11 months in, as a stay at home mom

I feel a bit like I have been hiding out for the last year, reluctant to tell people I don't work anymore. Or admit to the possibility that this has moved beyond a temporary status. I left my job of 15 years last October. Yes, I left voluntarily but it was with strongly mixed feelings that I had trouble concealing as I departed, perhaps because I felt so strongly that I had failed in the end. What had I failed at? I'm not entirely sure, perhaps just not leaving earlier.

Leaving was traumatic in its own way, but necessary. I had grand plans of taking a couple months off, dipping into a bit of savings to regroup and see what I wanted to do next.

At the time, it was not financially viable for me not to work, and this weighed heavily. Nonetheless, I took a pottery class, fell in love, and began researching professional potting careers, until I learned that most pros max out at about $7/hour and need to either be independently wealthy or teach. Scratch that.

I spent hours reading job postings, hating the ones that sounded like they might hire me and pay well, and having no idea where to start on the others.

Next came winter. And it was a particularly painful winter, to say the least. Back-to-back blizzards, many of which I spent home alone with the kids. I had to learn to use the snowblower and I spent too much time at Target, with lame-ass excuses that mostly boiled down to needing to leave the house. Snow days and sickness, however, no longer caused the sort of spousal fights where one of us would threaten divorce after the contest of whose meetings were more important (I always lost). But nonetheless, gradually, as I started dropping my safety net of childcare services, and launching myself into longer-term SAHM-life, I found myself wrestling with a strange combination of happy satisfaction and a weighty sense of continued personal failure.

And yet, I also found myself missing almost nothing about my old job. Well, except the paycheck and sense of independence it provided. Arguably, I am now investing heavily in my husband's success, by allowing him to leave early, work late if needed, and be free of the unpredictable tethers of alternating sick children, at the likely cost of my professional future, or so I can almost hear Sheryl Sandberg whispering over my shoulder.

It's uncomfortable to discuss, but at this point we no longer need my paycheck, which has removed the pressure to make a decision based on finances. For this I am fortunate. Yet this doesn't remove the sense of failure that continues to haunt me as I continue not working. If refocus thoughts on my future deathbed regrets, and resist the judgement I assume is contained by past colleagues who are still pursuing professional growth...I am happy. Heck, when I think back to facing 4 loads of unfolded laundry, every Sunday night before starting my work week... I am happy.

The kids have been able to slow down. I give them both the gift of quiet hours each day when they don't have to wear shoes and can lie on the couch if they so choose. These are options they did not have at full-time pre-school and after-school care.

It can be challenging to find purpose when so much of the day involves coaxing a 3-year-old in and out of the car, away from traffic, away from puddles...then afternoons driving around to my 7-year-old to karate and lacing his ice skates. It mostly gets better though. Finding other at-home parents as well as a reasonable routine for everyone involved helps a lot. Being committed and staying away from job postings for jobs I don't actually want also helps. There are no sure answers and, no, I have no long-term plan. But I do know this: I'll only be 40 once. And this is working, for now.

you realize your people tried to kill us, right?

My mother's family is Jewish. Eastern European origins, settled into the greater homeland area of metropolitan New York City, and so I am also Jewish.

My father's family is German. Not Nazis per se, just regular citizens who were technically on the wrong side of history during the international crisis that took place during the 1940s. My father was born in 1935 so was around for the whole affair. His father was drafted to Hitler's army corps of engineers. My father says he was mostly involved in blowing up bridges and stuff but that's as much as I really know. Dad describes his mother as "patriotic" to the point that she was happy to receive the Mutterkreutz after achieving her 6th proper German child. This is a fact I probably would not have known if she hadn't presented it as a gift to my sister towards the end of her life. Why she didn't have the thing smelted down I really can't say, so we write it off to elderly crazies and move on. I can't find it in me to hate my grandmother simply for holding onto this bizarre relic, as she is my past, and otherwise a sane and spirited woman. She is also my present: when I find myself filling my garden with blackberries and grapes instead of just the normal suburban stock of flowers and ornamental grasses, I know this is her genetic imprint bearing itself here and now.

Dad in front of his childhood home, with my son, Zach

Apparently, the war was a pretty big deal for anyone who lived through it. For folks who had their entire genetic future removed from the chain of future evolution by German mechanized murders, there is just no way to get one's brain around this such that it makes sense. And for a 10-year-old boy forced to flee his idyllic home near the beach due to punitive Russian occupation -- witnessing the nearby city of Stralsund burning to the ground on his way out, and then being deprived of the option to go back and visit freely for the next 45 years, skipping years of school and being moved to the rubble of a new city, in a country where the average adult was so demoralized by the terrible decisions they had either participated in or had not been able to stall, with national pride instantly turned into embarrassment and humiliation -- it was a big deal, too. And even for Germans today, children who have yet to be born, the scars of the past remain so very present and unshakable, even if they are not often discussed. 

