Before you read my letter: Please consider getting involved in the movement to #EndGunViolence by texting ACT to 644-33. You can also help Uvalde families after the Texas school shooting by supporting verified fundraisers found in the article linked here.
Write about a threshold you crossed-what you expected it to be like, how that differed from reality, and what it took to make it through.
The afternoon we were discharged from the hospital with my daughter Milena, we strapped her in the baby seat, and my husband drove through I95 in Miami to get home. I looked through the window and there was so much sunlight. The graffiti murals and neon pinks. A crowded highway with expensive cars and fast drivers switching lanes without ever signaling, the palm trees in 90-degree weather, the lizards on the asphalt, the bridges, and the sea in the background. Everything felt the same, and nothing felt the same.
We had moved to Miami one year ago from New York City, and I still couldn't call this one my own. Now, this would be the city where my daughter is from. The Biscayne bay and the Cuban dinners. The anti-communist Spanish radio stations. The beach. The different accents of Spanish all around her. Argentine empanadas delivered to our door, and the "beware, crocodile area" signs inside parks near the water. While I grew up in a small apartment in Buenos Aires, Argentina, sharing a room with my two sisters and not having much access to nature (even though I loved growing up there), Milena would have a twenty-minute car ride access to making sandcastles and an ocean view. She didn’t know it but, to us, she was so lucky, and we were lucky to have her too.
My husband grew up sleeping without a pillow because his parents just never bought him one. His parents had friends over most nights, from the Moscow Circus. They would spend hours drinking vodka and singing in Russian. Once they hired his sister to work for them as a translator, and his sister was 12 at the time. His dad switched jobs a lot. The most interesting ones: card counter at a local Casino, hand-writer of notes at the local fur store (his handwriting was beautiful apparently). I wonder if my husband who was driving us home, now a dad, also saw the sunlight, and the city the way I did.
He was sure our daughter would maybe have a better childhood than he did. We both grew up without much money, none of our parents could afford an AC in the summer for example. This comes up a lot now that we live in 90-degree weather Florida.
But, unlike me, my husband hated his childhood and got bullied at public school, and kept having to move to different states with his immigrant parents. I grew up pretty middle class in Buenos Aires. My dad was a history teacher. He was American but wanted to raise us in Argentina, the country my mom was from. We struggled as a family more once we lost everything in the hyperinflation years and moved to the United States to start over.
We both agreed we did not want to spoil our daughter. She will have to understand that money doesn't just grow in trees, as we did. She will need to learn how to do chores and work and earn things, and she will know how to say thank you and how to be self-sufficient like we had to be. Then again, we both know we will fall short of this idea as soon as she's old enough to ask us for things. We will give her the love that was given to us, and more. And before she becomes her own little autonomous self, I was already dreaming of taking her to ballet classes and art museums. My husband enrolling her in computer coding camp and guitar lessons as soon as she’s five. All the things that she might hate and not do, but that we would have liked to have done when we were kids. Had we been able to afford it.
Most of parenting in the early days seems like daydreaming and projection. Hoping and longing for a different, better future. It’s beautiful and impractical and full of sunlit projects. Some get accomplished, and maybe some don’t.
The day I returned from the hospital with Milena, I looked at Miami through the window, and everything and nothing was the same. This was still not my city. Had we been in NYC, I would have reminiscences about every neighborhood I ever stepped in, all the people I dated before I met my husband, the corners in the West Village, the local venues in the East Village were I lived. The summers at Coney Island with friends. The subway stations I spent my life in, taking trains to Brooklyn and Queens, and working in Manhattan. My parents and the apartment they lived in before they died of Cancer. Knowing that NYC would not be Milena's playground, but it had been mine. A city that knocks you when you are down but sometimes gifts you with so much.
I would have taken it all in. My past me against my present me. But we were driving back home in Miami, and I have little experiences here to go with, very few memories, and a vast road of new memories to create with her, and as a mom. Maybe this is why people move at times, to leave something painful behind. For me, it was the thousands of COVID deaths, the shutdowns, the friends of friends who died in the city, the death of my parents, and the sleepless nights—feeling abandoned by a friend when I needed her the most. Feeling like all the end-of-life caretaking fell on me and like I was failing at it. How dark it got inside my apartment on the Upper West Side. How we had to lower our voices whenever we got into an argument with my husband because neighbors would hear us expressing ourselves too loudly. My neighbor with Alzheimer’s who used to knock on my door at 3 AM asking for help, telling me she was lost.
For my husband it was taxes. Maybe it was other things too. But he mostly mentioned how taxes were too high in NYC.
All of that was now miles and miles away until I95 ended and our neighborhood began. Now we were driving under the summer sunlight with our baby sleeping in the car seat, and a world full of tiredness and possibilities awaited us. A new skin for the old ceremony. We had crossed that threshold together.