and yadda yadda, an aliyah blog
by Jen Maidenberg
I so enjoyed Little Labors, the latest book out from award-winning novelist Rivka Galchen. A stunning, intimate, but thoughtful hybrid work, Little Labors is definitely a recommended read for this summer.
Check out my review and interview with Galchen, up on The Times of Israel today.
At Jennifer’s First Birthday, 1975
In this big picture, find the locket, the John Lennon spectacles, blue eyeshadow, bangs trimmed straight, August, yellow #5, a red balloon (not to be confused with The Red Balloon), a tray wiped clean, a downward glance, an elephant, love, another elephant, motherhood, hints of a Bubbi in a baby’s breath, a candle blown, “she looks like you Mom,” uncertainty, a glassy iris, love, the end of an exhale, one year, 26, 11 in between days, a hidden picture, gingham.
In this big picture, find
* * * * **
Happy birthday, Mom.
Hidden Pictures is a trademark of Highlights Kids magazine.
Honesty bursts forth from me in fits, in starts.
This is 40.
This may not be 40 for you.
I realize, for you, this may be 43. Or 38. or 67.
I don’t know if it’s temporal, situational, or hormonal, this shift.
It certainly resembles the week leading up to my period with its moodiness, its gentle swaying between certainty and confusion.
There are moments, for instance, when I can’t speak anything but the absolute truth; even when I know it will hurt, even if I know I will pay.
There are moments, too, when I slip into a dark tunnel, the Hadron collider of womanhood: understanding that I can’t have both what I want and what I imagined I wanted years ago. They can’t live together in my world of almost 40. They will combust there together and set me on fire.
The kind of fire that burns people.
I can’t stretch my arm far enough down to reach the me who slipped behind the back of the sofa. She’s choking on dust bunnies down there, but I can’t reach her.
I almost don’t even want to.
“Sorry!” I yell to her; the one who dreamed of lots of babies. I leave her with the dust bunnies, and run off instead to play Hickory Dickory Dock.
“40 is the new 30,” said a friend of mine the other day.
That would totally and completely suck, I just realized.
Yes, my hair was blonder.
Yes, my breasts were firmer.
Yes, I had ten years ahead of me still ‘ til 40.
But …
wow. 30. 2004. Mom of one very restless baby. Up to my eyeballs in change … not bad change but the kind that causes upheaval that equals frequent upset. Orange vomit on my shoulder a lot. Not a lot of friends nearby. Unrealistic expectations of marriage, parenthood, community, work, friendship, life.
It’s not that I’m BRILLIANT now.
But I am now aware enough to know how dumb I am. And how age brings a wisdom born of experience that in some ways is better than firm breasts.
The more I speak about and write about 40, the more people (read “women”) say to me:
I loved my 40s
The 40s have been the best years of my life
I really found myself in my 40s
These kind of comments, from real people, are uplifting and have actually started to ignite in me a desired anticipation — the kind I remember feeling in the months leading up to 13. When was the last time we were truly excited for a birthday … not because we had a crazy evening planned or a vacation, but because it was appropriate to celebrate our advance? What happens to our birthday joy as we age?
I have a summer birthday and so I used to be very familiar with anticipation in advance of birthdays. My friends often reached milestones ahead of me : 13, 17 (driving age in NJ), 18, 21, etc. Those last few months before it was my turn were always killer. The summer I was 12, waiting for 13, I remember telling boys when they asked at the camp social, “how old are you?” that I was 13. That my birthday had been in April. For some reason, that mattered then. As if they wouldn’t ask me to dance unless I was old enough to have boobs. (The boobs wouldn’t come for 4 more summers.)
Last summer, when I turned 39, I remember feeling a sense of dread. It didn’t help that last summer I also suffered from a bunch of moderate health issues, serious enough to impact my daily life . (It’s likely that at least half of them were stress-related, and maybe 1/4 “pre-40” related.)
My 39th birthday, spent with family by the Jersey shore was lovely, but undercut by a constant heartburn. The antacids didn’t help. The gluten-free diet didn’t help. The technology detox didn’t help. I understand now it’s because the heartburn was only partly physical. Much of it was existential. Prilosec can’t help with that. Not even the Wild Berry flavor.
This summer, I am determined to drop the burn. Be all heart. Feel 12 again. I am determined to want 40. So badly that I pretend like I already am.
Boobs, or not.
As the two-minute siren commemorating Yom HaZikaron (Israel’s Memorial Day for the fallen) began its descent, a poem began to rise.
Please take a few minutes to travel over to the Times of Israel, where it’s posted.
I was one of those kids who was afraid of the dark.
