Sunday afternoon Jean, Sasha and I hopped the G train over to Williamsburg for brunch at a friend’s house. On the surface, this was a normal Brooklyn-type event: a dozen or so creative types (photographers, writers, designers) eating croissants and spinach-mushroom frittatas and drinking mimosas; four young children were playing with expensive imported wooden toys; many of the attendees were Asian.
Normal, yes, but I felt like I’d stepped into Bizarro-World.
The hosts, whom I’d recently met, were in many ways our parallels. J. was a globe-trotting photographer with a focus on Asia; Z. was a Taiwanese-born fashion designer; their adorable son, D., was just over a year old.
In their apartment, the almost-parallels continued. They had a felt map of the world on one wall; we have world-map wallpaper in Sasha’s room. They had a textured, multipiece play mat on the floor; we have the same thing, only with a less-intricate pattern. I spotted one of those Ugly Dolls that parents seem to love but kids often ignore; it was larger and a different color than the one Sasha has.
There was plenty I could have gotten jealous about. Their apartment was bigger and airier, the furniture slicker (love those Quasar Khanh chairs!). D. had way more hair than Sasha, and was taller than she is (and she’s 93rd percentile already), and D.’s studded rubber toy ball was identical to Sasha’s, only silver instead of purple; it was, literally, shinier than what we have.
But please believe me when I say jealousy was not foremost in my mind. Instead, I was looking at all the things we truly had in common: the diapers, the kids’ sudden inexplicable tears, the proliferation of toys across the floor. They faced financial pressures, too, and in fact were about to move back to Taiwan to vastly lower their expenses and take advantage of proximity to in-laws. Taiwanese in-laws! Good luck, J.
All of which made me feel a hell of a lot happier about my own lot. Around 4 p.m., Sasha got crabby, so we bundled her up, loaded her into the Ergo carrier and jumped back on the G, where Sasha cutely and instantly fell asleep on my chest. An hour later, we were back in our by-comparison-cramped apartment and probably doing exactly what J. and Z. were doing at that moment—trying to get the kid to eat. No matter how bizarre Bizarro-World gets, it’s hard to escape normality.
Besides, so what if D. had more hair than Sasha? I’ve got way more hair than D.’s dad.