Raising A Baby In The Tranny Hooker Capital Of The U.S.

I have a new hobby. I like to look through the photos of my friends on Facebook that live in other places and have families and fantasize about packing my man, baby, dog and kitty up and moving somewhere beautiful. In addition to being conflicted about whether I’m a stay-at-home mom, I’m conflicted about Los Angeles. I don't know why I live here.

Alden and I moved down here in 2004 because we were getting gouged by high rents in our dangerously crummy neighborhood in Northwest Oakland. It wasn't a very well thought out decision. We don't really fit in here. I mean, we spend our free time gardening and playing with Sculpty, not networking and sipping poolside martinis. We want our world to be beautiful, but we live in the midst of strip malls, fetid gutters, and within two blocks of a McDonalds, Burger King, Taco Bell, Subway and Yoshinoya.

But sometimes I see a nice rack of sangria-colored bougainvillea or a jade tree overwhelmed by buttery little blossoms and my anti-L.A. stance softens. Griffith Park has these Seussian trees with orange bundles of leaves dangling like Christmas ornaments that charm me to bits.

But culturally, we don't fit in here at all. Sometimes I just want to move back north to the gay outback of the Russian River, a few miles away from the wine country suburb where I grew up. I want to have four dogs and eight cats and grow vegetables in soil not tainted by urbanity. And wouldn't it be convenient if I lived close enough to my parents to take advantage of some babysitting every now and then? Because as it stands, I have no one in town that I can leave my baby with and it does get tiring to never have a break. (Alden and I are going on our first post-baby date in a few weeks to celebrate our sixth wedding anniversary, and my parents are flying down for the occasion.)

Then there's the economic factors: our rent here is expensive, but Alden has a great job here that we don't want to leave. There are far fewer job opportunities up there, but we could rent a big house in the wood for what we pay here. And the school problem: Bea would be in a small minority of students at our local school in Hollywood for whom English is a first language. What about if we have more kids? How does that affect the equation?

I don't know if I want to raise Baby Bea as a street smart city girl, a few blocks away from the intersection of Tranny Hooker Boulevard and Crack Rock Ally. Then again, I don't want Bea to be a yokel either. I do know, for sure, that the burbs are off limits. We're either city folk or country folk. There is no middle ground for us.

So what's a family to do?

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