When my son was home for Christmas break we had an ongoing dialogue about American suburbia and its inhabitants’ chronic myopia about the real world. We put the obvious elephant on the table: we were having these conversations over fresh espresso in a comfortable four-bedroom house in Connecticut, with a comfortable two-acre buffer between us and the surrounding, equally comfortable neighborhoods…or sometimes over late night sushi and martinis…while he was home on break from an extraordinary school from which he will graduate loan-free.
His position: American suburbanites judge their comfort by the thickness of the cocoon of homogeneity they are able to construct—and maintain—around them. This form of self-absorption creates an insidious and insular view that the world is (and only need be) as big as the five, ten or fifteen mile radius that constitutes their sphere of activity. This represents American insularism at its purest. Like an insect selecting only a certain weight of detritus to construct its tunnels, America suburban dwellers give off the distinct scent that they have no use for anyone or anything that doesn’t fit the criteria of “belonging here.”
My position: Most decisions about moving into or out of the American suburbs are driven by children: their arrival or their departure. Suburbs offer tangible evidence and predictable incidence of the elements that make up a parent’s must-have list: good schools to feed my child’s mind, safe neighborhoods to encourage friendships and protect my child from harm, parks that give my child room to run and recreation programs that give my child things to do all the time. In this way, the suburban environment is appealing to parents because it provides the essential starting place… and for some, that’s all they need to do their job. Even better for a parent who is inclined to introduce her child to cultural and artistic diversity, because with the basics covered, she is free to bring particular focus to what’s different, and spectacular, and enticing about places, things and people they don’t see every day. These are the parents who urgently whisper with their encouragement, it’s a big world out there.
So we square off, he with his fresh summer-in-New-York perspective and me, with 11 years invested in Suburban Connecticut. I anticipate this because it gets worse every year. After a few days of being home, the chafing begins, and no number of trips to Starbucks to cup his hands around the familiar blend and close his eyes, hoping he’ll open them to some Parisian side street, makes time go faster. He doesn’t hate suburbanites for choices they have made; he despises them for choices they haven’t.
I carefully pick through my response lest I shut him down and he retreats to his room to mark off another day until he can get back to his life. It takes no imagination to utter the truth, “I did this for you,” so I don’t.
Tracy McKee
Parent ’11
