Betwixt and between

I have loved living in the city with small children. We live within walking distance of a supermarket, a corner grocery, a post office, a hardware store, two library branches, several drug stores, and a farmer’s market, so many errands can be accomplished without wrestling little ones in and out of the carseat. I love that exercise—walking—is integrated into the fabric of our lives. Few people think of the city as being friendly or neighborly, but I have found the city—at least this neighborhood in this city—to be far more friendly than the small town in which I was raised. (Although that could be more a function of the locations of the small town and the city in question—reserved and reclusive New England versus the relatively more open and outgoing mid-Atlantic/South.) My mother, who visits three or four times a year, often comments that she knows my neighbors better than she knows her own. I like that my kids have lots of friendly adults around. When my kids play on the sidewalk, I sit on the front steps and chat with the neighbors and nod to passersby. And I like taking them to the park to play, where there are other kids to play with and other parents for me to chat with if I so desire. In this way, I feel much less isolated living in the city than I suspect I would living elsewhere. I also am happy not to have much yard-work to attend to, happy to have reduced heating and cooling bills because our house is attached to other houses on both sides, and happy not to have to spend much time in the car. (I would love to be completely car-free but we have not found that to be practical with two kids.) I don’t really miss the lack of privacy (that is, I don’t really *feel* a lack of privacy), although I do sometimes long for solitude.

I think I will love living in the city with teenagers. There is so much for teens to do, so many places to go. Not at all like where I grew up. I will love that they can get around on public transit (bus and rail), so I won’t have to drive them everywhere. And, even better, they will have far fewer opportunities to drive with or be driven by other teenagers, unlike their suburban, exurban, and rural counterparts. LOVE THAT.

But I think living in the city with “tweeners” is going to be something of a challenge. My eldest is now the age I was when my mother started yelling things like, “It’s a beautiful day—go outside!!” and I would go. I would play in my yard or in the neighbors’ yards or out in the woods. I would ride my bike to friends’ houses or to the store. I “taught” school in my neighbor’s basement, played wiffleball in my backyard, climbed trees, wrestled with my brother in our basement family room, played kick-the-can throughout the neighborhood as twilight fell on soft summer nights. I tromped miles through the woods, waded in the creek, trudged through the snow to a local hill to sled in the wintertime. All without adult supervision. I ran wild.

Maybe nobody has a childhood like that anymore. Perhaps city kids have never had a childhood like that and haven’t missed it. But I find myself mourning that loss for my kids. Now that I have a 9-year-old, the costs of city living seem a bit higher. I want to be able to tell him to go outside and play. But we have no yard to speak of, no basement, no place where he can just hang out or knock around. His friends don’t live nearby, and the park lies on the other side of a very busy street. He’s not ready to ride his bike on city streets, and even if he were, where can a 9-year-old go? I really want to stay in the city for my future teens (and selfishly, for myself), but how do I get from here to there?