Who says you can't go home?

I've been traveling with the girls for the past week, that's why I haven't blogged for a while. It was a hectic trip, but also the kind of trip where every night I looked around and thought how nice it was to be there, wherever "there" was that evening.

I brought the girls out to New Jersey first for a few days of fun with the sane branch of my family, then dropped them off at my friend Tatiana's in PA while I went up to visit/take care of my friend Anne who lives in New York's Hudson Valley and is about to have Baby #4.

During the course of the trip, I did a lot of criss-cross driving through New Jersey, the state of my birth and upbringing. I left NJ about 15 years ago, and since then have mostly felt aversion at the idea of going back, even for visits or for business. Rochester has been home in a way that NJ never was, never could be. I felt that the state had ground me down, not least because it is obscenely expensive to live in, the people as a whole are not particularly friendly or welcoming, and you spend much of what could be productive time sitting in traffic that sucks the life out of you. And though working in New York City for 4 years in my early 20s was a great experience, it too was intimidating. It was never *my* city. Leaving was the right thing to do.

But this week, there I was, age 40, driving through the Garden State by myself with the radio on.

Today's radio stations play LOTS of 80s music, and the New York City area is no exception. It was the music as much as the setting that plunged me right back into a vivid experience of what it was like to be Adolescent Deb. I heard Bon Jovi on the radio, and I remembered *exactly* what it was like to be 14, how I felt about the adults and kids I knew, what my take on the world was like then. The struggle to figure out what was the right thing to do, without guidance. The struggle to try to get through life and school without dissolving.

As I've said before on this blog, I was very different sort of person then. But now, I have an adult's understanding of what it all meant. And I'm old enough now that while I was absorbed in these memories this past week, I found that, remarkably, I could be both people simultaneously.

When I was a teenager and trying to figure everything out, I used to imagine myself older--35!--and life-toughened, going back in time to advise and comfort Teenage Deb. "What would I do if I were really, really wise? I used to ask myself. "I'll KNOW how to manage this in 20 years, but maybe I can just IMAGINE it now." I tried to be both people simultaneously then, too, but I was limited to what a 15-year-old could know.

Of course, as principled adults do, I've dissected my childhood for 20 years to determine what was right about it and what was wrong, and to decide what I'd replicate with my own kids and what I'd replace. But when I was in NJ this week, I suddenly felt that I could understand this in living color, not just theoretically. The experience brought back details that I'd forgotten, especially nice details that I'd suppressed in an attempt to put it all behind me. I understood, viscerally, the absolute necessity to a healthy later emotional life of not subjecting kids to too many things they have to endure; otherwise, ALL of the memories are clouded, even the good ones. In other words, "Well, at least it builds character" is pretty much bullshit.

This time, driving through New Jersey and New York City, it hit me that I was looking at it all with fresh eyes. In the intervening years, without realizing it, I'd somehow conquered New Jersey and New York. Really. It wasn't just that I drove into the city, which I'd done lots of times before when I was working there, but that I was doing it almost on a whim, to get a hair cut, and managing the traffic, tolls, and parking rates--not to mention what it costs for a Lexington Avenue trim--without blinking. The Big Apple had become No Big Deal.

When I was 23, I'd looked at that magnificent skyline from my bathroom window in Weehawken somewhat wistfully. The City meant hopes, dreams, possibilities, mystery. It was also edgy, and tough, and scary, and somehow inaccessible even though I was there every day. But this past Tuesday, as I was rounding the curve into the Lincoln Tunnel, I saw it differently. I felt sad, as I always do, seeing the gap where the Twin Towers should be. But I also saw the skyline prosaically. It was a place where I'd lived, and worked, and developed, and succeeded, and left. The 15 years from age 10 through age 25, without fanfare, clicked into a new place for me. New Jersey is now much more simply the place where I made the best of a bad situation than the scene of a tragic movie.

And how about those Bon Jovi songs that set these thoughts in motion? It was a "Two-Fer Tuesday" block of Bon Jovi: First, "Livin' on a Prayer" from 1986, and then "Who Says You Can't Go Home?" from 2005.

Almost poetic.