One last dig...
Dand then on to more positive thoughts, I promise!
I posted my last entry minutes before M (my husband), C (my one year old daughter) and I headed out to the beach for the afternoon. Anyone who has ever taken highway 17 to get anywhere knows that the traffic gives you lots of time to chat. On that day it was a good thing because within minutes I got the distinct feeling that M was annoyed about something. A little prying later("come on, just tell me, you know I won't give up...") he opened up. It seems that my post had touched a nerve.
M was born and raised right here in Silicon Valley. He felt that my post was one big disparaging rant about his hometown. I tried patiently to explain that I was too happy here and no I didn't hate it here, there were just some aspects of SV life that I had to come to grips with before really being able to accept it as my home. As we delved further we came to some interesting conclusions that I would like to share with you. However, before I do this, please bear in mind that we are in our very late twenties (so late in fact that one of us might not be in her twenties anymore in a month or two...). We live here by the grace of my in laws who are kindly paying our mortgage and putting M through law school. And we have a one year old daughter who has the youngest parents of all the kids in her daycare.
It would seem that all of my insecurities and feelings about the Bay Area arise from the fact that I feel inferior to the people I see and interact with on a daily basis. (Hey look! It's high school all over again!)
We discussed the fact that the Bay Area is different from anywhere else we've lived (Boston, NY, Paris, France) in it's total absence of a visible middle class. It seems sometimes that people here are either very affluent or very working class. It might be the fact that our lives keep propelling us into social circles of people better off than we are, but we can't seem to find more than a handful of people on the same social/financial rung of life that we are clinging to. Over the last five years many of the people we have met who could relate to have moved away because they just couldn't make ends meet here. This means that whenever we go to a social event, be it synagogue organized or secular, we know that we will be meeting people who have more money than we do. It's hard not to feel unsettled by that.
Continued on the next page
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