Last weekend, with Steve visiting his folks in North Carolina, Ian and I were on our own. Ian’s brand of autism means that he doesn’t have friends, but he’s otherwise low maintenance. He’s very portable, a perfect +1. So, every weekend, Steve and I take Ian to museums and restaurants. We hike up mountains and take day trips. Pretty much any place that we want to go, he goes with us. Since we hate for him to be bored, we probably do more on our weekends than most people. 

Having watched too many Italian grannies on TikTok, I had a craving for fresh pasta. So, we roped in my older son, Jonah, and drove into Manhattan to get the good stuff downtown. But first, we parked the car in a neighborhood just over the George Washington Bridge, called Washington Heights. I lived there for 14 years during the party girl years, the marriage years, and the young mom years.

I showed the boys around the apartment building where they spent their baby years. Ian took pictures for his photography class. And we talked about the old days, when we had little money, but lots of energy to play with our boys in the playgrounds of New York. That apartment, and the stories that we tell the boys about our recovery from graduate school and our little community in New York City, is our origin story. Stories that we tell the boys over dinner on a Sunday night.

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