The first thing you notice are the “talent scouts.” They follow you up the steps of the Getty Museum. They approach you near the 20 percent off rack in the girls’ section at Target. They stalk you at the beach, the mall and perhaps the farmer’s market too, though in fairness I have never been cornered by one near the asparagus. (Which we have fresh, in the middle of March. Sorry, New York.) They are men and women, who carry shiny business cards and descend upon you, telling you how cute your kids are and how they really ought to come to the audition they are having for some popular kid’s show next Monday. It’s always a Monday.
Most of them are scam artists— people posing as agents who get you to bring your kids for an “audition” and then sell you acting lessons—though once in a while it is a real entertainment executive of some sort tapping your shoulder. Well, one was—I looked on her IMDB page (the Los Angeles equivalent of a CV) and realized she had several bit parts in a few horror shows.
My kids are not allowed to audition for anything, so I can’t tell you much about how it works out, but I can definitely say that talent scouts, faux or otherwise, were not part of our Upper West Side landscape when we were there.
We moved from New York to Los Angeles three years ago, our family of four, and my now 5-year-old cannot recall the city of her birth, a meaningless and inevitable fact that somehow always manages to strike at me slightly.
The now 10-year-old still wears her even-smaller New York City Girl t- shirt with pride, but I wonder at times how she would adjust to a return.
When we still lived in New York City, my views of Los Angeles were formed almost exclusively by business trips during which I had no child care responsibilities, and were thus quite rosy and malformed. Los Angeles was a place where you could wear opentoed shoes in March! Los Angeles was a place that got Jamba Juice before New York, where the curve of the Pacific coastline was the prom queen to the East’s girl-next-door seaboard.
What was not to love? But, in some ways, the west side of Los Angeles is not much different from the West Side of Manhattan, parentally speaking. The dirty secret is that middle class child rearing is more or less the same in both places—I suspect it is so throughout the nation. People in both places speak obsessively about milk hormones, math and the lack of public middle schools, they ponder the best age for a cell phone, they wonder how much is too much television, ice cream and homework, they are excessively fearful of nuts, West Nile virus, and computer stalkers. All are ever grasping for that precious middle ground between urban independence and safety.
As with everyone who makes that cross-country journey, the most significant difference in our lives with children stemmed from the change in climate, and the addition of outdoor space. There they are in December, climbing the avocado tree in our middle-of-a-city backyard.
There they are on a particularly warm day one February wading into the Pacific Ocean. When you talk about missing your friends in New York, everyone here reflexively reminds you how annoying it would be to put your kids in mittens, and while you resent the auto-pilot response, you have to agree. You hate yourself for admiring the kid who went snowboarding in the mountains in the morning and surfing at the beach in the afternoon, for in fact wanting to be him. All the nice weather makes you feel overly confident about your own athletic abilities, and causes you to do things like boogie board. In New York, my most embarrassing parallel behavior was jumping over a pile of snow in high-heeled boots.
On the last day of
school last spring, my youngest child’s preschool teachers screened a
slide show from the year, highlighting the first and last days, big
holidays, important moments, fun field trips.
Afterward, my
husband and I realized we were a bit dazed by it all—without the
tell-tale scarves and snow mounds and grey skies in the photos, it was
impossible to remember when any of them were taken. That is life here in
one sense, the seasons slip by quietly unnoticed, the spring melts into
July and suddenly you wake up one day and realize your children’s shoes
are two sizes too small.
People here like to talk about school a
lot, just like back East, as they say here. But somehow the flavor is a
little different there, too. I distinctly remember my first parent
meeting at PS 87 when my older kid was in kindergarten, and the parents
who complained that the puzzles were not difficult enough. There was
nothing those parents did not know about Chicago math versus TERC,
balanced literacy versus phonics, progressive versus traditional
learning approaches.
People here have very distinct views about
what makes a school good, but it is never quite clear to me what they
are basing it on. On our first curriculum night here, I raised my hand,
shame-faced, and asked for an explanation of the math program.
All
the other parents ran for the table of Entenmann’s donuts. No one was
terribly interested. They just knew the test scores were good, and going
up. Ask 10 parents in public or private school what is it they like
about their child’s school in New York, and they tend to talk about the
things they learn about. Ask it here, and I have found people cling to
the idea that the other parents are “down to earth.” Roughly translated,
this means they work in the entertainment business, but do not let
their own children watch television.
Here just as many girls do
gymnastics as soccer, it seems, and drama classes and performances are
to Los Angeleno children as art classes are to the New York kid’s
extra-curricular activities.
One way in which New York
parents—especially in Manhattan and Brooklyn— like to pride themselves
as having it over Los Angelenos is on the diverse culture of their city,
to which they ostensibly expose their children. But while I do agree
that New York compares favorably to my new city—with its deeply
segregated neighborhoods and servant class of underpaid immigrants from
Latin America to which New York has no direct comparison—New Yorkers
often overstate just how much diversity their kids are actually
encountering. They seem to confuse subway rides among the masses with
actual neighborhood integration, and brag just a little too loudly about
their “diverse” private schools that are mostly anything but. Having
clocked hundreds of hours on the hippo playground in Riverside Park,
along with the pizza joints and bakeries, apartment building pools and
silly little stores selling over-priced children’s t-shirts, I always
felt I was a reluctant but undeniable member of a club whose only entry
fee was a child in a stroller and an undersized apartment.
I
have yet to meet other parents with whom to bond here—my kids are older
and I am too, and when you come from a city where you have seen the same
faces on the playground, then at toddler art class, then again at
school, and on the soccer field for all those years, it is suddenly
quite jarring and difficult to always be the odd woman out, the one with
no shared parenting history with all your new peers. And yes, I
confess, with a full time job and two children, no real will to make
connections.
And while I admit that somehow there is a bit too
much cheer about the weather, most days I hope to never leave. Maybe
it’s the year-round strawberries, or the sight of my everblonder girls
making their way up the avocado tree with a bowl of pretzels and a fat
book of Calvin and Hobbes.
Or maybe it is the pink streaking of
the sky each dawn, presaging another 72-degree morning, making time,
ever marching, seem to stand still for now.
Jennifer Steinhauer is
the Los Angeles bureau chief of The New York Times.
Set In L.A.
Jennifer Steinhauer’s new
home city of Los Angeles is also the setting of her first novel,
“Beverly Hills Adjacent,” which she co-authored with another uprooted
mom, Jessica Hendra. A smart and funny look at loving and mothering in
Los Angeles, it follows the life of June Dietz, a UCLA professor who
feels like a fish out of water in Tinseltown. June’s actor husband is
consistently trampled by Hollywood’s caste system, while the judgmental,
health-crazed super moms at her daughter’s preschool leave her feeling
one banana short of a protein shake. When a charming television producer
enters the scene, June struggles with temptation and her East Coast
notions of what family life should be. (May 2009, St. Martin’s Press.) —Carol Kuruvilla
