For posterity

I didn't leave the house for three days last week. It started raining on Wednesday, and then Shabbat afternoon found me increasingly irritated with my children. I kept stalking away from the Shabbat table, wineglass in hand, to go hide out in my bedroom with the napping baby. And really, my kids weren't doing much except being 5 and 3. Normal kid stuff.

"I need to get out of the house," I told my husband. I strapped T.S. into her carrier and headed out.

I was so done with my kids. I wouldn't even make eye contact with them as I was getting ready to go out. And at the same time, I was aware that I was being sulky and sullen, and that they were watching me.

Oh no, I thought with dawning dread. I am their mother! I am the mother of four people. This petulant grouch is their mother.

Inner peace at the Ministry of the Interior

Hello! I gave birth to a baby girl three weeks ago. And today, my husband and I took the baby, T.S., to the Ministry of the Interior to register her and make her all official with the government. All three of us needed to be present for this process, so it took some maneuvering to arrange that.

We asked the woman at the information desk how to register a baby born at home (a separate procedure from registering a hospital-born baby). She gave us a numbered ticket, and we went to sit in the vast and crowded waiting hall until our number would be called. We waited and waited and my husband started to get antsy because he needed to go guide a tour group, and there were still many people waiting ahead us.

Then T.S. made a mess of her diaper and two layers of clothing. I left the waiting hall to change her in a less-crowded place. I found a nearly-empty waiting room and got to work changing the baby. The only other person there was a young woman with an infant a bit older than mine. She immediately engaged me in cheerful banter, commenting on everything T.S. and I were doing.

Fumbling along in Hebrew

Something unremarkable and awesome happened today. Arriving early to gather the girls from gymnastics class, I found another mother waiting, and I sat down and chatted with her for twenty minutes or so. That’s not the remarkable part—although I am shy and wary of people I don’t know well. What made it unusual for me was that we conversed in Hebrew. We talked about our kids and their schools, and about how difficult it is for a parent to have enough alone time and still do important things like sleep. I asked her twice to explain words I didn't know. She gently corrected my grammar a couple of times. She didn't once offer to switch to English, although I think she speaks it as well as most Jerusalemites.

This kind of exchange almost never happens to me. I have lived in Israel for two years. I spent ten months in ulpan, studying Hebrew intensively three mornings a week. I finished at the highest level. I can read the newspaper with ease, seek help in a medical crisis from the on-call nurses’ line, understand most of what people say to me. I refuse to speak English with shopkeepers or anyone else I encounter in commercial dealings. But all of the conversations that really matter to me, conversations about ideas and feelings, those are always in English.

Aware

Yesterday, my daughters asked to watch videos of themselves as babies. I’m so grateful to a past version of myself for making these videos; I love watching them as much as the kids do.

In one of the videos, I filmed a long sequence of the girls at play. In the clip, a two-year-old Y.B. stands at her play kitchen “feeding” a doll in a high chair. She works with great solemnity and contemplation, crooning to the babydoll, offering it various treats from an array of pots and pans.

All the while, the onscreen A.N. is a blur of activity. She pushes a chair around the kitchen, crowing. She swings her stuffed lamb in my hanging silverware caddy. She pulls her potty down the stairs and tries to interest Y.B. in “taking a bath” in it.

Watching this video rips me up a bit. These little people are familiar to me: Baby Y.B. with her seriousness and nurturing, Tiny A.N. plotting zaniness. But these two-year-olds are also gone forever—Y.B.’s round, soft cheeks; A.N.’s staggering walk. I will probably never have two-year-old twins again. And these particular girls will definitely never be two again.

On grief

I lost a friend last month. His name was Moshe and he was 38 years old when he died suddenly. I thought of him like a brother.

I hadn’t seen him in a while, and then I ran into him in the shuk a couple of weeks before his death. I had finished my shopping and I lingered for a minute by the displays outside a jewelry shop. He spotted me and came over to say hello. I was happy to see him, happy for the accident of timing that let our paths cross.

Having written

A week ago, I was planning a blog post in my head as I moved through the afternoon routine with the kids. And then I left B.A. alone in the living room with a full pitcher of milk and my laptop.

So thank you to the wonderful L.L. who has loaned me her laptop for a bit. It's a rare friend indeed who will commiserate over a carelessly destroyed computer and then say, "Hey, would you like to borrow mine?"

***

The biggest surprise of my computer-less week was not how slowly Facebook loads on my smartphone. It was how much I ached to write, how much the daily events of my life seemed to be demanding to be typed up and mulled over.

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.”