I went through the regular weekday morning motions: leaving my apartment a few minutes later than planned, moving my Wisconsin feet at a New York pace, trying to catch the walk light at the big intersection, descending into my subway stop through a grimy staircase where the faint scent of urine lingers permanently.
I swipe my card and move through the turnstile in a single, fluid motion, practiced daily these past six years. I head toward my preferred seat on one of the few wooden benches along the platform, the seat that lies at the perfect spot so that when the train arrives I can walk straight forward without moving so much as an inch to either side and stand directly to the left of the train's open door. From this spot, I can enter the train right away and, hopefully, get a seat for my commute. Today, though, my seat is taken by a man whose fetor announced his presence many yards away. He lies sleeping across the bench, curled up into as little space as a tall man could possibly occupy. His tattered clothing as well as his hair hangs from him in a disheveled mess; he seems a man thick with dirt but thin with wear. Like the rest of the commuters on the platform, I do my best to ignore him, as if by not bringing attention to him I am giving him some modicum of privacy. It's gracious, really. I stand nearby, waiting for my train, and others walk by with eyes downcast or straight ahead in measured stride. Unaffected. But one little girl stops.
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It didn't take me long to learn one of the top ten lessons for surthriving residency: to "find a tribe." Participation in a tribe, or community, though a meaningful part of any healthy lifestyle, becomes an absolute necessity when your better half is absent. The relative value of that tribe increases with every compounded variable, whether it's a cross-country move, moving to a place with few existing connections, a spouse in one of the more demanding residences (they're all demanding, but some are more arduous than others), or, you know, all of the above.
In New York, community serves a secondary function: to make the city a little smaller and more manageable. As we prepared for our move someone told me that even though New York is a huge city, it begins to shrink the moment you settle into your neighborhood and your routines. Finding your routes and your haunts, your favorite coffee shops and 99-cent stores, that bar you go to with one friend and the restaurant you go to with another, these are the things that turn The Big Apple into something more bite-sized. Even in How I Met Your Mother, the characters agreed New York City was The Best Place On Earth™ while sitting at the same booth in the same bar night after night. The truth is that Manhattan or Brooklyn or the Bronx might be where you live, but your neighborhood is your home. It should come as no surprise, then, that upon arriving in Brooklyn I had one very singular goal: to find a community. I remember the Sunday paper.
I got it from the porch, rolled into a heavy log with a story inscribed in each ring, although I was far too young to be interested in them. Rather, I dug out the comics and we passed it around the family, chuckling to ourselves and waiting anxiously for each other to get to the punchlines we knew were coming so we could laugh together. It was a special little highlight of each week. For a time, our Sunday newspaper also featured a Magic Eye stereogram, and I marveled at how my dad seemed to possess the super-human ability to see the hidden 3D figure instantaneously every time. When all I saw were chaotic squiggles like static on a television screen, he saw animals, flowers, trees, hearts, faces floating in a sea of color. I was desperate to develop the skill, certain these Magic Eye prints in the paper held untold secrets to life. He taught me by holding the paper above me as I focused on the wall across the table, then lowering the paper in front of my face with gentle reminders not to let my focus shift. If we did it just right, something amazing reached out to me from the cluttered mess of meaningless shapes and lines. Maybe not the meaning of life, but something just as valuable to my 8-year-old self. I met her for the first time on a sweltering June day. I was alone except for my backpack and three suitcases stuffed to the seams with everything I thought mattered. She waited for me with a crossed-arms, foot-tapping impatience that made me feel apologetic for any extra moment I took to get my bearings. At the curb outside the airport, she pushed me into a cab smelling suspiciously and excessively pleasant; the first of many affronts to the senses. The cab - whose air-conditioning was conveniently broken - raced and crawled and lurched and pushed its way through thick evening traffic, leaving my stomach trying desperately to hold on. She sneered.
Throughout high school and college, there was this boy who had a crush on me. And he wasn't just any boy -- he was my rabbi's son. That in itself wasn't actually so alarming or awkward. I quite liked my rabbi and loved his family overall. But it just so happened that this particular son was on a path toward a more religious way of life. His family, like my own, was somewhere in the middle of the road of religious Judaism. "Conservadox," I liked to call it. For example, we kept the dietary laws in our homes but ate vegetarian food at non-Kosher restaurants, and we observed Shabbat and all the holidays but drove our cars instead of walking. But he was "becoming more frum," as we say when someone discards the leniencies of their childhood in pursuit of something more, whether it be more strict, more austere, more connected, more traditional, whatever that might be. This can be a noble pursuit, and in truth I was going through my own similar transformation, albeit in much smaller increments and with an end goal not so far from where I started. In his case, it meant ultimately wanting all the trappings of an ultra-orthodox lifestyle with its uniform of beard and black hat for himself, along with a wife who lived according to the same religious standards. This was where the trouble began, because no matter how kind he was, no matter how much I thought maybe I liked him back, no matter how sincere he seemed, I could never be that wife.
You can imagine his surprise, then, when a few years after a disastrous attempt at dating he found out where I was living. "Borough Park," I said with a smile. It was a bastion of ultra-orthodox Judaism in Brooklyn. For him it would have been a magnificent place to live! For me, it was anything but. I've often thought that I should share my experiences with the world, but I've held back for fear of not having an audience. But then there are the occasional afternoons or lonely evenings spent on Google searches and blog posts, reading the experiences of others in similar situations, and they bring me hope, comfort, or sometimes a healthy dose of head-nodding, finding camaraderie and companionship in these strangers' words.
Because let's face it: being a resident's wife is really hard. And being a surgical resident's wife is hard. And being a small-town girl thrown into a big city is hard. And not having family around is hard. And living in New York is just plain hard. |
AuthorNashira is a music teacher and proud Small-Town Jew who, after surthriving six years in Brooklyn for her husband's surgical residency, is finally back in Wisconsin where she belongs! At least until the end of the two-year surgical fellowship, that is. It's a wild ride, and she's ready to tell you all about it! Archives
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