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Language warning. And **Content Trigger warning.**

Episode Title: “Real Estate.” Avani Beth.

Written By:

 

Jeff thinks that it’s him. That he’s the reason why I don’t want to move into a nice little starter home in the suburbs. 

But it’s more about fast food commercials.

And toy commercials.

Both of my parents are British. My mother’s family from Jamaica. My father’s from India.

But the way my mother tells it, dad completely changed after the death of his dad. Became obsessed. Everything became about America. Moving to America.

To Hollywood. To Make movies. 

This was where he wanted to apply to go to college. And he never did because his father convinced him America was all lies, illusions, and doing it all on your own. “Here you have a family,” he would say.

He was in Healthcare Administration. Dad. My father. Try not to fall asleep. But this is how he reassured his parents while he deftly avoided medical school. 

And the first job he could get was in sleepy but semi-cosmopolitan Pymor, Virginia. He wanted NY and then to go to LA. Or to go straight to LA. But he also really wanted to get the process started. Because see, there was a ticking clock that was about to change the course of his life. One that could anchor him to the life he was in forever. If he didn’t move fast.

That anchor was me.

And so Mom and Dad moved to Pymore, Virginia.

Rented a home there.

Knowing that in a few years he would try again for Los Angeles or a city closer to Los Angeles.

And, in the meantime, he made home movies, backyard movies, and even short movies and documentaries for Pymore Hospital center. He volunteered to do it. And they loved his work.

But then the jobs in L.A. or anywhere near it kept falling through. He was too old to go to film school or grad school. And he had a life to keep up. And a family to continue to support. He kept getting offered promotion after promotion in Pymore. They bought a cul de sac house in the suburbs. Mom got a job she loved as a systems Analyst at a new tech firm that opened offices in Pymore to be close to D.C. Dad joined a local archive and documentary club in the area. My brother was born. My sister was born.

And soon I was entering Junior High. And High school.

And somewhere in there my grandmother got sick. And dad was flying back and forth to England to help take care of her.

And even though I was born in Pymore, I still felt different than my classmates or neighbors. Our food was green banana and butter, curry goat, rice and peas, plantain, and salt beef stew, saag and chapati, naan, masala and Gulab Jamun and rum cake, and theirs was steak, and white rice, and sliced tomatoes, iceberg lettuce salads, casseroles, meatloaf, burgers, roast chicken, pizza, *sometimes pizza,* chicken nuggets, corn on the cob, grilled cheese sandwiches, Lunchables.

And in this mostly white town with two Black families, no other South Asian families, or Asian families at all. No mixed families like mine. And one Hispanic family, who lived in our area, but whose kids went to the Loudoun county school, where their father taught, there was no one else like me and no other families exactly like mine who went to my school or lived in our neighborhood. Indian Father. And a Black Jamaica mother.

All of the other families in my neighborhood looked more like the families you saw on TV than mine. And there were NO. NO. families on TV or in any movie that I saw where the mother looked like my mother, and the father looked liked my father. And where the dinner table looked like ours. And the conversations sounded like ours.

Or where the fights, the fights that got worse and worse between my mother and my father, after my father’s mother died, sounded like the fights in ours. 

You know on TV, and in these shows, they make it seem like the happiness comes with the neighborhood and with the house.

It’s part of the storyline. In these neighborhoods and in these houses, life is happy. Idyllic. Safe. Satisfying. And peaceful.

But I feel like I started waking up in elementary school and it only solidified for me in Jr High….

The families around me, looked so much more like the the families on television than mine, their food looked more like the food on the America television shows, at least, than the food in my house did,

their rituals and dinner times,

and the way they spoke to each other,

the game nights,

the open doors,

the family conversation,

the plan for the family camping trip.

…All of that stuff, it looked a lot closer to what I saw on television.

But just one level… closer, just another layer… under the surface, their lives weren’t actually like the lives on television at all. Close very close, though. But there was part of it that I had never seen on TV before. Not on TV in the neighborhoods, or houses, or families that looked just like the ones surrounding mine.

Once we got into Jr High

Why did one of our friends who was a teenager suddenly take her life?

Why is it another girl, one of the most beautiful, most popular girls in school, kept a razor blade 

in her purse, and every time she would report in to her parents, during our study 

breaks, she would come out of the bathroom, with fresh cuts, into her legs, that she wouldn’t 

even hide, at least not from us. 

