Adieu, Californication
My family and I are moving from Los Angeles to Miami this week, and I’m having a really hard time letting go of our house.
Just so we’re on the same page, our home is no Million Dollar Listing-style mansion by any means. In fact, it is so “compact” that it doesn’t have enough space to comfortably fit a dining room table, which means that our only hosting area is outdoors (at a lovely table I recently sold on Facebook Marketplace, RIP). It has a front yard in lieu of a backyard, with two huge trees that house a very cute racoon family between the months of July and September. And yet, it has beautiful double-height ceilings and a perfect layout and a million memories attached to it that make it so hard for me to give it up. In a way, it is not the house as much as what it represents: our first real home together, the first two and a half years of my daughter’s life, our California chapter.
My personal relationship with California goes further back than I care to admit. When I was a little girl living in Russia, my brother shipped me a Barbie Malibu Dream House that I played with incessantly, making outfits for a doll that drove a purple Jeep Wrangler and seemed to live in a place where winter didn’t exist. A few years later, I abandoned Barbie and got heavily involved in the lives of Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield of Sweet Valley High, a fictional LA suburb imbued by hot teens and deadly drama. This mental Californication was capped off with an obsession with Clueless, where the tax bracket was higher but the Jeep Wrangler was ever-present.
It’s interesting how certain lifestyles have the ability to penetrate one’s psyche and stay lodged there for decades. Unbeknownst to me, Los Angeles became embedded into mine. Later on, once we moved to America, it became a city I visited regularly – partying at Hyde as a college student, supporting an ex when he moved to “find himself” in a house with five roommates in Silver Lake, visiting another ex who lived in Beachwood Canyon in my early thirties.
Then came Dave, lockdown, and pregnancy, in that exact order. Dave was opening a business in Hollywood, so we flew there to check on it when I was about three months into my pregnancy (and at the height of my first trimester pity party). As we drove around the spacious, traffic-free city, I had a brilliant thought. Maybe, this was the answer to all my problems: the entrapment of Covid-ridden New York, the terrible smells I could sense all over Chelsea, the lack of green spaces – and of actual space in Dave’s one-bedroom. LA promised fresh air, great weather, and abundant square footage. Rather than scrambling for “weekend getaways,” we could have the ultimate Covid holy grail: a house with a yard for our child to play in. Dave seemed half-sold, and so I got on Zillow and started looking. A few fruitless tours later, I found it: a newly-renovated house smack in the middle of West Hollywood, equipped with three perfectly placed bedrooms (each with its own bathroom – le luxe!), just ten minutes from Dave’s bar. The price was right, and we pulled the trigger within days.
Unlike my partner, who had never lived outside of New York, I had a storied track record of following my heart to my “dream cities” – for the most part, with excellent results. What I didn’t realize is that there is a big difference between bouncing off to Paris by yourself at the age of twenty-five and moving your entire family across the country in the middle of a global pandemic, with a new baby on the way. In Paris, I’d had no responsibilities or limitations – I was there to soak in new experiences, to meet interesting people, to become a part of the city’s fabric. Here in LA, I had none of this freedom. Freedom itself, as a concept, had been taken away from us in March 2020, leaving us all siloed in our small lives with little chance at expansion. I spent my first few months “reconnecting” with old friends via awkward socially distanced walks, wandering around Target in a mask, and “nesting,” i.e., pouring all my energy into creating a “perfect” home for my baby to be born into. My house became my haven, my happy place.
Once Sasha was born and the world opened up, I began to understand Los Angeles a little bit better. What I discovered was a city with a weaker pulse than those I had previously lived in – a place that almost always felt a bit flat, a bit empty, like the best parts of it were hidden from plebeian eyes and tucked away in the Hollywood hills homes, the close-knit friend circles, the “industry events” that required a certain level of cache. Years ago, I would have been able to tap into these enclaves: I would have gone on Raya, met new people, honored every invitation. This time around, with a partner in the hospitality industry and a tiny new baby, I couldn’t. Each outing came with a $100 nanny markup and a morning migraine due to my baby’s consistent 5am wake-up time, and therefore had to be reserved for something special. As it turns out, it takes a village not only to raise a child, but to help a mother feel human – therefore, voluntarily removing oneself from said village is not always a wise choice.
And so, I pivoted. Rather than the storied, glam, Didion-esque Los Angeles life I had envisioned, I reached for another kind of life LA had to offer – one entrenched in a suburban rhythm that I had never before experienced. I explored my new neighborhood, stroller in tow – stocking up on groceries at Whole Foods, chatting with the ladies at the local Russian stores, admiring the blossoming bougainvillea on each block. I found a nanny who helped make our life feel a little more familiar through my native language and a genuine adoration for my child. We soon created a routine that I grew to love – the door swinging open at 8am every morning, the sun pouring in through the skylights, the sounds of Sasha’s gurgles as they returned from the park a few hours later. LA didn’t energize me, so I slowed down to match its rhythm – sometimes, to my utter boredom; other times, in a way that felt restorative. I was so far out West that the rest of the world couldn’t reach my little bubble, and I often didn’t want it to.
On weekends, a whole new life would open up to us. While the politics of its big cities leave much to be desired, California also happens to be one of the most beautiful places one can live, and so we took full advantage. We got a Tesla and drove everywhere – I would conjure a plan and we would hit the road to Malibu or Ojai or some tiny coastal town on the Palos Verdes peninsula, returning home 15 hours later, drunk on sun and sand and perfect pink sunsets framing the California sky. We did big trips too – we drove the coast from San Diego to San Francisco, we gambled in Vegas and skied in Lake Tahoe and hiked in Joshua Tree. Speaking of which, we learned how to hike – really hike – pushing through the physical strain and occasional boredom and reaping the reward of connection with nature and each other. We listened to podcasts on winding roads and fought on desert highways and made each weekend count in a way we never would have otherwise, allowing our small but strong family unit to form.
Lastly, we built our own, tiny village. It was a village that many passed through over the three years, yet not everyone stuck. Most relationships in LA have a transactional side to them (“you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours”), and, since the post-baby me had little more than breastfeeding advice to offer, many people tapered off organically. Those who didn’t will likely be in our lives forever, no matter where we live or how many favors we can leverage. Nothing challenges one’s psyche as much as new motherhood, and I will be forever grateful for those wine-fueled dinners and boozy beach days that brought me back to a more fun and familiar version of myself.
LA was not what I expected it to be. It didn’t skyrocket my writing career or make me into an amateur surfer or ayahuasca hippie goddess. It was a bit flat and a bit lonely and really f*cking hard to build a community in. And yet, I most definitely don’t regret it. I will value it just like I cherish every other opportunity I’ve had to try on a new worldview, a new lifestyle, a new perspective – the kind of stuff that makes me feel more charged than a low interest mortgage on my dream home ever will.
Speaking of dream houses – Barbie’s that is. A few weeks ago, we met some friends in Malibu, where we walked down to the beach and spent a few hours just lying there with plastic cups of champagne, watching our kids build sandcastles and dream up their own fantasies. I remembered my own childhood, thousands of miles away in Saint Petersburg – the little girl playing with her Barbie Malibu Dream House, fantasizing about a life she didn’t quite understand. I pictured that little girl seeing me here on this beach, with my friends and partner and daughter, the waves crashing against our feet. I suddenly felt proud. Not because of the optics, but because I had dared to go out there and try on this new life for size, rather than just holding on to it as a daydream. Perhaps, the shoe didn’t quite fit, but I did walk a few miles in it. And that in itself was worth it.
