Hello friends,
It’s been a minute since I’ve last written here, and that’s with good reason. Becoming a mama of two back in December turned out to be only the beginning in a year of changes for our family.
We bought some land in upstate New York and moved from our beautiful apartment in downtown Stamford, Connecticut.
We moved into a townhouse with our toddler and newborn, and then I went back to work, with a now three-hour roundtrip commute.
I got accepted to begin PhD level coursework.
I had two health scares that, with the second one being most recent and a major wake up call to prioritize my health and well-being again.
J began preschool. H is crawling and trying his best to catch up to his big brother. D and I are marveling at how fast life seems to be going and trying to make time for each other in the whirlwind of this stage of our lives.
Our house is now in the early stages of construction. By this time next year I will be writing from a room in our “forever home.”
It got me thinking about how we choose where to raise our children, and how much of that choice is based on where you can afford to live.
D and I had never had any intention to move back to upstate NY, as smitten as we were with downtown life and the conveniences it held. But when we looked around for a home for our family, we found that there just wasn’t anything we could get for our money that looked like the houses we had grown up in. So we looked further and further north until we landed back in our hometowns.
I had a conversation with an old friend last night that made me realize how prevalent this kind of move is. She had been born and raised in Westchester and intended to buy a house with her husband in the area, until realizing that they were priced out of the market. And upstate they went.
Even thinking back to why my parents moved here from the Bronx with my siblings and I almost twenty years ago. They wanted a yard for us to play in and for us to finally have our own bedrooms. Things that they couldn’t afford in the neighborhood they had been raised in.
I’m sure this is a tale as old as time (to blatantly steal a phrase from Beauty and the Beast). City populations grow and grow, so people begin to spread farther out to afford housing. But still, there’s a small sadness about not being able to afford a home in the place you’ve called by that name for so long.
I feel fortunate that our parents chose to move further north while we were young, even as the prices here steadily creep up as well. We have a home here and a safe place for our children to roam. I just hope they get to have the choice to raise their own children here as well if they choose to.
Paige is Parenting 