I feel like twenty times a day I'm saying "I grew up there." "Where I grew up _______." "That happened where I grow up." And I'm always talking about different places. Someone recently asked me, "Were your parents military?" "Worse," I answered. "They were hippies."
Not that there's anything wrong with that! I am very much a hippie in a lot of ways myself. But my folks had a hard time getting their shit together when I was a kid. I was born on Martha's Vineyard, a now famous island of the coast of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. No, we were not rich or famous. When I was growing up the island was mostly made up of working class hippies; restauraneurs, fisherman, carpenters, small business owners. Sure, we had rich and famous tourists in the summer, but it was dead in the winter. It was after Bill Clinton came in the 90's that things really started to change in my opinion. But I digress........
Anyway, we moved to New York City when I was two, after a short jaunt to Hawaii of which I have little to no recollection. The way my mother tells it, they purchased this fixer upper house and after about a month winter hit. She woke up one morning and went downstairs and looked at a thermometer. She called for my father and told him it was 30 degrees. It being winter in Massachusetts my dad didn't think it was a big deal.
"You don't understand," she said. "It's 30 degrees inside the house." Big old drafty thing that it was. So we flew to Hawaii and spent a few months there. My mom lived there in her serious hippie days and still knew people there. After we came back, it's a little fuzzy to me on when exactly we moved to New York but it couldn't have been very long afterwards.
We lived in New York on the lower east side for four years. I think we spent summers still on the Vineyard because we still had that house and went back all the time. The people there were still very much a part of our lives. While we were living in New York my parents split up. My mom moved me to Boston and my dad stayed in New York. This was short lived. I was waking up in the middle of the night with stomach pains all the time. I would wake my mother and tell her I was in pain and she would drive me to the hospital but I always fell asleep before we got there. My mother did take me to the doctor (during the day) and he finally told her he thought I was depressed. That I missed my father and my friends and New York City. I cried a lot. I remember the time I started crying and my mother finally asked me if I wanted to go back to New York and live with my dad. I told her I did.
So she sent me back and I lived alone with my dad for almost all of kindergarten. We had a blast. We both have very fond memories of that time. But I did miss my mom, so I was very happy when she came back. They decided to try and make it work and we stayed in New York for one more year. Then we moved to Arizona. This was also short lived. My father hated it so much that after two months he told my mom that she could stay or she could come but he was leaving. So we moved back to Martha's Vineyard where we stayed for three more years. I was in second grade and finally got to go to school with all the kids I had grown up knowing, but I was still heartbroken over leaving New York and my best friend there.
My parents finally split up when I was seven or eight. I can't remember if I was in third grade yet or not. It was very, very messy and horrible. They fought and hated each other a lot. Eventually my dad moved back to New York and my mom and I moved to Boston (well, okay, Cambridge). They sold the house on the Vineyard.
I was once again devastated over this move, perhaps even more so because I was older and very attached to my friends. No one had ever heard of Martha's Vineyard and I was teased a lot for being a skinny white girl with absolutely no urban coolness. It was an extremely difficult transition. I kept in close contact with my friends on MV and we continued to attend each other's birthday parties and talk on the phone and write letters. I visited my dad a lot in New York City. And eventually I did grow to love living in Cambridge.
The problem was, my mom and I had major issues. Like, major ones. We were so close it was painful, but I was going through adolescent rage and I hated her at the same time that I loved her. I was angry for never having any stability and for just being my mom. I feel very guilty to this day about how awful I was to her, but it was what it was. In eighth grade I got myself some cool friends and some self confidence and decided I was too cool for school. I failed math and practically failed a lot of other subjects. My mom and I fought tooth and nail. She and my dad sent me to a private school for the arts for my freshman year of high school but I did no better even though I made some great friends. She constantly threatened to send me to go live with my dad and stepmother.
The summer in after my freshman year, my stepmother's ex husband (who still lived on MV) was on the brink of bankruptcy. He called her up and asked her if she wanted to buy the house. She offered him a ridiculously low amount of money and he took it. She and my dad came up with a plan. They were done living in New York City and wanted to move to western Massachusetts. They decided to leave New York and go back to the Vineyard for the summer to fix up the house. They would sell the house and use the money to move to Northampton and buy a house there.
Cue my annual summer visit. I always visited them for two or three weeks in the summer, and this one was no different. My mom and I had had an epic fight the week before I came for the visit, and my dad sat me down and told me that I had to shape up or she was going to send me to live with them. But it was too late. She had made her decision, and when I went home she informed me that I needed to pack my stuff. I going back to the Vineyard, something that five years ago would have been a dream come true for me but was now unthinkable.
My dad made the executive decision that due to the fact that I had had enough upheaval and instability in my life we would stay on the Vineyard instead of moving to Northampton. I was miserable and so was my stepmother. But it ended up being the best thing that could have ever happened for any of us. We had a great time together in the three years we lived together. I had grown to be extremely adaptable and figured it out eventually. My old friends we now just that; my old friends. For the most part I had to make completely new ones. But it was okay. I had a great high school experience.
My mom moved to California for love and work about six months after sending me to my dad's. At first I was angry but I eventually forgave her. I knew she needed to do it and that it broke her heart to not be with me. She still lives there and married my now stepfather.
I unfortunately continued the pattern of moving around. All I have ever craved is stability but I literally had no way to understand how to cultivate it. I went to three different colleges and moved around between four different states until finally settling here in New Jersey. So where exactly did I grow up?
As a kid, Martha's Vineyard, Cambridge and New York City. As an adult, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York and New Jersey. So I grew up a lot of places.
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