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.

I might be mellowing

We left the house with Dov folded inside my son’s coat pocket. Just in case we decided to stay late at the kiddush and wanted B.A. to take a nap in his stroller. He won’t fall asleep without that bear.

After the kiddush, we decided to take the kids to the park. “Do we have the notorious D-O-V?” I murmured to my husband. I didn’t want to mention his name in case B.A. started asking for him. My husband confirmed that Dov was still on board.

Where's my medal?

Nobody’s handed me a parenting medal in a long time.

Actually, no one has ever handed me a parenting medal at all. But back in the days when I used to traipse about with baby twins in tow, I got a lot of nice feedback.

The girls slept and nursed on a two-hour cycle for at least the first six months of their life. We had relocated to the suburbs from Manhattan, and I was stir-crazy. So, while they napped in their car seats, I would pack up all our stuff and get ready to GO—running errands, visiting friends, anywhere.

Sometimes our adventures were ill-conceived. One of my readers will probably remember a spontaneous trip to a Chinese restaurant that went south when we couldn’t get the hang of breastfeeding our infants in public, and discovered that we hadn’t brought any bottles or pacifiers. In retrospect, what’s the big deal about three crying babies? At the time, OH MY SWEET GRIEF.

Playing favorites

I love the morning, but only if I can spend the first hour of it all alone in total silence with a cup of coffee. My children get up an hour after I do. If they happen to wake up earlier, they know the rule: “We don’t talk to Ima until she’s finished her coffee.”

But on this particular morning, A.N. had woken up before her siblings, dressed herself and was now padding around the apartment, thinking aloud.

“Some people just keep being outside and they don't go home,” she observed.

I was interested. “Where do they go?” I asked.

Screen time

B.A. was not pleased. The girls were off to gan and I was davening. Usually, he plays by himself quietly or eats breakfast while I pray, but today he wanted my attention. He planted himself between me and the meditational print that I use to focus my intention in prayer. He turned his anguished face up to me and howled, “Ima nooooooo, stop daveniiiiiiiiing!.”

At least he’s honest about his motives.

He grabbed my skirt in fistfuls and tugged until he heard threads rip. He stomped around the apartment, raging and sobbing. This is a common scene in our house. B.A. and A.N. have, let’s say, heightened emotional responses. And Y.B. is an epic sulker. I’ve got a high threshold for pint-sized drama.

But it was difficult for me to concentrate. I thought, “Maybe I should start letting this kid watch videos.”