For some Jews in America, the Germans were and thus shall always be our enemies. They won't travel to Germany and most certainly wouldn't purchase a Volkswagen. But for me, it would be impossible to avoid myself. So, like all other Germans of my own and future generations, I must also take responsibility for Hitler's Germany as part of my own personal past. Definitely not a source of pride or acceptance, but one for which I am forced to mentally post-mortem. What would I have done? (I would probably have been killed, but that's not the point of this exercise.) Would I have been susceptible to the propaganda? The skewed and dehumanizing logic? I certainly hope not. I can't write off an entire generation of a country's population without dissecting the complexity in this worst-case illustration of the negative power we humans collectively possess.

I sometimes wonder what in my current life falls into the category of blissful but not benign ignorance. And if any human out there really has a clean bill of genealogical past. Probably not. Thus I look forward, and try not to judge people for histories they can not control or change, unless they carry them into the present.   

Solstice Tree

When Zach was 4 we got our first Christmas tree as a family. Is it a Christmas tree? I don't know. And after 2 years of telling him, no, we don't get a tree because we celebrate Chanukah -- one of which involved a riciulous display of blue and white string lights and a light-up menorah to appease his sadness, the thing that put me over the edge in needing one was my mother's death. Ironic I suppose, since she's the source of my Judaism. But I found myself shopping at the Wagon Wheel -- a small farm stand near home -- in a row of freshly cut trees. The scent grabbed me by the hand and brought me back to hazy happy years of my split-personality childhood, when my parents both lived under one roof and my Jewish mother embraced my father's German tradition of the holiday tree - oh, and the holiday baked goods.

As little kids, Santa came, there were spritz cookies and medieval holiday chants on the record player.  I have not figured out how this all came together with my mother other than as an act of rebellion, as she would not even come close to discussing her consumption of shellfish with her own parents.

My father moved out the summer after kindergarten to a house in the middle of the woods, where he would take us out to find a wispy white pine thinning which would be propped up and hung with orgami birds and sometimes gingerbread men, baked by his new Jewish wife. He loved Christmas music (classical only), and each year would go on about the tree being a pagan symbol for winter solstice. He loved -- and still loves -- all metaphoric religious ritual.

My mother tried to keep the tree thing going with my sister and me, but as we got older the tree got wimpier and eventually fizzled out. In fact, one year when I was in middle school I'm pretty sure she made a tree-like prop out of an old wrapping paper roll and several pine branches poked in alternating lateral rows. After that they stopped appearing altogether. We lit Chanukah candles, sure, too -- usually accompanied by my tired, stressed mother pulling something out of a TJmaxx bag for my sister and me. She occasionally would make latkes, which was an ordeal,  but that was about it. Christmas day, however, we would sit around in our pjs all morning eating candied nuts and opening small gifts and would often end up celebrating Thanksgiving with whichever parent had missed the holiday in November.

I spent time in college attempting to cultivate a more Jewish identity. I attended Friday night and Passover dinners with the campus Hillel, and dated 2 Jewish men. The first one actually kept kosher -- something I had, to date, only experienced with my grandparents and their siblings. The second one only celebrated the major Jewish holidays, and I eventually married him.

At first I was surprised to learn that Josh's mother sent him Easter care packages filled with items very similar to his Halloween care package -- candy, little themed toys, pez dispensers. But I got used to it. I too had Easter baskets as a child. So, we too made chocolate bunnies magically appear on Easter morning for our toddler son. It wasn't until Zach started asking about a Christmas tree, which Josh flatly opposed, that I became struck by the irony. I'm not a religious scholar, but on liturgy alone, Easter seems the most Christ-focused of all Christian holidays, tied together with what I can only assume are Passover plus Pagan egg and bunny leftovers.

As I became an adult, my mother stopped putting up trees but she did continue putting the Messiah on repeat every December and would occasionally still make spritz cookies. We continued celebrating belated Thanksgiving and gathering as a family on the 25th since that was one of the few times my sister and I both could take off and travel to mom's new home in Virginia.

So here I am, now back in the present, standing in the row of trees at the Wagon Wheel farm stand, completely overtaken by the smell of pine, the smell of my pre-angst toddler winters. My mother had died 6 months previously and the past felt like it collapsed on top of me in a heap of unattainable happiness. Even though this was the same year in which I enrolled Zach in Hebrew school, despite earlier ambivalence, I needed a winter fir tree in my house.

