, luv. I seen it a-tousand times.”

All my pent-up loneliness plus my suppressed impropriety had to go somewhere, and that somewhere was online. Google my name and in a few clickety-clicks you'll find a sorry list of intimate grotesqueries I cataloged about myself with abandon when the meds finally kicked in, I got my writing act together, and I started submitting to the
Boston Globe
and the
Huffington Post
. I was determined to entertain myself, even if it meant looking like a self-obsessed exhibitionist begging for laughs.

Much of the indignity happened on Facebook, which is just vastly more diverse than my real life in suburbia. (Please friend me, Linda Erin Keenan, on Facebook if you're so inclined. The crazier you are, the better. I genuinely love it.) Like other lonely souls out there, I fell into that vortex of making Facebook my real, not-real community. How could snow-white suburbia compete with this picture? I realized it could be my own massively Awkward Facebook Family Photo: the homeless artist, the Pakistani mariner, the military fetishist, the Renaissance faire–loving transsexual lesbian massage therapist, the evangelical Republicans, my fashionista Mormon, the very sweet Sikh, the homeschooling pagan, two home-birthing doulas, the Texas BBQ restaurateur who promotes “burnt end sandwiches” right next to the hard-core vegan telling us that, say, my beloved Hot Pockets are killing me. All there and much much more in my wonderful Facebook nuthouse. Oh, and Buddy the Elf. He's there, too. He works for Santa. Says he's a real bastard.

In private, I pushed my boundaries further and began writing fake news satire, because eventually I went from bored to fascinated with the habits and fixations of upper-middle-class suburban life and parenting culture—like the bubble-wrapping of the affluent child—and what that says about America. Why do so many of the world's luckiest people seem so damn anxious?

I'm fascinated by the way some women mercilessly judge other women's choices, and what motivates the harshest proponents of the “pure” and “natural,” especially in terms of breast-feeding. I see a lot of gory, competitive masochism in this area, like, say, “My nipples bled more than your nipples.” “No, MY nipples bled more AND I got mastitis and then septic-shock!” Well, at the risk of having frozen bags of breast milk pelted at my door, I really don't get why people are so passionately interested in how I feed my child or how I use or view my own breasts. As I recall, they are
my
breasts, and that baby is
my
baby, and it's actually quite an intimate act to press on others with such vigor. I
also
don't understand the many women
and men
who vocally trash those who breast-feed their kids publicly, or for years and years.
None of your business.
)

I do have friends who believe strongly in breast-feeding, but they are
lovely
, advocate for
all
women, including the poor here and around the world, where breast-feeding can be a life-and-death choice for a baby if water is dirty. These activists are not toxically judgmental like, say, the “Breast-feeding Nazi Really a Nazi” I write about in the book. But vicious invective from others can be found all over the Internet. And passive-aggressive, thoughtless comments on breast-feeding, C-sections, epidurals, circumcision, staying at home versus working, and organic-food eating can have ugly impacts on fragile moms who choose to do things differently, or who might not even have a choice. It sure did on me, and on innumerable other friends.

Sadly, I think some of these movements inadvertently add to the yawning divide between rich and poor, or educated versus less educated. Not because the underlying goals of breast-feeding or eating organic food are unworthy, but because we are simply not set up in this country for subsidizing healthy food or fully supporting working mothers who breast-feed, poor or otherwise. Really, how does a woman working at low pay afford a souped-up Medela breast pump? How many women have jobs that will allow time to pump? Breast-feeding is only free if you don't put value on a woman's time.

Michelle Obama can exercise her ass off all over the country (and God love her for it), but until we end, say, distorting food industry subsidies, the poor and middle class have every incentive imaginable to eat cheap crap, and many of the “well meaning” make the less fortunate feel guilty about it. Eating like a locovore is all good and great, but it's often expensive, time-consuming, and simply impossible for people of average means.

So the poor and middle class seem to be getting less and less healthy, while affluent suburbia (and “urbia,” too, for that matter) plies itself with every high-priced age-defying product, time-consuming betterment program or Whole Foods supplement, and basically jogs itself straight into its hale and hearty future. These days, Fat = Poor = Shame, as seen in “Woman Shops at Wal-Mart to Feel ‘Pretty, Thin,'” among other pieces. Class, race, and religious collisions in mostly monochrome suburbia really interest me.

In a broader way, I also began thinking about America's diminished place in the world and how it might translate to the everyday business of raising a family; this whole idea of “living the dream” and maintaining a kind of phantom affluence in the so-called Great Recession.

For instance, why did Amy Chua's tough-parenting
Tiger Mom
book strike such a chord? Do we fear she may be right, that we Americans are coddling our kids into mediocrity? I wrote “Indian Child Taunted as ‘New Jew' at Middle School” several years ago and thought Chua's “shaming” as an overdemanding mommy-shrew was quite similar to what happens to my overperforming immigrant Chaudry family.

Amidst this anxiety, I feel like in wealthy suburbia we not only Bubble-Wrap our kids from the broader world, but also ourselves,
even as wars are being fought in our name by our less fortunate, rural, urban, and not comfortably suburban countrymen.

Meanwhile, I have seen the insistent creep of anti-Muslim, anti-“other,” anti-teacher, and anti-union resentment that has been percolating since 9/11, but really seemed to explode as the economy collapsed and when President Obama was elected.

I was actually asked if I would prefer another doctor because the one I selected, a Sikh, wore a turban. You'll see that story, a Sikh gyno's desperate bid to keep patients, in an op-ed titled “I Am Certified Not Muslim . . . And I Love Your Feminine Area!” I labeled these op-eds
Shout Outs.