Ko tomar

My daughters came home from gan wearing paper Torah crowns and eating ice cream. We put away the groceries together and milled around in the kitchen.

“On Shavuot night,” A.N. informed me, “The abbas and the boys who are bar mitzvah go shul and learn Torah ALL NIGHT!”

“Just the abbas and the boys?” I asked. Both girls nodded emphatically.

“What about the big girls? And the women who don’t have little kids?”

They thought about it. Y.B. offered, “The imas go to shul to bring cookies for the abbas and the boys.”

Earthly Jerusalem

This morning, I took B.A. to the Old City to visit the Kotel, the Western Wall. Today was Yom Yerushalayim, the day Jerusalem was liberated in 1967 from Jordanian rule and returned to Jewish sovereignty for the first time in 2,000 years.

B.A. will turn three next month. He is not old enough to understand much about the holiday. But his gan was closed for the morning, and he is old enough, finally, to appreciate a long outing with his mother. So we rode the train to city hall and walked, hand in hand, from the train stop to the Old City walls, through the arab shuk, down the stairs to the Kotel plaza.

Before we left, we had a brief argument about whether people may bring large sticks to the holiest site in Judaism. After we reached the plaza and went through security, running my purse and his small knapsack through the x-ray machine, I couldn’t resist pointing out, “Good thing you didn’t bring your stick.”

The secret burn

I didn't see Y.B. burn her finger on the grilled cheese sandwich. I looked up when she began to cry and scream.

“What happened? Did you bite your finger?”

“No.” Sob. “I burned it.”

"On your sandwich?"

"Yes."

I couldn’t believe the cheese inside her sandwich was so hot, but I showed her how to run her hand under the tap, how to get relief from the cool water. She was crying so hard. Inwardly, I rolled my eyes at the dramatic display. Then I let it go. She hurt herself. This is her reaction. Fine.

The awkward immigrant

This morning, I had such a hard time getting the kids out of the house. And when their teacher had finally urged them, sobbing and sniffling, into the classroom and locked the door behind them all, I sat down on a sidewalk bench to rest and prepare for the day.

It was a breezy, overcast morning in the midst of a warm spring. I love a good cloudy sky, so I sat on the bench and reviewed my to-do list. I was getting over a bad cold, and when I sneezed loudly, a traffic cop stopped ticketing a parked car and responded in a comically loud voice, “BLESS YOU.”

Stupid and pointless

“Curse God and die,” says Job’s wife. You said it, woman. Honestly, nihilism is my first response to horrible events, too.

I’ll do it later

On Shabbat afternoon, I was reading a magazine article about preparing for Pesach. I anticipated the month ahead with excitement, all the planning, shopping, cooking, cleaning and learning for the holiday, culminating in the seder night. I actually felt excited as I thought about the cleaning, since it was Shabbat and I couldn’t actually DO any Pesach cleaning.

Like many procrastinators, I am full of optimism about what lies ahead. I imagine some future version of myself zipping around the house, getting ready for Pesach while spring unfolds outside my window. This version of me, by the way, is twenty pounds skinnier, better rested, and has excellent posture.

On telling my preschooler to cover up

This morning, I dropped off three little Queen Esthers at gan. The holiday of Purim falls on Friday in Jerusalem this year, but today was the day the kids wore their costumes to school. Y.B. and A.N. and their friend Y entered their classroom and skipped off into a sea of princess-queens. The little boys were dressed as kings, and also alligators and policeman and all other kinds of disguises expressing a range of pint-size machismo. And my daughters and almost all the other girls were dressed as queens or princesses. There might have been a bride or two.

I thought about this post that I wrote last year about the contrast between pretty-pretty-princess culture and the Jewish concept of a princess. While the American cult of the princess ties her self-worth to her appearance, the Jewish model of female royalty is inner dignity and substance. I hoped that my attempts to reframe princesses in those terms would inoculate them against messages of the broader society. I wondered what would happen when they started preschool.

And here we are.

Our kind of place

Where should we live? The plan was always to move to Israel, and here we are. Faced with the choice of which city to choose as our home, my husband and I decided to make a temporary move to Jerusalem and figure it out from there. We lived here for two years as students and it’s what we knew. And where would we live if we could live anywhere in Jerusalem? Nachlaot, of course.

Actually, I don’t know how Nachlaot came to capture my imagination while we lived in America. When I lived in Jerusalem six years ago, I thought this neighborhood was sort of eye-rollingly crunchy. And hard to navigate with its winding alleyways.

Happy birthday All Victories

Three pleasures of this day:

My daughters patiently explained to me how hide-and-seek is played. The world is created anew each moment.

I wanted to send A.N. to her room to cool down and leave her there. She was whining and ordering everyone around and it was bugging me mightily. I deposited her in her bedroom, and she said, “Ima, stay. I want you to do ‘Shh-mmm-ahhh’ with me.” That’s a breathing exercise that I learned at a workshop with Dahlia Orlev and taught to my kids. And now they use it to calm themselves down. Awesome.

What do you do with your time?

I never know what to say when people ask, “What do you do?”

Sometimes I say that I am a writer. I love writing for this blog, and I occasionally write for pay. But writing is so new to my life and such a side project that it doesn’t feel like an honest or complete answer.

The easy answer is that I stay home with my kids. But I dislike the label stay-at-home mom. My kids spend their morning at preschool, but how is it relevant to my identity that I don’t work while they are out of the house? Every mother is a mother, regardless of what else she does with her life. “Stay-at-home” seems to convey parenting and nothing else. Am I more committed to parenting than a woman who works for a living? More present, more attentive? I hardly think so.