Though she hid them well at school.

Why were girls so young betting each other on who could do what to who. 

And which member of the football team, at the neighboring high school, they could do it to?

And that’s only some of it.

It was actually a lot. 

And still none of it I had ever seen portrayed on television. Forget being portrayed or dealt with at all. They certainly weren’t dealt with, or portrayed, in any houses that looked like that, in any neighborhoods like those, in any of those pristinely, or at least, decently manicured developments, and certainly not on American television.

You know how we all knew what the real burger and fries were, as kids, right? 

The ones from McDonald’s because we saw the commercials.

Like a mom-made burger, in a box, with a note, that would be bullshit, right? Like that isn’t what all the kids have, or want, because this isn’t part of the story in the commercials?

And the way we all knew what the real Barbie was, or the real GI JOE was, right, because of the commercials. Homemade toys?! It’d be like what is this *BULLSHIT?* I want the thing in the commercial. The thing with the storyline that I have seen a million times… so that, at this point, I want it so much that I’m about to burst.

We knew what was the good thing, the real thing, the valued thing because of the commercials. And sometimes entire television-show-long commercials. Because it was what we saw on television, and it had all the best storylines.

Even if you see your parents, and their parents, live that life, part of what reinforces that, yes, this is normal, this is the right away to live out a life, is because it is reinforced by what you see on the TV, in all those commercials. 

Suburbia had a whole lot of excellent commercials in the form of TV shows, and actual ads, and storylines.

Suburban life is the America dream. Suburban life is the good life.

There was farm life that was shown a lot of times as hearkening to some idealized and rustic version of the past, city life for singles, and couples who hadn’t yet started their families. But suburban life. On TV, that was real life, that was settled life.

Good job, good and quiet neighborhood, in a good house that looked like the houses on TV.

That was a future for the kids.

That was life for a family.

And see everything else was meant to be like a sign that you were lost, or on the way there, and otherwise, everything else…oh everything else, it was simply bullshit. Not the American dream, not the life for a family. 

Not a family you wanted to be settled, safe, secure. And have a bright future.

But because of my actual real life experiences, this is one commercial I did not fall for. Suburban life being real life didn’t seem so automatic to me. But then, in America, what else would it be right? What else would it be for a family?

I only knew that, hey, the commercials for the suburban life, they aren’t telling the full story, but who wants to hear that anyway, the towns, and the neighborhoods the lawns, the houses, they look so quiet so settled so beautiful, they look like the America dream.

Let me just say, 

I’m not sure if Artists can even be a normal part of society, or if when we are mingling amongst normal society we are kind of just undercover. I don’t know how you can be a civilian, as I call them, or a normal part of society, when you are always looking at the bigger picture, and always seeing more.

So I haven’t given Jeff an answer yet, on going to look at yet another house in the suburbs of L.A.  A house we would have to fix up, anyway, ‘til it looked the… one of the houses in the commercials, I guess. Though the neighborhood is already there.

My father and mother are divorced now, one living in a condo, one in an apartment, still in Pymore. Old habits die hard. But they are happier than they have ever been. 

My brother travels with water sourcing missions all over the world. So who knows where he is living. 

And my sister and her husband just moved to Ireland with some friends. I’m like, how are you going to fit in there? She’s like we don’t know, but we’re going to document the whole thing. I don’t know. My father repeatedly said something to me when I was approaching the age where I was going to be applying for colleges.

Be careful of two things. The town you move to after high school or college. And the town where you have your first child. Because one of those places is likely to be where you’ll live out the whole rest of your life.

And even though Jeff is my person. And I don’t want to wait too long to have our first kid.

And I believe life can happy, idyllic… Or at least, have some real beautiful moments in it, and be safe, satisfying, and peaceful. In the suburbs. 

I don’t know if my life can be in the suburbs. MY best life can be in the suburbs.

And I certainly know those things don’t just come with the neighborhood, or with the neighbors, or with the house.

Country, city, suburban life in America those seem like all the choices. 

And sometimes I feel like I’d like to raise my family in some other kind of awesome life with my person. 

I just don’t know what kind of life that would be. 

Or what real estate that would amount to. 

What the best real estate would be for us and for me.

This Podcast is Fiction.

 

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