Juan Monino/iStock.'t everybody love the suburbs?
You'd think I would have caught on while in college, living a half-block from the Massachusetts Turnpike near Fenway Park, that maybe not everyone wants to settle down, have a family and pull weeds from the front stoop on weekends. It was the 80's after all, when it was suddenly perfectly okay for women like me, communications majors with their whole lives ahead of them, to want to live overseas and report on the Soviet Union falling apart or to take apartments in Manhattan and work toward the top over on Madison Avenue.
And for a while, I actually thought I might do something like that. I figured I'd be a modern version of Mary Tyler Moore, living alone with an automatic coffee maker, a closet full of suits with jumbo shoulder pads and perhaps a cat that doesn't like men. I thought that I wouldn't be that woman in the mini-van, loading up bags at Costco, or the mom running the bake sale at school. All that was a bit too bourgeois for me, you see. Besides, I was 22. What did I know?
And then I met Pete, and I remembered how much I love the suburbs. Soon, we married and moved there, to a condo near his parents' house in New Jersey. Later, we bought a house and had kids. I even stayed home full-time with them for a few years and now I work at home around their schedules. In other words, I did exactly what the women's libbers before me didn't want me to do. And yet, I don't feel the need to apologize.
At church one recent Sunday, one of the kids on the soccer team I coach promised to be at our next game early so he could practice shooting goals with me. My son's Cub Scouts den leader reminded me when the next pack meeting would be, and a friend from Pete's running club complimented me on my new hairdo. My community - my "peops" - was there for me.
When we got home, the boys from across the street came over to play while my husband worked in the yard. I threw in a load of laundry and sorted out the summer clothes from my kids' closets. And I never once wished I was reporting for CNN from Wasilla or working the weekend on something that would wind up on "America's Funniest Commercials."
I love my suburban life. I love its chilly Saturdays watching the leaves blow across the soccer field and the packs of kids riding by on bikes, heading to the pond at the end of our street to go frogging. I love getting "ghosted" by neighbors, when they ring your doorbell and run off after leaving a bag of Halloween goodies outside your door. I love being the hostess of the frat house for fourth graders - the house where all the kids love to hang out.
My friend was right: I did want "that kind of life." And now it appears that she does, too. She and her husband plan to move from the city to the 'burbs before their son starts school two years from now. Soon, she'll find out why I chose this life and why I stay here.
Maybe it's not for everybody, but the suburbs are for me. I love living here. I mean, doesn't everybody?
Good Housekeeping
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