An Impulsive Move and a Pandemic

By Nina B. Lichtenstein

Suddenly, I found myself living in Brooklyn, in the same building as my twenty-five-year-old son Tobi. His presence there made my move feel grounded and comforting, like it made more sense.

“You framed me!” he joked when I told him I was moving in upstairs from him, and added, “No judging of me, promise?”

“Honey, no judging of me,” I retorted. I was newly single at fifty-four and had fantasies of living it up. Thankfully he laughed.

I was going to live by myself for the first time in my life, and the thought overwhelmed but also excited me. Mostly excited. My twenty-three years-long marriage to the father of my three sons had ended in divorce ten years earlier, and six years later, when the boys launched from the nest, I followed my new partner Tony to Maine, where he had retired. Now I had broken up with him and moved out.

Ours was a relationship that had felt bashert —meant to be—on so many levels, it used to make us giddy. Both Tony and I had emotional and exuberant personalities, and he was a convert to Judaism as was I; he was a professor of French and I had a Ph.D. in French, and we both yearned to live in a more northern climate (he is a native of Maine and I of Norway) than the hot and humid Connecticut where we had each raised our combined large brood of kids, nine in all. We also shared a challenge: neither of us was particularly good at letting go of a disagreement before it spiraled into an exhaustive fight and sour moods that could easily ruin the day or, worst-case scenario, turn our much longed-for Sabbath, a day of peaceful rest and loving, into a period of disconnect and silence. Though we usually managed to rally and turn things around, when the latest storm hit, I felt I had reached my limit, and I wanted out.

When I left Tony, I felt as if I was facing a huge, white canvas: the possibilities seemed endless and thrilling, but the vastness of this unexpected and open space was also scary. I was free, but now what? A text pinged on my phone from my son’s landlord, a family friend: there was another opening in his building. Did I know anyone who might be interested?

•••

Even though the apartment was rent-stabilized, nothing about this made any financial sense, but I wanted to listen to my guts, not shy away from change just because it would be a challenge, wasn’t the “safe” thing. I was in my third semester of a low-residency MFA program and bills ticked in from the university every month, and I was still paying for my two younger sons’ college educations. I knew deep inside that an impulsive move during an emotional upheaval was probably not the wisest path, but I quickly imagined a new beginning and fantasized wildly about how I would re-invent my mid-life from sleepy Maine to hipster Brooklyn. I was going to be a New Yorker, after all! It had been a fantasy of mine since I first left my childhood home in Oslo, Norway, at nineteen and came to America as an au-pair, nearly thirty-five years ago.

“Can we talk about this?” Tony tried, as I packed my personal belongings from our house in the quintessential New England college town where it sat steps from the quaint campus and lush town green. “Please don’t go,” he pleaded, “What we have is too precious, Nina!” But my heart was hardened, and I was exhausted from our latest debacle. I didn’t see all that preciousness now; all I could say was, “No.”

Our Maine house was built in 1865 and had an adjoining, raw barn with cracks in the walls and a two-seater, wooden outhouse; “the honey-pot” Tony called the ancient privy and thought it was the most romantic thing ever. When I moved up from Connecticut, we renovated the barn and turned it into a colorful and glorious AirBnB where we hosted happy tourists during the summer, and family and friends during the year. We’d put our hearts and souls into cultivating the garden where tomatoes, kale, and blueberries thrived, and the vibrant colors in our flower beds brightened our days; Cosmos, Zinnias, Coneflowers, and Bachelor’s Buttons, their heads turned toward the sun on summer mornings, we’d sip our coffee and read the paper in our blue and green Adirondack chairs facing each other, feeling blessed.

Now I was driving the twenty-five-foot U-Haul truck south, filled with odd pieces of furniture I had gathered from the house, a few flea market finds, and suitcases stuffed with my clothes. I made a strategic stop at IKEA in New Haven on the way south and picked up a simple, pine bed frame and a white, round, dining table with four aqua colored plastic chairs, their contemporary design totally out of character for me who normally prefers things showing the imperfect patina of age and use.

I navigated through narrow city streets and completed a gutsy parallel parking stunt under low hanging branches that creaked ominously across the roof of the truck. Tobi and his roommate greeted me from the apartment building stoop. “Hey mamma, welcome home!” he said with grin and gave me one of his delicious bear hugs. They helped me move in to the top floor, one-bedroom apartment with hardwood floors and high ceilings. Located across the street from Brooklyn Botanical Gardens in a once-elegant, pre-war brick building, its old-world charm had dwindled over the decades but was still palpable. I was in love.

