Of Course, You Are!

A few weeks ago, on a regular Saturday morning in Harlem, one of my students' parents asked me how married life was going.  I smiled, as I unlocked the door to get class started, and said, "it is going well.  We're moving next weekend."  "Oh, where?" quizzed the long standing parent. "Brooklyn."  He laughed, "of course, you are!  That's what we did after we got married."  

This got me to thinking about the path we've taken.  When we decided to get married almost two years ago, we wanted it to be on our terms (as much as possible).  We didn't do the diamond; We walked down the aisle to Harry Potter and Star Wars music;  We went to Turkey instead of Hawaii.

After the wedding, we knew that we weren't going to stay in our little East Harlem apartment forever.  It had served its purpose for two years, but we wanted more space.  We were willing to look in Queens, the Bronx, etc., but for our price range Brooklyn seemed to come up again and again.  When we saw this place, we just had to have it.

Side note: My body has not quite adjusted to the amount of space we have yet.  I still find myself taking up only a little area of our bedroom.  I've also not quite got a handle on where the light switches are and always seem to hit my hand against the wrong side of the wall.

Anyway, I don't necessarily think that the area of Brooklyn that the parent I mentioned above had moved to as a newlywed is the same area of Brooklyn that Arthur and I have chosen (though I can jog past those neighborhoods since we're close to Prospect park).  I can't imagine this parent living in a neighborhood bordered on one side by the Chasidic community and the West-Indian community on the other.  All the bagels and jerk chicken you can eat!   

 

We've moved to Brooklyn for the roominess and an improvement in the quality of our life despite our less than extravagant income. We've moved here because we deserve to have a space that is a respite from work, from weather, from disappointment, from the sometimes harshness of the day.  We moved to celebrate our new life, our new family in a place that allows room to move, to entertain and to grow.  Manhattan doesn't allow for that at the present time.  

And to be honest, I don't think I'd care if it did.  

So even though, to some, it may seem that we've taken the expected next step in the scripted road map of marriage, we've done what we needed to do in order to feel that we are moving in the right direction.  That direction just so happened to be across the river to the east.