Philosophy of a Home, Part 2

Read Part 1 first!

The good news is: I am going to live this time in a home I love. It does not belong to me, of course: We are going to rent, in a house similar in style to one pictured above there are many such buildings in my town). And funnily enough, back on the block we lived on from 2000 to 2006. When my daughter was an infant, I rented a one-bedroom garden apartment on M. St. When she was three, we moved into a two-bedroom apartment in a two-family house right across the street; at the same time, a young couple bought the two-family next door, living in one of the apartments and renting the other. We became good friends. We will be renting their upstairs apartment. It has the charm that my own house never had. All the houses on that block were originally built the same around 100 years ago, but there's was the only one that kept the original detail in the kitchen, so it has arched doors and gingerbread-trimmed cabinets. The attic was renovated into one large and two small rooms, with the front one overlooking the street through a huge window. With the attic renovated, it is two floors--a small living room, dining room, two medium-sized and one tiny bedroom, the kitchen and kitchen nook on one floor; the attic floor has the big room and two tiny ones. So there is a room that will be a study, a room that will be a playroom, a room for me to write or bead in, plenty of room for guests. There was extensive renovation on the apartment--they had a fire there last year and had to--but it's very well done and still has an old-fashioned feel, and the cozy corners I like. It's back on a street I loved for its neighbors--there are a dozen kids around Yvette's age within a two-block radius. My daughter is thrilled to be back there.

No, I will not miss our current house. There are occasions I feel pain, though. I feel it when I look at my grandfather's desk, so perfectly situated among the oak trimmed corner as you walk in the door. I feel it on the rare occasion I am home when real estate agents bring buyers to see the house: I am thinking: How is it that these 25 year olds who look like grad students can buy a house, and I cannot, even though I probably earn as much as they do? I feel it when I go into a shop in Boro Park and see hats for $200 apiece--how is it that people can be so extravagant? I feel it when I see McMansions replacing decrepit mini-capes and wonder: Where do people get so much money? I felt it in my gut while picking up empty boxes from another family who had just moved to town. I came in to their house-- to a family with four children, living on one income, in a beautiful antique home on one of the most expensive streets in town. There I was pathetically picking up their empty boxes so my tiny two-person family can leave our modest home for a rental. All the next day at work my face hurt.

I try to accept that I am an unwilling member of the economic club of current American and Orthodox life. No longer can one assume that homeownership is the ideal, or, since about the year 2000, worth the cost. No longer can one assume that one will be financially better off than one's parents. I know so many families who grew up in comfortable upper middle class homes, which their parents bought for under $80,000, who can barely afford their own, often smaller, homes. Even people I know who are relatively well off are struggling under the cost of yeshiva tuition. In my community, or every family like one I got the boxes from, there are probably at least two who live paycheck to paycheck.

I have friends who are far, far less materialistic than I am, who don't seem to need their "things" like I do, who live with several kids two bedroom apartments and seem to be able to live with that. I cannot; or, let me rephrase that; I can live like that but refuse to. And I'll save that word--entitlement--for my next post, Part 3.