A story I would tell myself about my name, when I struggled to make peace with it, was the one my mom told me. She heard me cry one late night at work in her job as a secretary at one of the city’s hospitals. Hearing your child cry of course is nothing out of the norm, except when you haven’t been born yet. She heard my cry in her belly, thought it was a sign from God, and that her soon to be born daughter needed a name to match the impossibility of that moment. Or so she said. That she landed on the name of the pop superstar known for her sacrilegious iconography and dance moves, is as hilarious as it is ridiculous. I can only laugh at being saddled with a name that carries such a heavy burden. Some would even call it a heavy cross to bear.
But my namesake pop icon and I have some things in common. Namely that we both made it, for better or worse, in this concrete jungle. She passed through here, made a name for herself and then took on the world. She was never going to stay here which is why she got away from this place. I was born here and haven’t figured out how to escape it myself. People like me accept the city’s chaos because it’s all they’ve known, and they have no real way out. You learn to navigate the emotional whiplash from experiencing fleeting moments of happiness alongside the things you must survive on a daily basis. Life everywhere, but especially here, is just so damn hard. It doesn’t matter what your name is.
Perhaps nothing represents this more than the story of my birth, where my mom and her very pregnant belly hopped on a city bus and told the driver she was headed to the hospital to deliver me. She did so, according to what I was told, all by herself. I hold on to this quasi-memory because it feels emblematic of what my life and this city are to me: a place of enduring and unending hardship and perseverance, struggle and pain. It’s also why after four decades here I am as tied to it as it is to me.
Once, when my mom was walking down the pre-gentrified streets of Bed-Stuy, during the time when unassuming corner stores and vacant lots pre-dated cafes and hip restaurants, she was held at gun-point with my brother and I in hand. In her telling of it, she fought him off by throwing her diaper-filled bag at him and he ran away with it in hand thinking he had come away with something more valuable. Thankfully none of us were harmed. It became just another character building moment, a story to tell, in a city with no shortage of them.
Mere weeks after giving birth to me, my mom went back to work. The life of a single parent is never an easy one and she had bills to pay. The city doesn’t pay for itself you know. My brother and I went from the care of family into daycare where my lasting memory is that they used to serve us liver and onions sometimes, and I secretly liked the texture and weird taste, though I didn’t want to admit it. That daycare doesn’t exist anymore.
What I remember most about being a young child in this city is mainly how stressed and tired my mom was about absolutely everything. How hard life seemed to be for her and by extension, for us. It was in these formative years that I began to feel resentful about my place here. I longed for normalcy, a quieter existence with no chaotic bus rides or crowded train cars. One time we walked over the Williamsburg Bridge and my mom told me not to look because a man was shooting up next to us. It was a different time then. There was no Mayor with a vested interest in that bridge. No one cared about Williamsburg. It was poor and “ghetto”, I was told. Taxi drivers would turn you away when you told them you were going there.
Mostly though it’s hard for me to not tie this city to everything that I’ve lost to it.
Hart Island, located in the Bronx, is where unclaimed bodies are sent for burial. Every few years I search for my grandmother in their database. Because I don’t know anything about her, except that she died homeless and in the throes of a mental breakdown. I haven’t found her. Likely I never will. My mom searched for her too when I was a child, and ended up losing her mind in the process. My mom’s mental illness and my grandmother’s, I blame the city for those too. Not truly, of course, because mental illness is not something that can be given. But this place didn’t make either of their lives easier. Maybe if we lived somewhere better, their outcomes would have been different.
And that’s the other thing that guides my feelings about New York. I lost my mom during the Swine Flu outbreak of 2009, a precursor to Covid. I blame the city for that one too.
Some of my favorite times as a child were when we took weekly trips to visit family in Long Island, which was everything this city wasn’t. There were houses and quiet streets, and people lived like how I saw them on tv. I loved visiting family there even though I always felt completely out of place. It wasn’t really enough, there wasn’t enough grit. The Island, as it was called, wasn’t and still isn’t for me.
I used to blame the city too for all that I didn’t become. I had all this potential, teachers told me. Potential I never realized for most of my adult life. Up until my early thirties, I assumed I’d amount to nothing in life, and end up poor and a failure by every metric of success imaginable. I blamed the city for that because what if I went to better schools and had less distractions, and were taught by people who weren’t burnt out by this city too? But that was what I told myself to cope with the crushing disappointment of what my life had become. In fact, I went to great public schools and had teachers who were trying their best. I’ll never forget the librarian who in the fourth grade took me under her wing and entered me into a citywide storytelling contest where I memorized a story by heart and then recited it out loud. She over-enunciated all her ‘s’s’ so for a time I thought she was secretly a snake. I won that contest 4 years in a row, and then lost in the semi-finals each time. But it was in that library with her that I learned the power of telling a story. The city gave me teachers like her too. Ones who I loved and who helped me navigate the very difficult parts of my childhood.
Once, as my brother and I took the train home from middle school, a group of boys surrounded him. He told me to get away, as a way of protecting me from whatever was about to happen. I was too young to really understand the gravity of the moment. I yelled at them but knew I was helpless to stop anything. So, as my brother got robbed by a group of teens, I stood by at a distance licking the ice cream cone I had just bought. I wasn’t going to let it go to waste. And my brother would have probably been more upset had I tried to intervene. The city teaches you that you have to pick and choose your battles. That one wasn’t mine.
My high school graduation was at Lincoln Center, a place I never frequented as a child growing up here. It was exciting to graduate there, in a prestigious and recognizable place in the city, I thought. After the ceremony, however, as other classmates were going to parties and nice dinners, my mom and I sat on a nearby bench and ate sandwiches from the deli. It was a moment in retrospect that also shaped my view of the city. It always felt like I was on the outside looking in. I was there but not fully experiencing the city, and my life, in the same way other people were. I resented that, even if now I can appreciate that moment in a different way.
It’s why I’ve come to the conclusion that the only time people find happiness is when they leave here. For me too. I went to college in Oswego, the small town outside of Syracuse on Lake Ontario, about as spiritually far from this city as one could get. I studied abroad in Beijing in the early 2000’s. It was dusty and dirty then but allowed me to become the truest version of myself. I’ve been around the world, looking to find the beauty in other places that I can’t find here. From Europe to Central America and beyond. There’s so many amazing people and stories out there in the world. I feel about virtually anywhere else, the way many people feel about this city.
My brother left for Pittsburgh and never looked back. Some family left to Puerto Rico. My mom herself was hoping to move to Long Island, in fact she was all packed up and ready to go before life had other plans.
My network of friends are here but they have kids now, and I get the sense that they’d like to raise them anywhere else. If I had a reason to run away I would have done that a long time ago. I’m still looking for it.
So I’m stuck here, and I don’t know how to get out. But then I don’t know anything else either. I don’t really like this city but I love the Mets(sometimes). I can’t stand the hip and trendy place Williamsburg has become, it’s a shell of what it used to be. But there’s nothing as exhilarating as the view from a bike as you cross the bridge that used to be too dangerous to walk over.
With the state of the world being what it is, I recently told someone: “Thank God, we’re in New York.” And I meant it. If the world is falling apart outside of the five boroughs, there’s probably no other place I’d rather be than here. Even if there are a million other places I’d rather be.
Madonna Writes 
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