In the end we decided to surprise Zach by tree-shopping without him several days before December 25. The farm stand was of course empty, it being so late in the season, but glad to get rid of one more tree. Of course we also needed to buy a stand, a skirt, lights...  I felt a strange mixture of guilt, pleasure, and fear of judgement from friends, watching the trunk through the sunroof on the ride home.

We didn't bother buying decorations so I covered it in old wrapping bows and we all found ourselves just sitting, staring the thing down, mesmerized, taking in the pine smell and all those tiny points of light. Four-year-old Zach would repeat every few days how much he loved to look at it.

We didn't celebrate Christmas differently than we would have in the past as a result. We still sat around in our pjs all morning -- no reason to get dressed when the rest of the world more or less shuts down -- then went to our Hindu/non-practicing Christian friends' for Christmas Dinner to eat ham and indulge in other fun timely rituals such as that Pandora mix based on Bing Crosby's Silver Bells, and reindeer-shaped sugar cookies painted in red and green icing.

And we still celebrated Chanukah, exactly as we had in the past.

We have since learned a few practical bits about dealing with drying pine needles and when the thing has to be on the curb if you want it picked up before March. I still fear judgement from my friends, but try to remind myself that I have consciously chosen this defiant act of inclusion over exclusion, taking cue from my father and embracing it all when it comes to ritual.

Jolly Euro-pagan Solstice, Happy Chanukah, and yes, Merry Christmas too.

For mom's unveiling

It hasn't quite been a year since my mother left us. As much as I miss her and found it jarring not to have her a phone call away anymore, I have realized just how much of her I carry around with me each day. Of course there are the physical artifacts: lush green pottery coffee cups, a painted wooden chicken that greets me when I walk into my house, the gold-framed mirror that hangs opposite my bed, a handful of necklaces, earrings, and socks with tiger stripes and ladybugs... things I didn't need but remind me each day of her passionate aesthetic sense, one that combined humor with Victorian flare, and usually on a thrift store budget.

I'm also beginning to recognize her various lessons and inclinations I hadn't till recently realized that I carry: A hatred for waste - I can almost hear her voice behind me when I cut the moldy edges off a block of cheese that's otherwise still fine... flare for the unexpected and quirky, when I bake blueberry muffins in 3-D dinosaur shapes (a tin she had gotten for me, of course). An inability to sit still and just...relax...when there are things to be seen -- parades, sheep shearing festivals, the ocean... Unabashed, nagging awe for small objects or details that have in some way achieved perfection: white daylilies in the height of bloom -- or a fresh boiled lobster (and when I say nagging, I mean that she would nag me, literally, to acknowledge agreement of the superlative).

Obscure memories of the time we shared have begun unfurling, as her life is now spread behind us as a complete tapestry. The years when she raised me seem just as far away as the later ones. These memories come and they go, often at unexpected moments:

Eating chocolate twizzlers on the Staten Island Ferry... inspecting all the potted plants (yes, all of them) and fresh-picked peas at Paisley's farm stand....The rose-colored, pleated, corduroy sailor dress she sewed for me before the start of 6th grade (it was amazing, at least by the standards of 1986 fashion)... The lights in our eyes in a community chorus concert at a local Elks lodge -- at the time she was in her 40s, I was about 12... Pepperidge Farm cookies in her office at school between classes...Stopping to read the plaque on Every. Single. exhibit at the Pompideau art museum in Paris, then cream puffs at the fountain outside...

Good memories. She did not waste her time here. I will try to share her lessons with my children. I wish of course that she were still here to share them herself, but I know she's never going to be all that far off, as long as I can keep these memories close at hand.

Miss you. 

My Outsourced Seder

Walking through the parking lot at 5:10 on the evening of the start of Passover with no plan for the night. But I was concerned about providing continuity for my children. Wanting for them to taste matzoh with horseradish and be taken back to those elusive moments in their childhood when time stood still. It's not about G-d, though. I'm a proud but aetheist Jew. Contradiction? Officially, I suppose.

So what to do? I'm ashamed to admit, but I appeared at the prepared foods counter at Whole Foods in Natick and exhaled with wide eyes upon finding pre-made (vegan) matzoh balls, chopped liver, lamb roast slices, brisket, gefilte fish... potato pancakes in 3 varieties, and, yes, matzoh kugel muffins. I could do this. One quick run over to produce for some bitter herbs (celery), a pit stop for cream cheese and whitefish for the weekend, and I was off, back home where Josh had the kids and was boiling eggs.

