The Lazy Desi’s 25-year archive of chaos, dreams, kids, ADHD, gaming, and everything life swallowed too early.
They saw the young mom with the baby on her hip.
They did not see the silent equations running in the background,
the strategic overhaul I was architecting in real time,
the future I was coding with instinct rather than algorithms.
Genius doesn’t always look like a lab coat.
Sometimes it looks like a 20-year-old buying a house in a collapsed market while packing a stroller into an SUV.
I was absurdly young.
I was catastrophically tired.
I was hilariously overqualified for motherhood and simultaneously winging every part of it.
But my son turned one surrounded by family who adored him,
in a town that felt breathable,
in a house that felt like a mathematical pivot —
a calculated leap that only a certain type of mind can pull off at 20.
When we arrived, when he saw the house, when he saw the price, when he saw the opportunity —
he looked at me the way people look at Nobel winners on stage.
“You always know,” he said.
“You always see ahead.”
And for the first time, postpartum, exhausted, still half traumatized by early pregnancy and early motherhood —
I felt that truth settle in me like a long-overdue recognition.
I originally returned to NYC for a one-week visit after the purchase.
A normal person would have said, “Let’s plan the move.”
I am not a normal person. (We KNOW this by now)
I said,
“We’re leaving.
Now.”
I packed our massive SUV with every atom in that little Brighton Beach studio — clothes, textbooks, game consoles, the baby’s jumper, half of Bed Bath & Beyond — and we drove out of New York like fugitives from mediocrity.
I didn’t even look back at the skyline.
It felt like closing a book I had outgrown.
There is a moment when you physically feel the chapter turning —
as if the atmosphere around you rearranges its molecules in real time.
Driving away from New York with my baby asleep in the backseat, I felt my entire nervous system unclench.
I had no idea what the next ten years would look like,
but I knew I’d orchestrated the one thing every burnt-out genius craves:
my own environment.
Call it quaint, call it modest, call it whatever —
but that house radiated possibility the way newborns radiate potential.
I remember standing in the living room with my baby on my hip thinking:
This is the pivot point.
This is where the story changes direction.
The walls weren’t fancy but they felt alive.
Like they had been waiting for a family with a strange destiny.
…and an even stranger CFO (Chief Female Operator)
Granted, this was the fifteenth house I’d seen this week. But, this is the one!
The house was $16,000.
Sixteen.
Thousand.
Dollars.
Closing costs included.
Comes with a Hot Tub.
My Uncle gave his thumbs up.
SOLD!
The entire real estate market was basically offering a clearance sale to anyone bold or unhinged enough to take advantage.
Naturally, that was me.
I walked in.
Saw the bones.
Saw the future.
Saw the numbers.
Signed.
Done.
My husband blinked once, nodded, and said, “If you chose it, it’s the right one.”
However, why do I feel like I could have bought a cardboard box and he would’ve still said “brilliant.” Spoiled rotten is where it’s at!
He didn’t ask a single question.
Not one.
Just logged in, transferred everything, and handed me the phone like it was a sacred offering.
This is why I married him:
not just because he caters to my weirdness,
but because he trusts my intellect like it’s a natural force —
a weather pattern you don’t argue with.
There are birthdays where nothing happens.
And then there are birthdays where the tectonic plates shift.
Turning 20 felt like someone plugged my brain into a generator.
Suddenly, I could see the future architecture of my life in crisp resolution — and New York was not in it.
Security was.
Autonomy was.
A home was.
The desire was so surgically precise it bordered on prophetic.
Look — NYC is a masterpiece… for other people.
For me, it was an overcaffeinated mausoleum pretending to be a city.
I could never shake the sense that everyone was sprinting nowhere in particular.
Every time I returned from my hometown with the baby, the city felt even more sterile, more hollow, more like a diorama of ambition with no soul.
It was not going to raise my child.
Not if I wanted him alive, sane, or familiar with sunlight.
UnderTheRock Diaries 