Interlude: New York City, One Last Time (Before The Baby)

A trip to NYC before our lives completely change.

Our plan to return to New York City one last time before the upcoming arrival of our son in November came together fairly quickly.

Andrea’s job required her to travel to Washington D.C., and with us not on the hook for the cost of her flight it made sense for me to join her on the East Coast. It was our last chance to experience New York, childless, before our lives change forever.

We moved to Oaxaca just about a year ago and I think a common thread across my stories has been a deep and pervasive ache for New York. I wish I could say that our time in Mexico has dulled the pain, but it has not. The longer we spend in Mexico, the more I think perhaps we have lost more than we have gained.

The fact that New York has presented itself splendidly for the past week has artificially worsened the problem. The old issues which made leaving the city feel possible certainly have not improved, a fact I was reminded of when I encountered someone smoking a joint in a quite busy bathroom at LeGuardia airport. A day or two later Andrea and I were sitting on the subway when she suddenly said to me, “someone peed on the ground.” That same day we saw someone take their shoes off on the subway platform. So, take heart, dear reader: the city is just as disgusting and unhinged as ever.

But we scheduled our week here entirely around shopping for the baby, seeing friends, and eating food from cuisines we don’t have access to in Oaxaca and that’s a combination of circumstances which will dull even the sharpest of blades the city might wield against a hopeful visitor. While this year New York experienced once of its most brutally, relentlessly hot summers, by the time we arrived the daytime high was around 78 and the low was 65. We took a ride on a rowboat in Central Park, saw the new insect exhibit at the Museum of Natural History, and ordered a big, greasy, coal-fired pepperoni pizza at a restaurant that’s been open for more than a century. It was, for New York, as close to a perfect week as one could hope for.

As much as I love and miss the city, though, life in Mexico has not made the United States look better: quite the opposite, actually. The United States feels, in a word, unhealthy. It is grotesquely, eye-poppingly expensive here, and our friends who live outside of NYC, including in other states and in places which are suburban or rural, report that they’re paying about the same amount of money that New Yorkers do for many of the same foods, goods, and services. Almost nobody we know can afford to go to the doctor as much as they need to, and therapy is laughably expensive and inaccessible while drugs and alcohol are not. The only people thriving in the U.S. are the ultra-wealthy. We truly could not afford to live here without making extreme concessions to our lifestyle.

As I write this, though, I find that my appetite for describing the ills of New York is weak, and a tallying of those problems does not make Mexico seem better. Likewise, listing the advantages of Mexico also doesn’t lessen the pain of leaving New York. Complaining and justifying feel, in equal measure, hollow. The net is zero, and I’m left with both the love of our new home and the loss of the old one.

I think a lot of this boils down not just to the fact that I miss our friends, the shops, the parks, or the ability to go eat Ethopian food in a tenement basement. What I had expected for our child has profoundly changed. I had a vision of them as a New Yorker and now they won’t be. True, odds seem good that at some point in their life they will live here. I don’t see how a person we raise couldn’t also be enamored by the city, if only by what they’ll experience when we take them to visit and when we describe our old life here. But our child will be Mexican, a Nuevo Oaxaqueño, and I can’t help but feel that we have somehow robbed them of the experience of being a native-born New Yorker.

People keep asking, understandably and rightfully, if we’re scared to become parents. Andrea’s fears in this moment are different from my own, in that she is worried about the physical process of giving birth (since she has to do it!) and I have more mental and emotional bandwidth to think about what happens after the child is born. But beyond the horrifying process of giving birth, I’m just sad that our kid won’t experience growing up in New York.

We love Oaxaca and in a lot of ways it’s a safer, cleaner, healthier place to have a childhood. But we’re signing our kid up for an experience we really can’t predict and I am mourning an unknown future they might have had, had we made different decisions. And yes, I am also grieving my own future a bit. The fact that our neighborhood gained both a Wegman’s and an H-Mart only after we left feels more than a little like the universe is laughing at me.

Our visit to New York this week has undoubtedly skewed my perspective of the balance in our lives. It’s easy to wear the blinders of a better life when you’re on vacation and once I’m back amongst the swaying palms and cactuses with our dogs at our feet I think an equilibrium will reestablish itself. Adventure is hard, but rewarding. But there is also another force to contend with: there’s no place like home.

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