19720: The Lessons I Learned in The Town Where I Grew Up

I remember the day I left for college very clearly. I left home and never really looked back. I came home 2 summers during college but that was it and then landed a job right after I graduated that took me to another city. Essentially, with the exception of a few summer months I left home at 18 and never went back. If you are wondering what 19720 is it is the zip code for the town of New Castle, Delaware which is the the town where I grew up with a population of about 5,500 people 6 miles south of Wilmington and considered a suburb of Philadelphia. It is the town that shaped who I am today and the town where I lived my first 18 years in a small home with 6 people and one tiny bathroom that always needed repairs with something breaking down or needing to be replaced but it was the place I called home.

[Photo Credit: Wix Stock Photos]

The house I lived in was crowded with about 1600 square feet and some VERY big personalities under one roof. When I was in 6th grade my grandfather came to live with us which was a daily history lesson in finances , the Great Depression he lived through and stories I was mesmerized by of his days growing up in Ohio and Pennsylvania. My town was a mix of working class folks trying to get by and a very historical part that was a mini Williamsburg steeped in revolutionary history on the banks of the Delaware River which of course is where George Washington famously crossed the River that was the start of the Revolutionary War .

I remember going to the library in the historical part of New Castle on a regular basis to do homework because our house was so small there was not a place to find quiet to study but the worlds between that part of the town and the neighborhood I lived in couldn’t have been further apart demographically. ”Old Town” New Castle was a haven for “yuppies” ( an old 80’s term) or Young Urban professionals if you are too young to remember. I loved strolling down the streets or going to Wassams’s 5 and dime for a Rosati’s water ice and walking down to the battery watching boats go by and seeing New Jersey just across the river banks. It was a place I would go to think and dream about what my life would be like when I got out of 19720 and explored the world to see what was beyond the borders. We rarely went on vacations so I had a hunger to see different cities and experience different things. Looking back New Castle was really a tale of two cities.

I haven’t been back much after my parents moved to another town in southern Delaware. However, a few years back I took my kids on a tour of their Mom’s life growing up in Delaware covering New Castle, the first places I worked a job, my high school, the schools I attended as a child, some of my high school hangouts that all brought back great memories that made the three of us feel closer. I felt like they knew me a little better as their mom and I was able to share stories along our 2 day journey around town filling in the blanks from my days in Delaware. At times on that trip down memory lane I would feel a pang of nostalgia but also it brought me back to a time when I was desperate to get away and spread my wings knowing there was more to life than the roads I ran all those years before. It is true of course as Thomas Wolfe says “You can never go home again” because you are different and changed in ways that don’t resemble who you used to be that make it impossible for you to see things in the same way before you left.

I was a different person when I went back seeing things through a new lens and found myself appreciating the familiar places that still existed and the experiences I had dismissed as trivial and boring. Some of those included riding bikes around town, the local pool that we couldn’t afford to belong to but was so grateful for an invite begging my parents year after year to join. I just knew once I left that town my life would work out perfectly with a white picket fence attached to my dream house with a perfect husband and of course a dog with two perfect kids that had no flaws. I imagined they would both be overachievers winning all the awards at school. I would be a stay at home mom sitting on a pedestal being worshipped for the perfect mother I was to my kids. My fantasy is laughable now as life happens and realizing the very unrealistic expectations that I harbored imagining the “greener” grass on the other side of a different zip code that would surely give me a better life.

But the real lessons of my days in 19720 are the ones of a girl from a working class family taught that work ethic was supreme, no sense of entitlement, you must work for anything you want and seeing my mother be dependent on my father for her livlihood motivated me to vow to always be able support myself ( as long as I had good health) to give myself choices and never feel trapped. The thing is my mother never felt trapped but that was how I saw her then. I have come to realize that those were her choices with no regrets. It makes me wonder today how my kids see me with my many flaws and foibles. Are they as secretly unforgiving toward me as I was to her back then for the choices I have made? Probably so with their limited life experiences but I think there is a normal and natural progression of greater understanding of our parents as we age ourselves, experience disappointments and realize our pie in the sky dreams may have partially come true but most were idealistic thoughts of youth steeped more in fantasy than reality.

The house I lived in for 18 years is still there and I always make a point to drive by now when I am in town. Even though I have no idea who lives there now I always remember the conversations, arguments, birthday parties, tears, celebrations, holiday dinners, talks with my grandfather, my neighborhood friends I grew up with, the next neighborhood over I had always longed to live in and the surprising sadness I felt when my parents sold it. There was the realization I would never be able to go back and touch the walls or climb the steps or look out the window in the kitchen and see my neighbors laundry hanging to dry on the clothes line or the memories of becoming an 18 year old adult including all the awkward stages leading to that point.

The house I so desperately wanted to escape from is now a shrine in my mind to a place I learned so much, had the privilege of two parents that stayed married in good times and bad and the home I brought my children to when they were first born to have them feel a piece of me even if they didn’t know what that meant yet. It was the house that built me that includes all the good and the bad that happened there reminding me of that same very familiar line in the country music hit by Miranda Lambert.

XO & #StayCurious