FSB Author Article
This Land is Their Land
By Meg Wolitzer,
Author of The Ten Year Nap: A Novel
My fourteen-year-old son and his friends travel the streets of the city
like Oliver Twist and the Artful Dodger and co. -- not ripping off
people's wallets and purses, but just hanging out in an excitable,
ragged crowd, thrilled to be together and thrilled to be wandering, and
certainly in no hurry to come home. When I told a friend about my
son's new freedom, she replied, "That's why we live in the city,
right? So our kids can have that urban, independent experience."
But the truth is that when I initially imagined raising children in the
city, I somehow always thought about being perpetually with
them -- a sort of Zelig-like maternal figure lurking inappropriately in
the background of every scene. Yes, of course, the city is a
great place to live with your family; even before you give birth, you
picture easygoing Sundays in which you all stroll through sunlit museum
galleries together, both parents pointing out Seurat and Chuck Close
paintings to the enthusiastic children. "See all the dots!" you
cry, and your children nod excitedly and try to count them. Or
else you imagine your family at a picnic in the park; you've brought
along a bottle of wine for the adults, and a thermos of chocolate soy
milk for the children, who in your imagination remain perpetually
frozen at four years of age.
At four they are yours. You can raise them in the city and feel
thrilled with the cultural stimuli that's continually hurled at them
like high-end asteroids. And all the while you can monitor their
actions and activities and steer them in various directions. Four
belongs to you. Fourteen, of course, belongs to them, and to the
subways, and St. Mark's Place in the East Village, and the basketball
courts, and the street corners where they congregate, haggling with
vendors over belts with skull's-head buckles. Fourteen can head out
into the city and go places where you, in your fortyish, lumpen state,
are no longer welcome.
The desire to have a child springs from many sources, but frequently
mentioned by parents is the fantasy of creating a world that contains
elements that were lacking in their own childhoods. I grew up in
a suburb where the turnpike was dotted with fast-food franchises and
carpet stores. For a long time there was only one Chinese
restaurant in town -- a dreary green room where the silver dishes had
lids, and inside you would most likely find chop suey or almond
ding. On Friday nights my friends and I went to an event at the
junior high school (back when it was called "junior high school") known
as "rec," short for "recreation." This featured a frenzy of
Nok-Hockey-playing, some sugary orange drink in little containers, and
not much else. One night, a bored girl came to rec drunk on
Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill, and was taken out by ambulance as we all
stood around and watched in dumb surprise.
Yet as we grew older, we found more places to go; there were new
fast-food franchises springing up all the time -- though we still
steered clear of the carpet stores. Suddenly, an arthouse cinema
appeared in an old public school; I watched "Persona" while sitting in
a tiny chair. There were parks and bars and paneled basements,
always paneled basements. This was the late 1970s, and our
parents had very little idea of how or where we spent our weekend days
and nights. My friends and I didn't live inside the world of "The Last
Picture Show" -- a sleepy hamlet of dustballs and black-and-white
despair -- but neither did we live in the city.
In my mind I have given my children the city as a gift, and yet it's a
gift that comes with caveats and restrictions, dictated by their
mother's particular strain of anxiety. The city is theirs, if
only I will let them take it. When I consider the ongoing march
toward generational improvement, I wonder where my kids will want to
raise their own children. Maybe they won't even want to have
children -- or maybe, instead, the presence of the city in their
childhoods will have given them nowhere to go in their imaginations
except, perhaps, another planet, which they and their spouses and
children will colonize, Ray Bradbury-style. I am not sure, when they
look back at these years, exactly what they will recall and how they
will feel. But I suspect that what most children take away from
their childhood is not so much the landscape in which they lived as the
freedom they were allowed within it.
©2009 Meg Wolitzer, author of The Ten Year Nap: A Novel
Author Bio
Meg Wolitzer is the author of seven previous novels, including The
Position and The Wife. Her short fiction has appeared in
The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize. She lives in
New York City.