Suburban Angst
Moving to the suburbs was not a transition I made easily. In the city neighborhood where we had
lived for eight years, I bustled about, smugly convinced that my smiling, middle-class presence
elevated the entire tone of my street. What finally broke me were the barking dogs, the breaking
glass, the conjugal mayhem expressed in excrutiating decibel levels, and stereo speakers as big
as Buicks. The noise from my street transformed me, already seven months pregnant, into a
pajama-clad, wild-haired, frothing, madwoman. When we moved to our suburban house from
our place in the city, it was the middle of winter and I was in the last month of my third and final
pregnancy. The sheer and joyous convenience of being able to barely touch a button in one's
car and have the garage door open, almost moved me to sobs. This relatively simple thing
caused me to muse about the general air of satisfaction I found during those first months among
the denizens of the suburbs. I have more recently come to the conclusion that living with so
much green grass, mature trees, and general tidiness causes a certain blindness to the suffering
of others. I have also discovered that when bundled up in winter clothing, all white kids look the
same.
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