I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

I have a guess. Is it: living in a provincial European capital with a superiority complex, with no job, no husband (half the week) and the pressure to OHMIGOD enjoy this time, you’re never going to get it back, isn’t living in Europe SO WONDERFUL you can walk everywhere, and look, there’s even a subway? A subway! These Europeans are so clever with their innovative underground tubes and jauntily-tied scarves and what not.

As if there’s nowhere else where scarves and subways can co-exist peacefully where, perhaps, the conservatism wasn’t so palatable, and the idea of a woman Working While Parenting (WWP) wouldn’t get you pulled over by the Society for Creative Re-enactments of Time Gone By. (Oh those career gals with their crazy idea of suffrage — its so cute how they want to use their educations at the same time as their uteri. Don’t they know the two are mutually exclusive?)

For example: I am actually watching a woman yodel on television now. Wearing a dirndl. Surrounded by a trio of lederhosen-clad musicians. The kind with shorts. And accordions. During prime time. Unironically.

In the four months we’ve been here, I haven’t quite acclimated. I didn’t realize how much having a job — even a horribly stressful one which gave me grey hair and dandruff like snow in a Chicago winter — made me feel like a person. And how much being a hausfrau makes me feel like Virginia Woolf. Probably because being a hausfrau here is still considered a valid role for women (also, apparently, Prime Minister. Get your gender roles shit together, Germans).

(God, more dirndls. And a polka. What AM I watching?)

Oh, New York, how I miss your cramped apartments, your long work hours, your sticky summers and your frigid winters, your diversity, your open-mindedness, your warmth, your sense of possibility, your vitality, your creativity, your pulse, your subways and your jauntily-tied scarves.