Now, when I say “one of those kids” I do pause for a moment and wonder what kid isn’t afraid of the dark.
What adult isn’t still?
I think most of us are afraid of the dark. Even grownups. We just pretend we’re not or drug ourselves or sex ourselves up to believe otherwise. We do something to smother the very innate fear we have of unknown monsters creeping like fog through the slats of our windows or more corporeal, through a locked door with the help of a plastic credit card.
There’s a reason why dark thoughts float to the surface of our mind at night.
I am still afraid of the dark. My bedtime routine? I read a book in bed with the light on until my eyes are practically closed and then I reach for the light and quickly fall to sleep. On the nights when I can’t fall asleep quickly, I’m troubled.
The dark is simply not a place I enjoy being.
It’s possible that not everyone is afraid of the dark.
If you’re one of these people, I’d be curious to hear from you. I wonder if it’s just us: Those of us with overactive imaginations; those of us with stress-related ulcers or migraines; those of us who jump at the sound of a ceramic plate falling to the ground; those of us who are afraid of the shadow we see at the corner of our eye when we’re drying our hair in the mirror. Is there a human being who welcomes the dark? Are you one?
My discomfort with the dark presents a quandary for me at bedtime with my kids. They all want me — still — to lie with them til they fall asleep. If they had their druthers, they’d sleep up against me all night long like spoons. One against the other in a row like a cartoon Tom & Jerry sandwich.
I can’t really blame them for that.
As much as I need space from them, space from people, space to be alone, I hardly ever want it at my own bedtime. This is not to say I enjoy tiny feet in my face at 3 am, but this is to say that I might, in some alternate Blade Runner reality, pay for someone to tickle my back and comb their fingers through my hair til I fell asleep. I might like that. It might be something I’d consider voting for in an election.
I want to know someone is near in the dark. But more important, I want to know someone is there to protect me.
I just want to know I am safe. Even if it’s a false knowing. Because, come on, do our kids really believe deep down we could protect them from ghouls, intruders, burglars?
No. I don’t think so.
They just want someone to whisper softly in their ears as they drift down into a subconscious that will take over for a time. They want the whispers to be true enough:
“You are safe. The world is safe. You are free to drift away. You are safe.”
I’ve been whispering these words to my middle son these past few nights. He had been having trouble sleeping the few nights before and our bedtime routine had become quite anguished, for both him and me. I could continue to fight him; try for the 50th time to “sleep train” him successfully; or I could just acknowledge that my son is like me, afraid of the dark, not just the absence of light in his room but of the dark thoughts I know bubble up for him, too, at bedtime. Thoughts about people he loves. Thoughts about the fragility of life.
Who should have to be alone with such thoughts?
So at the end of an evening meditation I take him through, I speak the words I wish someone would speak to me as dreams carry me away.
“You are safe. The world is safe.”
Perhaps the more I speak them, the more the words will be true.
The less the dark will overpower me…and him…and you.
Don’t believe a word of it.
Not a letter.
Not even a space or a hard return.
None of it is to be trusted nor considered true.
At best, one or two or ten of my words will last longer than the quart of 1% cow’s milk shoved into a crusty corner of my ornery fridge.
I repeat; my song is sung in tune for the length of a long exhale.
After that, it’s expired.
I am hungry and so I hate food.
I am full and so the peach tree growing in my front yard is a gift.
I am tired and so I wish my children away from me.
I am rested and so my children are the suns and moons and stars and fairy dust of my existence.
I am needy and so my husband is my rock.
I am complete and so I want to run away.
I am pretty and so I strut the city streets.
I am old and so I hide in a darkened room behind the pages of a paperback.
I am smart and so I shout all my wisdom and thrust forward my chest.
I am a fool and so I cry the tears of someone who wasted her life away.
I am loved and so I write a poem.
I am lost and so I write a poem.
I hardly blog about parenting anymore.
It’s not because I don’t have opinions to share or thoughts to express. It’s that I finally arrived at a place where I understand that most of what I say or think about parenting is either obvious or worthless.
Obvious to the older or more veteran demographic who, at best, might compassionately respond to what I write with a nod, “Oh yes, I remember that time of life.”
Worthless to the younger or less experienced demographic who, at best, can’t possibly imagine ever being in my situation, so focused they are on the stage of life, couplehood or parenting they are in right now.
I suppose, too, when it comes to parenting, I find my voice so boring I can’t even stand to read what I write.
This is when you should stop writing about a topic.
At least, this is when I should.
So I did. For a while.
Instead, I expressed my Parent Self through photographs and filters; as I tried to filter through what it meant that I no longer wanted to express myself as a parent.