I quickly got to know my new neighbors, some whose families had lived in the building for generations. I recognized the faces of the owners of the shabby bodegas on Franklin Street and was on first name basis with Rawl at the Laundromat and Maggie at the coffee shop owned by the Palestinian grocers next door. She called me “mami” and knew I liked oat milk in my coffee and capers on my bagel.

In the apartment, I pulled up multiple layers of grungy linoleum from the kitchen floor and covered the mismatched and crooked floor tiles in the bathroom with soft bathmats. I splurged on a teal green, velour sleeper couch, and I painted the kitchen wall orange. In a whirlwind I nested like a fervent mammal expecting pups and turned the rundown place into a cozy and colorful lair. Candles flickered everywhere, plants perched on windowsills, and jazz piped from the speakers. I relished living by myself, something I had never experienced before. My son even said he loved having me close by, especially when I cooked dinners for him upstairs and stayed away from his messy den of iniquity downstairs.

•••

After a brief period of separation, Tony came to Brooklyn for a visit. We had been in touch via email, and as days turned into weeks, something softened in me. We were both wordsmiths and romantically inclined, and early tentative exchanges turned warmer until eventually, we agreed to see each other. He said he wasn’t excited about coming to the apartment that symbolized our break-up, but he made the journey anyway. I looked forward to welcoming him and made sure I had his favorite gin in the freezer.

Having him next to me again felt really good, and after four days and a few difficult conversations, we decided to not give up on our couple after all. We agreed on a compromise: I’d keep the Brooklyn apartment and divide my time between Maine and the City.

“I’m happy in my own company,” I told him, as I tried to explain how much I had relished my alone-time. “I’ll need to be able to have some of this, moving forward.” We were going to work on our relationship, and soon I was back north for a visit. We made plans for an extended trip to Israel, where Tony has kids and grandkids.

But then Covid-19 happened, and the trickle of strange information rapidly turned into a deluge of scary statistics, followed by travel advisories, lockdowns, and cancelled flights.

Plans changed for everyone. The young academic couple that was subletting my Brooklyn apartment for the spring returned to Spain, as libraries, universities, and archives closed their doors. This meant I was stuck with the rent. Two of my three sons lost income due to the pandemic and needed extra support from their father and me. I kept knocking myself —see what happens when you act on impulse?—and deep inside, a harsh voice kept telling me the whole Brooklyn idea had been foolish.

Yet, something had shifted between my partner and me since I had taken the apartment, and we had both spent some time alone. The heat of the fights had cooled and our hearts had thawed from the frost that made believing in our couple seem impossible. We were able to recall the reasons we had fallen in love in the first place, everything we shared, and how much we loved all that and each other. So, I stayed in Maine for what we agreed would be “a relationship in process.” We were getting along surprisingly well during the many weeks long shelter-in-place spring.

During New York’s most dire pandemic days, a woman from Bangladesh visiting her son in the City reached out. She needed a place to stay until things quieted down—could she sublet? “Your apartment seems like such a happy, comfortable space,” her son said in our Zoom meeting, sitting next to his mom, translating back and forth from Bengali. I was thrilled to offer his mom the apartment, and he was grateful that she would have a warm and welcoming home in which to stay safe.

I scroll through the colorful photos of the Brooklyn apartment and wonder when I will be able to return. I love the urban dwelling I created as a true “room of my own,” yet back in Maine, waiting out the lockdown, I was a better partner. More patient and compassionate, I held Tony’s hand on our walks beneath the pines, and as spring turned to summer and summer to fall, I sensed renewed hope for a future. I realized that although I’m at home in more places than one, my heart has found its way back to my bashert.

•••

NINA B. LICHTENSTEIN is a native of Oslo, Norway, who divides her time between Maine and Tel Aviv. She has a PhD in French literature and an MFA from University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast program. Her essays have appeared in the Washington Post, Tablet, Brevity, Hippocampus, Lilith, and AARP’s The Ethel, among other places.

The Baby Corps

By Kate Haas

It was a joke to begin with, a half-serious attempt to persuade my parents to move from their coast to ours: “The Baby Corps seeks qualified volunteers to aid developing families,” our pitch began. “Do you have what it takes to serve?”

