Living Lessons Contributor Tina Traster has published a humor collection of essays based on her eponymous New York Post column.

Is it me or is the word suburbia loaded?

Like 'stay-at-home mom' or 'Britney Spears', suburbia has its fans, satirists, detractors. Until 2005, I was smugly ensconced in the third category, a self-styled city slicker who wore black garb, told cabbies the best route to get across town, exchanged intimacies with people riding elevators. Typical New Yorker. Suburbia to me -- a psychologically-scarred Brooklyn-born kid whose family never 'made it' to Long Island -- was an aseptic construct where women over 40 lost their edge and their calf muscles because they spent their days driving to the strip mall and schlepping kids to soccer practice.

"That will never be me," I'd swear to my husband driving over the George Washington Bridge after visiting friends who lived in cavernous colonials with marbled foyers and Labrador retrievers. “Never!”

My lifelong scorn for suburbia enabled me to put up with every city-related inconvenience or absurdity. Circling like a hungry buzzard for a parking spot or keeping windows shut on hot summer nights to drown out whining sirens or the occasional gunshot. Even when I was tripping over my toddler's loot, I believed IKEA was the solution to our ever-shrinking 700-square-foot apartment.

We could not afford a bigger apartment in a steroidal real estate market but I would not contemplate suburbia.

I was mentally and physically asphyxiated by my long-held beliefs that the sticks were filled with people who stopped going to independent films and who ate dinner before 7. Sure I was yearning for room and trees and a driveway but my childhood demons were ninjas. It all started the day my family piled into the yellow Cadillac to see the white house for sale in Long Island. At ten, this was the most glamorous house I'd ever stepped inside of - it was nothing like the cramped ones in Brooklyn. My mother wanted this house and this life more than anything in the world. My father didn't. He thought a Cadillac in his driveway and a detached house in Canarsie was good enough. My mother's brooding and envy for greener pastures turned into scorn for all-things-suburban. An emotionally resourceful woman, she came up with plan B: raise her daughters to worship Manhattan.

To learn more about her book, read reviews and order, please go to: http://www.amazon.com/Burb-Appeal-Collection-Humorous-ebook/dp/B0042G0SZA

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