Finding Stories in the Suburbs

Our eldest daughter’s here for a few days. She’s staying at her mother’s house. “I don’t even know where her mother lives,” I say to my husband.

How much our lives have changed. For more than a decade, I drove back and forth and back and forth to our children’s mother’s house, waiting in the driveway for the kids to load or unload their knapsacks and bags, as they went back and forth between their two homes. Then for a while, I waited at the end of the driveway, when her husband decreed that we weren’t to come on the property, and the children had to meet us at the road. That charmer is no longer her husband. Our children are grown up. She lives somewhere different now.

Which turns out to be one of those suburbs, that looks like so many other suburbs. The kind where everything seems to look the same. Like the suburb my husband and I moved to, when we blended families.

When I met my husband, I lived in Toronto, in a neighbourhood made up, mostly of low-income families. And though I owned a tiny condo that I shared with the two daughters from my first marriage, I’d bought it in a social program that sold real estate below market value. I didn’t have a car. I walked everywhere, pulling the kids in a wagon to school and to daycare.

My future husband and his children lived in a suburb west of the city. He couldn’t move. I could. And so two girls and I moved in with my husband, two more girls and a boy. We couldn’t walk where we needed to go anymore, so our first purchase together was a minivan. “I’m sorry,” my husband kept saying. “My poor hippie wife.”

We meet our daughter outside her mother’s house. It’s bitterly cold and windy day. I’m wearing layers I haven’t put on in years. Our daughter claims to be wearing two more pairs of pants under her jeans. She lives in Ottawa now, and even she’s cold.

A short walk, all of us agree. We cinch in our hoods, press tight our sunglasses. All of us are wearing masks. My husband’s high risk, and our daughter is here only temporarily, looking after her mother who’s just had knee surgery.

Off the porch, we turn right. Does it matter? We’re definitely not here for the scenery. In the suburbs, is anyone?

I’d never lived in a suburb—or, as we called them in the small town I grew up in, a subdivision—and never thought I would. Suburbs were for certain sorts of people. People that weren’t me. How could they ever stand it, I thought? The sameness. The bumped out garages. Cul-de-sacs and parks under hydro paths. What people would choose such a life? People without imagination.

My new husband felt something else. Not the opposite, exactly; not charmed or inspired. He felt at home. He’d grown up in a suburb. Knew the advantages it offered, along with the drawbacks. He knew how to navigate, and get around.

I did not. In fact, we three Toronto transplants didn’t seem equipped with the right compasses. The streets were safe enough for my daughter to ride her bike around the neighbourhood on her own. But she got so lost on her first excursion, that she never wanted to do it again. “Everything looks the same!” she said.

“You must love me a lot to move here,” my new husband said.

I did. I do. But I was also lost.

I didn’t know how to make friends in this new place. The mothers of the children’s classmates, or the adults I’d meet while waiting to pick up a child from soccer or hockey or choir, were friends with my husband’s ex-wife. It had been the sort of divorce, and it was the sort of place, where the lines of allegiance had been clearly drawn. In my old life, I could run into other parents in the park, and strike up a conversation. There weren’t those kind of parks here. In fact, where were the people? They seemed to come out only to cut their lawns, or blow out their driveways, machinery roaring, before they’d press the opener on their garages to let themselves back in.

It was, in short, pretty much as I’d expected. Except it was a little bit worse.

“Should we turn here?” my husband asks. We peer out from inside our thick hoods. The masks are making our glasses fog up. To me, the street looks the same as the one we crossed before.

Our daughter tells us about a horror movie, where a couple from the city buys a house in the suburbs, and every time they try to leave, they get lost, and wind up back at their own house.

“You know, I’m not sure I know where we are anymore.” Funny. It’s my husband who says that. But then, it’s been a decade since we lived in a suburb. Maybe those compasses require frequent calibration.

“This is the street,” our daughter says.

“But this isn’t Steeplechase.” My husband is looking at the sign.

“Not yet,” says our daughter, “but it will be.”

We get back to her mother’s house, just as we intended. And then, my husband and I get in our car and drive out.

During my time in the suburbs and since, I learned that a blanket hatred of suburbs can’t be entirely separated from a narrative that is snobby and racist. Criticizing any community’s aesthetic, is about turning up one’s nose at someone else’s life—whether it’s the money they have to spend, or the taste they show while spending it. And the way I thought of suburbs growing up—as white and bland as a Betty Crocker cake—is not the way the suburbs are now. Today, maligning suburbs is not necessarily a comment on car culture and cookie-cutter architecture, but more a dog-whistle complaint about the presence of new immigrants, or the deepening roots put down by communities of colour. The rich culture and the relationships in those suburban places are things I never found in my own suburban community. Some of that may have been my own doing. For the most part, I remained lonely there.

But I can’t say that I stayed uninspired.

After I stopped commuting to a job in Toronto, and began to freelance remotely, if I wasn’t grocery shopping, or driving the kids somewhere, or on the phone with a client, there was nowhere for me to go.

There was nothing to do except write.

And I did. Furiously. Making up for the bleakness of my exterior landscape, with the one I created inside. Which might have been just what all those other people were doing—in their own ways—behind those repeating bay windows and metal front doors.