“Think it’ll work?” my husband asked, looking up from the scribbled draft of our “recruitment” letter.

I shrugged. “You never know.” But I come from a two-generation Peace Corps clan, and I knew my audience. They’d be tempted. Especially considering what we were offering as an incentive.

I never expected to live near my folks as an adult. When I was growing up, my parents lived far from their own hometowns. For my siblings and me, visiting grandparents involved hours in the car and the crossing of state lines. The books I read as a kid reinforced this scenario. Fairytale heroes sought adventure far from the home castle and didn’t tend to return once they’d found it. Ma and Pa Ingalls set out for the prairie, leaving the old folks behind in Wisconsin. That was the model I absorbed. The idea was to go to college, get a job (the eighties was a happier era for English majors), and settle in some distant city. I loved my mom and stepdad. But I did not imagine that one day I’d be scheming to lure them to my neighborhood.

Some thirty years later, that day arrived. Like many otherwise rational women, I took a good look at my two-year-old—verbal, finally sleeping through the night, potty-training underway—and concluded that what I really needed was another baby.

“Are you insane?” asked my husband.

I wasn’t offended by his query. The prospect of another child terrified me, too. Simon was a charming kid now, but as a baby, he rarely slept longer than twenty minutes at a stretch, day or night. Persistent breastfeeding problems added anxiety to the miserable fog of sleep deprivation that enveloped us. Another child was appealing in theory, we eventually agreed. But we dreaded a return to all that fatigue and stress—this time while chasing around a lively little boy.

“And I wouldn’t be able to help as much,” worried my husband; in addition to working full-time, he was now enrolled in a graduate program that entailed night classes and weekend fieldwork. “It would be different if we had family around,” he added. “Like, if your parents lived here.”

I stared at him, arrested by this novel concept. As a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco, I had observed the way extended families shared the burden of child-rearing. I realized, of course, that people right here at home benefited from these arrangements, too. But I had never imagined partaking in such a set-up, myself. Now, as though I were watching a soft-focus movie montage, I saw how it might play out: my mother taking my energetic son for the afternoon while I napped peacefully with the baby; my stepfather cooking meals for us after the birth; maybe even—hoo boy!—a regular date night for me and my husband. Mostly though, what I envisioned was less tangible: a sense of security I hadn’t realized I’d been missing, the comfort of having family close by—even if I didn’t need them exactly the way I used to.

I couldn’t help wondering, however, if this scenario would be attractive to my parents. Retirees on a budget, they found plenty to keep them busy in Maine. But what really fired up these former Peace Corps volunteers was finding frugal, creative ways to travel. Over the past five years, while my husband and I were fixing up an old house and settling into domesticity, my parents had swapped homes with a family in Spain, worked their way across Ireland on organic farms, and volunteered at an archeological dig in Romania. Currently, they were spending a year in the Czech Republic, teaching English. My folks were accustomed to renting out their house and setting off to roam the world. Would they really want to shlep to Oregon to change diapers?

On the other hand, my mother had long been campaigning for me to have another baby. I had practically memorized her current stump speech, “The Pathetic Life of the Only Child.” (It was a marginal improvement over a previous effort, “You’re Not Getting Any Younger, You Know.”) Perhaps, we thought, there was a way to leverage mom’s lust for grandchildren into an arrangement that would make everyone happy.

That was when we came up with the Baby Corps. Its mission: to serve the needs of developing families (ours, anyway) by recruiting volunteers with years of parenting expertise. “Only an elite cadre of highly-qualified and experienced candidates will be accepted into the Baby Corps,” we wrote, cunningly. “Will you rise to the challenge?”

Then we added the kicker: If my parents signed on for a two-year stint with the Corps, we’d be delighted to give them another grandchild. My husband tweaked the design of the Peace Corps logo, with its stars and dove, to create an official-looking letterhead for our recruitment letter, and we sent it off.

Would we have gone ahead and had another baby on our own? Probably. But we never had to make that decision. Three weeks later a letter arrived from the Czech Republic. My parents were charmed with the notion of the Baby Corps and flattered that we wanted their help. They would be delighted to rent out the house again and move across the country for a couple of years. “So, get busy, you two,” my mother finished. I could practically see her smirking.

