Envy

The girls and I went near my old apartment the other day to eat ice cream. We sat in the brightly lit shop in the pedestrian neighborhood. There was a family with a young boy at the next table, the father telling stories about his last business trip to Brazil. At the other occupied table were two professors from the university discussing chemicals and medications.

I do not live in that neighborhood anymore. I used to, but when I conceived and we needed a bigger place, that neighborhood was no longer an option.

Instead we bought a house in a different part of the city, a neighborhood with a different character and different problems. I have grown accustomed to my new neighborhood, and I can do the things required here. I know how to talk to all kinds of people. I have built my own sense of community here, and made it my home. I am proud of the skills I have acquired by living here.

But sometimes I miss the simplicity of other places.

When my mother visited, she wanted to walk to the grocery store. I told her that she could not go alone - she had to take one of the children with her. A white woman walking alone here is a threat or an opportunity, but a woman walking with a child is a mother or grandmother, and in my neighborhood, motherhood is respected in any color.

She said she saw her first drug deal on the way home.

When I was sitting in that ice cream store with my kids, I was seized with envy. I deep-down envied these people for living where they don’t size people up as soon as they enter the door, where they walk to the store without avoiding the dealers or stopping to think whether it’s Friday, payday, when there will be more drunks on the street.

I don’t want to live a sheltered existence, where I only know people of one class and my children grow up thinking that everybody has the same privileges they do.

But on other days, I do.