Easter day trip: bye Carrie, hello Charlotte

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Easter was a big affair this year. We got invited for brunch at Julia and Mark at their new home in Greenwich, Connecticut for the first time. For those who do not know Greenwich, Connecticut it is hard to grasp how huge this affair is. Why? When people think about Connecticut, they think (and always say it) about mansions, hedge funds, Blue blood, Porsches, and obnoxious gates.When people think about Harlem, they often think (and often don’t say it) projects, drugs dealers, crack houses, racial tensions, sketchy, bohemia, gentrification and so on. Us visiting Julia and Mark is like some New York-based Bundys from ‘Married…with children’ visiting some Caucasian version of the Banks from ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel Air’.

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The occasion required a special outfit but the strange weather has made it impossible to dress. In the last month, snow, rain, sun, showers, sleet, drizzle, you name it, pushed me to shuffle around heavy knits, light tees, shorts, leggings, jeans, puffer coats, denim jackets, trench coats, snow boots, wellies, flat pumps and what have you. My current hair situation was not helping either. The lack of money and time to book a hair appointment since July last year resulted in a very long, unstructured and damaged mane. And what about all this baby hair that has been growing all over my scalp out of nowhere? It has been a very weird experience. Indeed I lost a third of my hair mass after L was born. I was so freaked out that I started to watch these crazy infomercials on hair growth products not with disdain but with hope…Pathetic much? But now, I have new hair shooting out everywhere. And when you are Asian, well…Remember tennis player Michael Chang or basketball player Jeremy Lin? Yep, enough said. Motherhood makes you live through the sufferings of an old hag with flappy belly and breasts losing hair and through the experiences of a tot such as incoherent bavardage, irrational tantrums and unruly baby hair growth. That sounds about right, I suppose.
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Anyway, who cares? As I watched Julia and Mark gracefully show us around the house and its grounds, I understood that the big affair was not me and my messy and loud crew trashing their beautiful and immaculate dining room (my 3 monsters did put the  ‘kids’ table upside down three times in a row while trying to stand on it…too bad I don’t have any inheritance money to threaten them with). The real big affair was this: my friend Julia, single gal living in a loft studio in the middle of Greenwich village, successful professional, unlucky in love, possessing the biggest designer shoes collection I have ever seen, has become Julia, gorgeous expectant mom who settled down in a humongous family home in Greenwich, Connecticut with her ‘John James Preston’ , a dog, still owning the biggest shoe collection I have ever seen (though it does now seem smaller in Connecticut). I thought ‘wow, this is  it, that’s her home now FOREVER, that’s her life’. It was kind of emotional; I had lost  ‘my’ Carrie Bradshaw. But as we were driving back home, we talked about how nice it was to see Julia happy and then, DH asked: ‘do you think Julia will let us squat her swimming pool this summer?’. The thought made me smile; ‘my’ Carrie was gone but I have now ‘my very own Charlotte York-Goldenblatt’…with a pool. Wicked.

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