City Girl Goes Small Town

I was born a city girl, and I will die a city girl. In between, I have become a small-town mom.

I first noticed this during dinner a few weeks ago, when I announced to my family that I was eating flowers. (Actually, it was an artichoke, but it had leaves.)

My son said, "Mommy, you're a nature girl!"

I was horrified.

No, I'm not, I told him. Nature girls wear no makeup. They have curly, graying hair. And they eat vegetables.

Guilty, guilty and (reluctantly) guilty.

Where, oh where, has my city soul gone?

I grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. We went to the zoo, the Art Institute and the Museum of Science and Industry. I spent time at my dad's business in the blue-collar neighborhood of Bridgeport and tasted the flavor of real Italian meatballs, real Greek olives and real steamed hot dogs in poppy seed buns.

When I was 13, we moved into the city, and I found new energy in the theatre, the bookstores and the buses. I thrived on having access to anything, anytime. I loved the rhythm of the streets.

When it was time to choose a college, there was only one place for me: New York City. My four years there were filled with the ultimate urban experience. I traded buses for subways, Second City for Broadway, and Lincoln Park for Central Park. I lived just south of Harlem and saw the island from Cloisters to Wall Street. I even ventured out to a borough or two.

But with bachelor's degree in hand, I decided to leave New York. After hopping over a homeless person one too many times, my heart was hardening.

So I went to graduate school in Chapel Hill, N.C., a college town just down the road from a capital city.

It wasn't Chicago or New York, but it was home. I was ready to slow down a little. Even though I never grew roses, I did hope to stop and smell them more often.

Once I got married and had a son, I realized that the benefits of a simpler life outweighed my longing for the rush of activity. I was content with fewer restaurants, more pottery places and a rebalanced life.

Mostly.

As my son grew, and we saw city friends and family during visits over the years, I started to worry.

Was I raising my son at a disadvantage? Sure, we went to the occasional museum to see dinosaurs and space exhibits. And traveling troupes came through to put on shows that had long ago left larger cities or grown old in them.

But it wasn't the cultural gap that made me anxious. It wasn't even the diversity gap, although I wondered whether my son would appreciate differences as much as I'd like. What would it mean if he never learned the sights and sounds of Chinatown? The Lower East Side? The boardwalk?

Even if I dismissed some of my concerns as snobbery or reverse snobbery, there was still this most persistent fear: the achievement gap.

Most city kids I know are hipper, wiser and faster than my son. They're likely to rise to the top in various fields and become the kids against whom he will compete for spots in college, work, life. They'll probably be the ones hiring or firing him in about 15 years.

Will they understand his wry sarcasm, recognize and respect the intelligence behind his slow smile?

I hope that their exposure to all walks and talks of life has done more than render them sarcastic and cynical, as I was. I hope that it enables them to postpone the prejudgments that most of us immediately form.

These days, I live in a small town, a few blocks south of Main Street. We walk to the community center, where my son plays basketball. We walk to the ice cream shop, where we sit outside by the train tracks and eat. We walk to the library, where the new books arrive regularly.

Sometimes, we even walk to the pier and look out over Tampa Bay at the stingrays and sharks below and the sky above.

It's a view I've never seen anywhere else.

These days, cities are great places to visit. I just wouldn't want to live there.

Julie Moos is a fortysomething who lives with her husband and son. Her column appears every other Thursday. To read more of her thoughts, visit MomInTheMirror.com.