When I was in my early twenties and pictured having a baby one day — a day that felt, from that vantage point, way off in the inconceivably distant future — that picture included things like a house. A job that made money. Probably a nursery furnished entirely from the Pottery Barn Kids catalog. What my life actually looked like when my husband, Kendrick, and I decided to have a baby wasn’t quite like that.
In the years before we moved to the West Coast, I became thoroughly disenchanted with New York City. It was too hot in the summer, too cold in the winter. It was too hard to get around the subway system with a stroller, and too expensive to take taxis everywhere. The restaurants were great, but after we moved to Westchester (despite our insistence that "Oh, we'll still come into the city all the time!"), we never went to them.
Not like we knew the good places to go anymore, anyway.
Last week I took a trip to New York that was technically a business trip but that I extended by a couple of days so that Indy and I could spend extra time with my parents, and ended up roaming the streets for hours at a time, stopping into places I remembered and places that only just sprung up in the months since I left.
Oh my GOD yesterday.
So Francesca's visiting me for a few days, and yesterday we both worked from home in the morning, and then in the afternoon we thought we'd take Indy and Goldie to lunch and to the candy store and then swing by TJMaxx on the way back to my place. We were a little "eehhhhh" about the idea of shopping with two kids, but figured, hey, they have a toy section; we can stop there first and get something for each of my children to play with while we browse sweaters for half an hour or so.
Nope.
Q. Jordan,
My husband and I have been married a year now, own a house, have a dog and a cat. I'm approaching 30 next summer. Our lives are primed for a child, but we've both been a bit ambivalent about deciding to go for it because everything in life is so good and peaceful right now. Maybe we're subconsciously thinking "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."
There have been times in the past when I've been super baby hungry, but always when I knew I was nowhere near ready in terms of lifestyle. I know I want a child or two eventually, just not sure I want to start right now. But of course, there's the whole biological clock thing ticking away....
This is my Dad, racing on the track at Laguna Seca. He is 70 years old.
For many, many years, my primary mode of transportation was a motorcycle. I've been on one since I was about seven months old, tucked into a kind of rucksack contraption on my dad's back with a teeny-tiny helmet on my head (this is obviously pretty crazy - not to mention definitely illegal nowadays - but was apparently more or less acceptable behavior back in 1981). When I turned sixteen, my parents did the opposite of what every other parent in the world would do, and signed me up for a motorcycle training course so I could get my license as soon as possible and join in on the family pastime. I spent the weekend at some kind of army base camp-type place, practicing my turns around orange traffic cones alongside the four middle-aged men and two twentysomething guys who comprised the rest of the class.
My bike was a yellow Suzuki Savage 650. It wasn't the prettiest thing I've ever seen - it was really yellow - but I loved it. I think you always love the first vehicle you own. I rode it to school in the mornings, and on weekends I sometimes took solo drives up towards Bear Mountain, my heart pounding as I took the curves on the Henry Hudson Parkway, my mind screaming don't fall don't fall don't fall. Riding never felt comfortable to me, exactly, but I pretended that it did - because walking into class with my helmet in my hand, I was The Girl Who Rode A Motorcycle.
