I fell in love with Laurie Colwin’s books when I was in college in the early 1980s. More precisely, I fell in love with her depiction of New York City and the literary and culinary lives of the characters she located there. I had been there only once before as a 12-year-old with my grandparents the year of the bicentennial – I mostly remember the Statue of Liberty and being uncomfortably hot and sweaty. Around that same time, as I emerged from several years of family tumult, including a violent and abusive stepfather, cooking and reading were my solace as our family began to stabilize. I subscribed to Bon Appetit and Gourmet magazines and channeled my need to be seen and loved into preparing elaborate dishes. I read Colwin’s columns in Gourmet faithfully over the years, but it wasn’t until college that I discovered her fiction. I saw myself in her heroines – or I should say the self that I yearned to be – their sexual freedom, their “domestic sensuality,” their literary world – imagine the glamor of life as a copy editor in New York City! I saw myself there. It was all that I wanted.

I never went.

Fundamentalist Christianity also came into our lives when I was 12. My mother fell in love with a good man, and in the course of their preparation for marriage, they became born-again Christians. I was delighted with anything that was stable and gladly joined in. I had invited Jesus into my heart as a younger child at a vacation Bible school, but sealed the deal with a baptism and regular church attendance with the family. I only bring this up to note that a strong and pervasive force in my life was maintaining the peace and equilibrium that Christianity had brought my mother. But I was still me. My high school years were fraught as I lived a double life, one where I moved through the world with confidence and intellect, a wisecracking, pot-smoking, sexually active teenager, and the other where I repented and repented and lived with the guilt of hiding myself from my mother. When I went to college, my only ambition at that point was to stay in her good graces because, in my immaturity, I really thought if I could be perfect in her eyes, she (and by extension I) would be okay. That meant “walking with the Lord” and entering into marriage with a Christian (being “unequally yoked” was forbidden) and fulfilling my God-given vocation as a wife and a mother.

Obviously, I never went to New York.

Instead, I fell in love with Brad, who was decidedly not a Christian. We met in a poetry class in a tiered classroom where he was sitting below me and turned around and smiled, a big open smile on a very handsome face. We sat together in every class after that and walked down the hill together when class was over. The semester ended and so did our friendship. A few months later, we bumped into each other and realized we had a mutual friend. We finally went on a date that lasted 48 hours and involved lots of sex, deeply bonding eye gazing, and a trip to the beach; we have been together ever since. Brad was my person – there was no doubt. After the relationship was discovered by my mother, she, over some months, convinced me that if I really loved Brad I would break up with him as that would prove that I valued his immortal soul more than my selfish desire to be with him. I eventually did that. Brad said, “Okay, I understand.” A few months later he came back to town and my mother “led him to the Lord” in our living room. Just like that, everything was fine. Fine! I got to have the man and my mother’s approval. I fast tracked my college education, doing summer school so I could graduate in three and a half years. 

Happily engaged, I encountered a potential glitch to this newfound equilibrium in my last semester of college: two classes that ignited me to my core, Modern Art History and The Critical Review, a journalism course. All I wanted to do was think about art and write about art. I wanted to do it all over again and major in art history. I wanted to be a museum curator. I wanted to review restaurants and films. I wanted and I wanted, but I pushed it down: my path was set.

Instead of New York, I followed Brad to Hawaii where he was in grad school. I worked in a restaurant to pay the rent while he taught and studied sea urchins.

This is all incredibly embarrassing to write. What a child I was. We did the Christian family thing for 15 years. I raised the kids. Brad traveled a lot for work (no longer a marine biologist). I became a high school English teacher, a career I love, but my own life, as Biblically ordained, was an afterthought. As a woman, I was conditioned to subsume myself into everyone else. Brad blindly went along with it – let’s be honest – as a man he had the better deal. In the early 2000s we left the church and set about figuring out what we wanted out of our marriage. It has been hard, wrenching, rewarding work.

The inner voice that shit talks into my ear tells me that I am pathetic and old. What makes me think that spending a month living in New York at age 58, writing about art, is going to redeem anything. No one cares. I’m mostly able to tell that voice to be quiet. When I am in New York City, which I have visited many times in my life, I feel intensely calm and vibrant simultaneously, intensely myself. I have always been drawn here – even after all of these years. I may not be able to time travel to my 21 year old self (if I could we would have some words about self worth and personal agency), but I can go. I will go. If you are reading this, I am here.