A few months later, I was pregnant. My parents returned from Europe and settled their affairs on the east coast. My husband and I found an apartment for them in a nearby Victorian and spent the summer furnishing it from Craigslist and yard sales. By now I had tempered my expectations of the next two years. My mother and I have never shied from speaking our minds to each other. She sniffs at my reading habits (“lightweight”); I frown at her wardrobe (“shmattes”). (My stepfather wisely keeps his distance.) There would be highly charged discussions, that was certain. Still, I knew that our differences would always be bridged by our shared love of PBS costume dramas, the novels of Ursula le Guin, and the wedding page of the New York Times Sunday Styles section. Besides, we had a history of supporting each other when it really mattered.

When our Baby Corps recruits arrived, it became clear that they regarded this move not only as a grandparental mission, but as another opportunity for adventure in a new location. Within a few weeks, my mother had signed up to audit Latin classes at the university. My stepfather was investigating the local art scene. They were raving about fabulous cheap restaurants we’d never heard of.

But when I went into labor, three weeks after their arrival, my parents were at our house in minutes to take charge of our now-three-year-old. The next day they brought him to the hospital to meet his baby brother. When we got home, a big pot of curried red pepper soup was on the stove, along with a tray of fresh biscuits. “I’ll be back tomorrow to take Simon to the park so you two can sleep,” promised my mother. “And don’t forget,” she instructed, pulling on her coat, “At five o’clock, put your feet up, nurse that baby, and have a big glass of red wine. Millions of Frenchwomen can’t be wrong!”

When I told people that my parents were coming to town, I invariably got one of two reactions. “Is that a good thing?” asked some, poised to commiserate. Others were frankly envious. “They’re moving here just to help out? You guys are so lucky.”

We were lucky. Parenting a three-year-old and a newborn was every inch as difficult as we anticipated. But over the next two years, our Baby Corps volunteers stepped up for us in countless ways, taking on tasks that might look minor—like staying with Simon while I took the baby to the doctor—but which made our lives inestimably easier. Weekends, when I was running on four hours of sleep and my husband was analyzing bioswale diversity, I could walk the boys to my parents’ sunny apartment, where a special stash of toys waited and I could count on conversation that wasn’t about fire trucks. And eventually, once we were all getting more sleep, there was Date Night.

True, my mother and I had our moments. Many times, I was the beneficiary of her unique brand of childrearing advice, a whiplash-inducing combination of old school techniques (“Just rub brandy on those gums.”) and woo-woo theories (“No learning to read before the first tooth falls out.”) She deplored the “draconian” hospital policy dictating that we produce our carseat for inspection before taking the baby home (“I held you in the front seat and you were fine!”) She was disappointed that, unlike her, I wouldn’t consider Waldorf education for my kids—even if I could have afforded it.

On the other hand, Mom was unfazed when her grandson wanted to wear a dress at age four, pronouncing him “adorable” in the blue-checked frock she’d saved from my own childhood. (“It’s just a phase; he’ll get over it,” she told me—correctly.) She demonstrated admirable stamina for reading aloud, delighting in introducing Simon to my old pals Frog and Toad, and that canny bread-and-jam lover, Frances. So when, at the conclusion of their official Baby Corps service, my parents elected to settle in our neighborhood permanently, my husband and I were thrilled.

My boys are in elementary and middle school now. It’s been a long time since we needed to rely on my folks for the logistical and emotional support that saw us through those first, hard years with two kids. These days it’s not their help that I value (although we never take Date Night for granted). It’s the way my parents have become a part of our lives. What I savor now are the birthday dinners and Thanksgiving feasts, the latke parties and impromptu calls: “We baked a pie, come on over.” I’m happy that for my boys, the seven-block walk to their grandparents’ house is a familiar routine, and that visiting can be as simple as stopping in for a quick hello on the way home from the library.

I’ll always be grateful for what our Baby Corps volunteers did for us. And while nobody’s looking forward to it, I’m aware that one day it will be our turn to render whatever assistance my folks may come to need. It may not be for a while, but as I like to remind my mom, “You’re not getting any younger, you know.”

•••

KATE HAAS still regards her three years in Morocco with the Peace Corps as one of the highlights of her life. She is a creative nonfiction editor at Literary Mama and the publisher of Miranda, a long-running print zine about motherhood. Her writing has appeared in Salon, Brain, Child, Babble, and The Toronto Star. She lives in Portland, Oregon, with her family. Read more of her writing at www.katehaas.com.