Our seder lacked the decorum of those held at my grandparents' house. The hagaddah was an illustrated kids' book. Alisha gnawed on matzoh and threw Whole Food's cashew apricot charoset on the floor. And Zach used the gnarly beet representing a lamb shank bone that I'd placed on my grandparents' turquoise and gold seder plate as a hammer at intervals, before being allowed to start the meal with those matzoh balls which were reheating in organic boxed broth on the stove. We finished with a well-intentioned but ill-conceived chocolate chip bundt cake from Grandma Estee, a brief history lesson about slavery, and of course the delicious afikomen, purchased from Zachary for the low price of $2.

We pulled it together, but next year, I'm hoping to gather a larger table of friends. Not to mention a home-made apple-matzoh kugel.

Chocolate prune cake

Alisha's turning 1 on Sunday. I had it in my mind that I would summon the presence of my mother by baking a chocolate prune cake. It's the one recipe I have in my possession that is written in her handwriting probably from when I was not much older than 1, and probably not tasted since I was in my single digits. It was a perplexing cake - rich, moist, chocolatey, yet also high in fiber.

However, my oven is broken. So I'll probably end up at Whole Foods picking out an expensive pre-made cake, with no dried plums, no trip back in time to 1979 when my mother was roughly my age.

When someone is clearly dying - their body visibly declining in a more or less natural manner after a life of children, grandchildren and years battling a deadly disease - you begin to want to know how the process ends. No, of course I don't mean want them to be gone, but the person they've become bears so little resemblance to the one you remember that you have to remind yourself of the person they used to be. Where the process of watching them die becomes stressful and the anticipation of the final event eats at you, wondering what you'll be able to say or do to comfort them, what questions you need to ask while they can still answer them. What will it feel like when they're gone for real?

And then it happens. Followed by awkward emptiness. Where's the person who used to nag me because I never called? Where are the magazine clippings that used to arrive in the mail that I often forgot to read?

Was the last conversation I had with her really one in which I started complaining about Josh's garage project because I had run out of other things to say? And did I really go to Storyland the last afternoon she was alive? How is this possible?

My stepfather, Terry, called me, I'm not sure when, but shared that he thought she was slipping away. I asked if I should head down there. I had always hoped I could be there with her in the end, to help her pass in peace, I guess. Then Terry said she went to the cafeteria for lunch. This confused me. A woman on her deathbed doesn't go to the cafeteria for lunch. Right? Nonetheless I didn't want to take chances - I needed at least to speak to her.

She didn't have the energy to talk and the cell phone connection sucked. I was in North Conway, NH. Terry's phone didn't work so well either and the regular phone in her room didn't have a speaker option. But when he called, I walked outside the Muddy Moose restaurant to try and say something nice. I suspected this might be the last time I talked to her. I think I told her we were in North Conway, hoping it would trigger happy memories of trips we took together - this was my favorite place on earth when I was 7, after all - and that I loved her. I have no idea if she heard me.

Then I went inside, finished my crappy taco salad, collected my children and spent the afternoon standing in lines at Storyland. Fucking Storyland. My sister, Sarah, and her family, however, were at that moment on their way to see her, which eased my mind slightly.

Looking back I have trouble connecting these dots on my personal timeline with that call, and the one I got at 9 am the following morning after a hotel breakfast. I was on my way back to the room for diapers and felt instantly trapped by the ridiculous decision to head north for this weekend. It was the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend. Zach was expecting to spend the day back and Storyland, not driving for 15 hours south.

After my last visit with her, just 2 weeks earlier, I came home perplexed. I had to dig out old albums to remind myself what she used to look like. She had changed so much physically in her last months that she was hard to recognize.

That was the process. I know now how it ends. Going back for a re-do is not an option, though of course there are things I wish I had done differently. Of course I carry her with me. Among other things, I carry the 38-year-old woman who baked chocolate prune cake, though I'm sure folks thought it was weird - even in the 70s. And of course, I miss being nagged for not calling.

And yes, we'll make that cake one of these days, even if the oven is broken this weekend.

The last normal weekend (7/4/11)

I happened on these photos the other day when looking for...something. I was shocked and confused as to how this could be in the same July where so so many lives changed. This was the 4th. Canoeing with the friends we've adopted as our local family, with our kids. Zach was crying because the plastic cup he'd been playing with had dropped into the water. These were the things we got upset about.

 I had to do a bit of math to figure out that this was just a few days before Jenn went into the hospital that same July.

Everything seems to be measured relative to this.