Realistically Speaking
Because let’s be realistic; we need to move, but we’re not buying a house in Boro Park
My dinette is a perfect square.
A perfectly small square, bookended by a garbage can and highchair, which take up precious real estate, but remain in place anyway, because, well, babies. And garbage.
Every year or so, during a random suppertime when little people vie for elbow space and the third cup of water spills, I rotate my kitchen table. From one minute to the next I’ll decide, “If I rotate the table, there will be so much more space.”
For the next whole week, we all wow the extra space and wonder why nobody thought of this brilliant idea sooner.
But then, after a week, we realize whatever space we gained in the width, we lost it in the length.
We need to move to another house.
It’s an old story. We need to move because there are too many little people sharing one bedroom, which happens to also be our playroom. And storage room. And study and den and living room and family room — all those lovely rooms we see on realtor’s incredible virtual tours. And when so many people share a bedroom, and you’re the mother of all these people, bedtime is not fun.
It’s also not fun to share one bathroom with all these amazing people, especially not an hour before Shabbos when the toilet clogs.
As more little people join our family, we start talking about Lakewood. And Monsey. And Linden and Staten Island and Jersey City and Bloomingberg and Blooming Grove and any and every other blooming community. Because let’s be realistic; we need to move, but we’re not buying a house in Boro Park.
To clarify, we’d love to buy a house in Boro Park. My husband and I both grew up in Boro Park, and we like this place. We want to continue living here. But with the Brooklyn housing market being what it is, we need to be realistic.
Okay, realistic. We’re mature and responsible adults, we can do realistic.
Except that realistic is even less fun than bedtime.
“We’re not moving to a place that requires a daily commute back to Boro Park for schooling and shopping,” I declare. “If we move, we have to settle in and lead normal lives.”
That rules out three-quarters of the “realistic” options. The new frontiers are in varying stages of infancy. It’s going to take a long time before they could declare independence from the closest established communities.
In the name of hishtadlus, we do some casual touring of different locales. We spend Shabbosos in new developments, check out the shops and shuls and neighbors. It’s nice. We enjoy those getaways.
“It’s nice to visit,” my husband points out. Can we see ourselves replanting our lives on these foreign territories?
We return home with garbage bags full of laundry — laundry which soon hangs around the entire house to dry. “If we move to X, we’ll have a laundry room. And a Pesach kitchen. And a playroom and a living room and a study and…”
We’re not moving to X. Realistic turns unrealistic very fast.
But we urgently need to move. We need to do something about it, today, because if someone stands in front of the open fridge and blocks my way one more time, I’m going to scream so loud, you’ll hear it all the way in Jackson-Airmont-Ramat Beit Shemesh.
“Maybe we could buy a house in Boro Park,” I say optimistically. “We’ll tighten our belts; we’ll make it work. It doesn’t have to be our dream home. We can start small, a starter home.”
We get in a touch with a broker, start house-hunting.
It doesn’t take long to learn that everything we’ve heard about the Brooklyn housing market is true — and then some. You can either rob the bank and move into a comfortable little house. Or you can move into a hovel and rob the bank to rebuild it. If a house is listed at a price “too low to mention,” that’s because it isn’t actually a house. It’s a few feet of space with moldy walls and rusty pipes and exorbitant maintenance fees.
It’s back to Monsey-Lakewood-Linden-Afghanistan. Back to realistic.
We need to move, there’s no question about it. But for now, we’re not going anywhere. We live in Boro Park, and we like it here. Our family and friends live here, our kids are settled in schools here, we have our shuls, our doctors, our stores. We’re card-bearing community members and even 5,000 sq. ft. palatial homes with circular driveways and kidney-shaped pools can’t make us leave.
Instead, to gain living space, I rotate the kitchen table again.
(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 730)
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