Neighborhood Gossip

When we left LA, I also left behind a social world that felt like a throw back to another era. Women stayed home, men worked, kids were shuttled to T-Ball games, soccer games, pool parties, and play dates. In some ways, the social incestuousness of these families co-mingling cast an illusion of the All-American experience. But like most idyllic scenarios, there was an undercurrent of ugliness that was stifling. Gossip was the real past time of all those twenty or so families involved. I could imagine a few affairs among the spouses causing tidal waves of unrest. During my experience it was the adults that behaved like children as phone lines lit up after a cocktail party, dissecting the evening's intricacies. The kids, all too young, hadn't become the cause of families splintering over slights, hurt feelings, bullying, and possibly even young hearts being broken. But I imagine that is all just around the corner.

The New Yorker reported on a story that resonated with me, reminding me of the cloistered neighborhood I'd just left in LA. A young troubled girl committed suicide after meeting a young boy on line on her MySpace account. It turns out the boy was pure fiction, created by her former friend and this former friend's mother. The young adolescent's suicide is tragic beyond comprehension, but the story really paints an ugly picture of a world where lives are so unhealthily intermingled and where time is plentiful. What's unfathomable is what happens when parents get so involved in their children's lives, boundaries blurring as mother's take on their child's hurt feelings as their own. The story also showed the way technology has accelerated social situations. Behind the mask of words, intimacies can be revealed all too easily. Personalities created or discarded with one key stroke, sometimes with such tragic consequences. The real tragedy here is that this young girl, in the throes of that time in all of our childhood, adolescence, was going through what most of us had gone through. Yet, with a few email exchanges, her loneliness and self-hatred took a turn impossible to comprehend.

The most shocking part of this story is that the mother behind this has shown no remorse for her part in this horrendous story. In the eyes of the law, she's done nothing wrong. Egregious morally, yes, but not illegal. These two families still live on the same block, having to face one another in this suburban town as they try and go about their lives. I don't know why this piece reminded me so much of LA. I could see all of those families we'd socialized with, the ever-changing alliances part of the amusement of most social gatherings. I could see all of those families I'd come to know so intimately, falling victim to this type of pettiness as their kids got older. It wouldn't be the slights over who got picked or ignored for a specific T-Ball team, but would now center on a few of their daughter's friendships fracturing as one girl became the target of their collective meanness. Kids learn these social games from their parents, I believe. And it is easy to see how kids would emulate their parents, whose behavior is no better than that of teenage girls and boys.

We have not yet become so ensconced in such social situations. This year has been a reprieve, allowing us a freedom to explore and examine this city without the strictures of social groups, each them embedded with expectations and rules. I don't know how moving to a different neighborhood, moving our child to a different school may change all of this for us. I'm hoping New York is much too big, much too preoccupied with games of life that extend beyond cocktail parties, to fall prey to such pettiness. But who can say? We may find the Upper West or East Side is a replication of the four blocks in Hancock Park that was the center of the universe for those families. I pray that is not the case.