Country Mouse & City Mouse

Background

A year ago, I attended a writing retreat with different craft workshops.

Self-portrait of me in a writing workshop. Photo by Dylan Gillis on Unsplash

One of the workshops was on setting. The workshop leader said that setting was so important to writing, that, when reading work submitted for publication or for contests, this workshop leader said they automatically reject any piece which does not have a good sense of setting.

This made me realize two things:

1. Anonymous blogging has taught me a bunch of bad writing habits, namely, the tendency to mask identifiers and location details.
2. The struggle to align with Husband on where to live almost definitely stems in part from the fact that Husband and I grew up in very different places.

More Background

I interrupt my “Authentic Self and the Assimilated Jew” post series – which I don’t think anyone really cares about – to post something which is arguably a continuation of the whole saga of searching for a “pond” (Jewish community) post series – which I also don’t anyone really cares about, and also a late response of sorts to Fandango’s FPQ about what type of community we’re from.

[I just realized I misread the question. It’s actually “Which type of community do you currently live in” followed by what you like/dislike about it/where would you rather live etc. But I’m going to go off-prompt.]

Even MORE Background*

*Actually, if you think about it, this entire post is really just background.

The Exurban Mouse

Until very recently (before I learned that “exurban” was a word – thanks, Fandango!), I would have described the Deeply Boring, Small, Unremarkable Municipality I grew up in as “rural”. Hometown was not close enough to a city to be considered “suburban” by definition, I had some high school classmates who lived on farms, and public transit was basically non-existent. Now I know “exurban” is more accurate – we had highways, strip malls, chain restaurants, and enough conveniences such that we weren’t out in the middle of nowhere.

I’m not a country mouse; I’m an exurban mouse. Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

But what’s more relevant to this post is the Jewish community. In Deeply Boring, Small, Unremarkable Municipality,

• Jews were a minority. I’m aware of 1 or 2 minor nonviolent antisemitic incidences happening in hometown in ~30 years.
• We had one awesome egalitarian synagogue, and pretty much all the mostly non-Orthodox (there wasn’t the infrastructure of eruv, daily minyan, kosher restaurants, etc. for Orthodox) Jews of Hometown went to it because the next closest place was 20+ minute drive away with a radically different feel. When I say “all of the Jews of Hometown”, I think the synagogue had a max of ~150 families at its peak – it wasn’t a massive congregation.
• Everyone went to public school and afternoon Hebrew school. The location of the public school and the synagogue, and the timing of Hebrew school was such that when I was attending, the kids would walk to Hebrew school, maybe grabbing snacks at the convenience store or eating a slice of pizza at the local (nonkosher) pizzeria en route, then playing Mortal Kombat in the synagogue lounge until it was time for Hebrew School. In other words, it wasn’t a bad afternoon.
• I didn’t really have close friends in public school or at synagogue. No one was mean or bullied me or anything like that; mostly, I spent middle school and high school in a not-formally-diagnosed-as-depression-sleepwalking-fog (best term I can think of for it) and just wasn’t very social.
• I didn’t keep in touch much with friends from public school or Hebrew school. But I come back to Hometown Synagogue every so often, and my former classmates and I are friendly on the occasions we see each other.

The Urban Mouse

Husband grew up in an urban environment with a large Orthodox Jewish community. As an urban environment, Husband’s Hometown is far more diverse than my own. But since Husband was raised right-wing Modern Orthodox, he lived in and pretty much only interacted with the Jewish part of town.

And Jewish it was! Multiple large kosher grocery stores. Blocks with multiple Orthodox synagogues on one block because the community could support that. So many right-wing Modern Orthodox to Yeshivish school options.

Stock photo that isn’t of Husband’s Hometown, but it’s the closest I could find. Photo by Blake Campbell on Unsplash

Because there were so many options, being in synagogue and school where you had friends was important. Or rather, from a kid’s perspective, being in synagogue or school without your friends, or where you didn’t fit in was a very big deal.

(Tbh, I’m not sure if this is actually any different outside of the Husband’s super-Jewish hometown. What kid doesn’t want to be cool and fit in with all their friends at school? The difference is that for everyone else, public school is usually the default and only option.)

Anyway, it’s not my place to describe Husband’s upbringing in detail. Suffice it to say, he came out of childhood with:

1. An amazing Jewish education
2. A few super-close besties
3. A lot of negative feelings/attitudes about Orthodox Judaism

TL;DR: Where We Want To Live

Where we currently live, and where we want to end up living, is somewhere in between my exurban non-so-Jewish boring hometown and Husband’s super-Jewish neighborhood of urban hometown. That we agree on.

Husband and I actually agreeing on something?!?! This is a miracle! Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

But nowhere is perfect. So amongst the imperfect choices:

• I would rather live somewhere more like my exurban hometown.
• Husband would rather live somewhere more like his super-Jewish hometown.

Cue disagreement.

Agreement? Lol, nope! Image by Afif Kusuma from Pixabay