Category: community

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Our next door neighbor’s house sold today. She lived in that house for almost 40 years. Now in her 80s, without any kids or family, she needed the money to pay for her care. For almost a year she had 24/7 caregivers in her home as her health deteriorated. She was still smart as a whip but unable to tend to her daily needs. She told me that the caregivers became too expensive. She could pay for them for another year or so but then what? She needed the money from the home sale to last her a lifetime – literally the rest of her life.

So many emotions from that conversation. Sadness and a sense of loss. She began to cry when she told me. She didn’t want to leave. It was her home and she wanted to stay in it. It made me think about the passage of time. She was in her early 40s when she moved in, and one year became two became four became eight…How many steps between our lives now and then?

It made me think about family. She jokingly said she was waiting for a rich granddaughter to emerge from the shadows. Aren’t we all? I think about the legacy of descendants – the good, the bad. I wonder what her relationships were like, who she loved, what she thought about children. I thought of our own parents – getting closer to that age. They still have a decade or two but soon this will be their fate. And then what do we do? How do we do what we need to do with the distance between us?

I think about the neighborhood as it was 40 years ago. We have neighbors who have lived here for half a century (or close to it) and they were the young parents (or singletons) with little ones (or not) who got to know one another, helped each other out, socialized, gossiped. And then time passes and new people move in, and neighborhoods are continuously decorated with the tapestry of these lives – one on top of the other, on top of the other. Life is a wheel, my grandmother used to say.

It feels like the end of an era. We spoke with our neighbor when we came to view the house years ago, before putting in an offer. She said it was a nice neighborhood, a quiet one. When we first moved in and I was pregnant, about to burst, she helped me prune some rose bushes and move them into a planter. That planter still stands at the edge of our driveway, roses blooming each season. She noticed one of our trees dying and alerted us to it before it could fall and cause damage. She would always tell us that our children sounded happy, that she loved to hear their joy while they played. We purchased basic essentials for her during the pandemic. I walked over Thanksgiving dinner. I answered her call and went to check on her when her health problems began in earnest – when she started to have trouble with her balance. She came to the door naked from the waist down because she had wet herself. It felt like the beginning of the end.

I’m going to miss her. I don’t know who the new neighbors will be – whether they will be a family, an elderly person, a developer who will raze the home and put up something modern, white and all angles. Change makes me nervous, but change is also the way of the world. One day, we will move. Maybe it will be in a few years, or maybe we’ll be in our 80s as well. Life is a wheel and it never stops turning.

The Village

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I was recently surprised to learn that I had lost my desire to move back to New York. As recently as a few months ago, when people would ask me whether I envisioned myself staying in California forever, I used to respond with “Probably, because I don’t think I can convince my husband to live anywhere else.” Now I pause, because the answer is that I can’t quite imagine living anywhere else.

When and how did this drastic shift occur? I left New York when I was 18 years old. To be honest, I was thrilled to do so. I lived in the suburbs outside of NYC, had moved during my freshman year of high school (NOT a good situation), and was excited to “discover the world”. I floated around New England for college and medical school, and spent a requisite year living and working in NYC. When it was time for residency selection, my husband (also an East Coaster) and I were adamant that we needed to get out of the cold. He wanted to work in California and I was game to live in California and so I applied and was accepted.

We flew to the West Coast with one suitcase. (I can imagine myself telling this story to my children one day, at which point they’ll roll their eyes at this particular sentence.) We had less than $5,000 combined in our bank accounts. My husband was unemployed (“between jobs”) and I was days shy of starting my intern year. We rented a small unit in a house of four units total and decked it out in IKEA furniture. My husband bought a Samsung flat screen TV which we still own 8 years later. We weren’t married yet but reasoned that we needed to move in together because the rent was too expensive to swing two apartments. When he proposed to me, the engagement ring was the most expensive thing we owned. We didn’t have much but we were so happy.

In the past 8 years, we’ve spent 5 of them living together (we were apart for 3 years while I completed my residency), got jobs, got married, bought a house, tucked away money for retirement, had 3 kids, tucked away money for college education, and created the life we always wanted – one we could have never quite imagined when we landed in California in 2010.

Yet there were bumps in the road. I started my first job out of residency in 2014 and had a baby 3 months later. I’ve had 2 additional children since. I had no idea how difficult it would be to raise a family away from our families. It often felt impossible. I vividly remember those first colic-filled weeks with our oldest. We had help for a few of them but were on our own most of the time and I cried constantly. When I went back to work I was convinced there was no way I could juggle motherhood and my career without help. Most of our acquaintances at the time were my husband’s friends and, although mostly good people, they just weren’t my people. Is that a terrible thing to say? I hope not. You know that feeling when you just click with someone? When you can tell them anything – lay all your cards on the table, be completely vulnerable – and they will accept you wholeheartedly? Let’s just say I didn’t get that vibe from his people. And that’s what I struggled with the most – not having someone I could text frantically when our first was up at all hours of the night, not having someone I could ask to watch him for an hour while I took a breather, not having a tribe to commiserate with.

So I put myself out there. I met a group of women I now call “The Mommies”. My first mom friends! Now, the group has changed dramatically these past 4 years as moms move away and group dynamics shift, but we have each other’s backs, an ongoing calendar of events, never-ending birthday parties, and most importantly the knowledge that we have known each other since our little ones were just months old. I rekindled friendships with people from my intern year and became closer to co-workers with young children. I met more moms through preschool and subsequent “new mom” groups as more children joined our family. We acquired a network of people who have helped us out in some capacity around the house – gardeners, painters, nannies, cleaning crews, etc. Today, our nanny saw that I was clearing out our shed for some upcoming work and (unsolicited) called her husband to see if he would be willing to pick up all of the items we were throwing out to save us the hassle. He came by an hour later and I was so happy I could have cried. With such distance between ourselves and our families, these random acts of kindness mean everything.

I also have to admit that there are serious perks to living in California: great weather, tons of diversity, generally liberal politics. It’s also true that we both love our jobs and our house. But the game-changer for me was truly the evolution of our community and little village. We’ll see how we feel as the kids get older and schedules become more demanding but, for now, I am truly loving where we live, and this is the first time since 2014 that I’ve been truly able to say that.