Growing in Place: Chicago
Marriage, Motherhood, and Messy Forgiveness
God, I love Chicago. More now than ever. It is home to my baby girl, dear memories and friends, and it offers a kind of sanctuary I actually look forward to.
I turned 30 in Chicago. I married at 30.
I will never forget my 30th birthday. I had moved from LA to Chicago to be with my then-boyfriend several months earlier. I made friends quickly. I had a full life within months and was getting dressed to celebrate at a trendy downtown Moroccan restaurant when my boyfriend entered the bedroom, got down on one knee, and opened a box with a diamond ring. I was stunned, and not in a good way. Instead of happy tears and rom-com breathless yeses, I was annoyed and shocked. I was not that girl who wanted or needed to get married. My mother had never married. I did not see it as a necessity. I thought of myself as a non-conformist and did not need to follow societal rules, especially ones I did not believe in. I could not hide my dismay and his feelings were hurt. I loved the man and I felt bad but also relieved he had not proposed at the restaurant in front of all my friends. It was a cringeworthy shitshow and I tried to repair the damage, but it was not a quick or easy fix. We had a dinner to attend so off we went in awkward silence.
I loved him dearly. He was my best friend, but I was not sure it was a forever love. We went to therapy and eventually, after three proposals, he convinced me to marry him. I felt like I gave in and gave up. I made him promise we would do marriage our way. Not live by some strange code handed down by millennium, but rather make our own rules as we went. He agreed. Chicago was supposed to last a summer, but he put a ring on it and I did not return to LA, to the apartment I had sublet, to the life I had worked hard to create. Goodbye, Los Angeles. Hello, Chicago and married life.
And what a life. Great food, friends, restaurants, dinner parties. I lived at EastBank Club, a high-end gym with restaurants, multiple pools, and sweeping city views. We enjoyed brunches, lakefront walks, museum dates, and the kind of expendable income that makes ordinary days feel cinematic. We jaunted to St. Martin, Vegas, or NYC on a whim. It was a curated, yet joyful time. It was the height of the Sex and the City craze and while I did not have the wardrobe or love life of Carrie, I shared her passion for words, stories, and martinis. I felt I stopped being honest with myself in Chicago and started drinking to quiet my fears, unsure and afraid I had made a mistake.
Shortly after we married, my husband was transferred to New Jersey, and we moved to NYC. Chicago had been a brief, meaningful, wildly enjoyable chapter.
After Chicago, life moved fast. A move to New York, a daughter, a marriage that unraveled by the time she was seven. Years of co-parenting with distance, both geographical and emotional. During Covid, Gigi was applying to colleges and we were all living in San Francisco. I had not been back to Chicago in nearly two decades.
Until Gigi.
My daughter and I boarded a flight from San Francisco to Chicago to look at colleges. Loyola stood out. Covid, layered with other traumas, had done a number on her. She needed a new beginning. Her father and I, both with deep ties to the city, believed Chicago could offer that. She was not convinced. I was. I wandered the streets with old memories tugging at me, walked past our old condo building, passed familiar restaurants, reconnected with dear friends I hadn’t seen in years. And just like that, Chicago was back in my life, as if no time had gone by. But this time, the city was not letting me pretend. It remembered too much.
Because of my daughter, I returned again and again. For Christmas. For New Year’s. For long weekends. For the fall. For a winter when things spiraled, bad enough that her father flew in from Portugal, and the three of us found ourselves crammed on her couch in her tiny one-bedroom Rogers Park apartment. Her parents, once married, now long-divorced, trying to hold it together, watching TV side by side, laughing at old inside jokes we had not shared in years. Our daughter stared at us like we were not real, like this version of her parents was a hallucination.
This was not the carefree Chicago I knew in my thirties. This one carried a different weight. It had seen more than I care to admit. Hospital stays. Panic. A month of remote work done from a couch I could not leave. And under all that crisis came forgiveness. Slow, jagged, incomplete, forgiveness happened in Chicago.
Forgiving myself. For giving in to a marriage I did not believe in. For not having the courage to say no. For saying yes because everyone else was getting married. For giving up on my LA dreams and writing life, which I eventually reclaimed. I forgave the young woman who needed validation, who traded her instincts for security.
And just as importantly, I found forgiveness for him. For the heartbreak. For the ways we failed each other. And I forgave us for the pain our unraveling caused our daughter.
Chicago was where I finally wrote him a letter. An excruciating one. I told him everything. I forgave him and hoped, silently, that he might forgive me too. He never responded to the letter. But sitting beside him on that couch, our daughter watching us laugh at a dumb movie, it felt like a quiet acknowledgment. A shared truce.
Sex and the City was fun, light, iconic. But this. This season is different. I am not sipping cosmos in high heels. I am grappling with heart-wrenching forgiveness. Of him. Of myself. Of the younger woman who did not know better. Of the mother who sometimes did not do better.
There are things I will never write here, not mine to tell. But the city knows. And so do we.
I did not come to Chicago looking for forgiveness. I came for my daughter. Hoping she might find her way back to herself. Hoping I might too.
Chicago made me sit with what I would rather forget. It held me in moments I would not wish on anyone. It cracked me open. Forced me to feel what I had tried to outrun for years.
Forgiveness is not neat. It is not linear. It loops back, stings sharp, softens again. And still, here I am. This city lets me carry the mess of it all. Lets me stay in the discomfort and the beauty. No neat endings. No clean escapes. In the Chi, where the past always finds you.
Really beautiful. I have this relationship with NYC.