I think I figured it out.
I stopped caring so much.
Which is unimaginable to me considering how much I used to
CARE.
How all-consumed I was as a mother.
How all-consuming my children were.
(“Yes, you were,” say my Greek chorus of family and friends in unison from the shadows of my not-so-distant past.)
But I got tired of caring.
Literally. Physically.
Tired.
Wiped out. Sucked dry. Milk gone.
From my breasts. From my galaxy.
There I was (there I am)
a heap of flesh, in desperate need of my own nourishment.
In need of someone like me to care so much about my needs, my safety, my future.
To hang my art on the refrigerator door.
To give me a Time Out.
To tie my hair back in a long, silky ribbon
and kiss me softly, with no expectations, in that region of my neck below the ear.
* * *
I just finished reading Sisterland by Curtis Sittenfeld, an author whose work I always love, always connect to. In the book, the main character is a mother of two very young children. She, like I was when my kids were infants and toddlers, is all-consumed by her role as mother. She wants to be not just a good mother, not only the best mother, but a mother IN CONTROL.
Because life, and more specifically parenting, is too overwhelming otherwise. At least for those of us like Kate (the main character) whose lives are precariously balanced between intuition and anxious uncertainty. At least for those of us who believe our children are a reflection of our commitment to parenting them.
On the one hand, I related very much to this character. I used to be her, to the smallest, organic, breastfeeding detail. On the other hand, I found her annoying and shrill. It’s clear the author does, too. In fact, she references just how shrill Kate is and sounds on more than one occasion. It’s clear, too, Sittenfeld is on the otherside of “all-consuming motherhood.” She is, in a way, mocking Kate. Lovingly so.
It was in the reading of the book that I fully understood (and admitted to myself) how I feel a tiny bit embarrassed by her. Not by Kate, but my Me. The former Me. The one who cared too much.
And how I feel a tiny bit ashamed of Her. Not the Her I used to be. Me. Now. The Her who doesn’t care so much.
I don’t really want to be either of them. Her then or Me now.
I want to be somewhere else.
Someone else.
But who?
* * *
The older demographic of my readers will likely nod at this post, “Oh yes, I remember that time of life.” That in between space. That desperation for nourishment. That guilt for wanting Me back so badly. The conflict between loving these children so much I can’t stand it and wanting them to leave the house RIGHT NOW so i can write so I can read so I can nourish myself. Me Me Me.
The younger demographic of my readers will likely have already stopped reading at the first paragraph, so all-consumed and convinced they are that their choices today directly impact tomorrow. So sure they are, as I was, that tomorrow will be intact and unassailable for their children if only they pay close enough attention.
And again, I am bored by my words. Turned off even as I write them. Swearing off, once again, blogging about parenting.
But I won’t forsake my Greek Chorus their collective voice. Their somewhat smug, somewhat compassionate nods.
I won’t assume that I am the only mother in that in between space.
I’ll leave a trail of pebbles so that you may find your way to me and tell me I’m not alone.
Tell me you remember that time.
Tell me you are in it right now.
Tell me you too are tired.
Tell me my children will forgive me my selfishness.
Tell me I will fill up again.
Tell me I will be more than this.
Tell me.
I give up knowing it all.
I give it up.
It’s not the first time I daydreamed I was
Nicole Krauss, authoress
all-around good
woman good Jewish but not so Jewish
writer I could aspire towards
and as a matter of curiosity
exactly one day
(perhaps only hours!)
older than I.
But today most of all
when I learned husband
Jonathan
Safran
Foer
(even his name sounds groovy out loud with line breaks forcing teeth against my lips)
cuts up old books to make
new books
Fresh! Magical!
I thought I couldn’t stand to
be me another day
I just want to be Nicole Krauss
just to be married to a man
who thinks up cutting up
old books to make new ones
who writes books called
Extremely Loud
Incredibly Close
and then writes a book
about not Eating Animals
because sometimes he
doesn’t eat them
out of kindness or conviction
and then – to top it all off with an all-natural maraschino cherry –
lives in Park Slope and wears
smart but sexy glasses.
I imagine him sitting there
next to her
at a wooden desk in their house in Brooklyn
(the desk was his
found at an antiques shop in New Paltz)
separating their two laptops is an
antique robin blue typewriter
maybe even with Hebrew letters like
the one I drooled over but
didn’t haggle over
(4000 shekels!)
in the artist’s colony in the Golan Heights.
There is an imposed silence every week day
in Chez Safran Foer Krauss
from 8 am to 12:45 for
Writing Time.
They write and write and write
while sipping organic espresso
a matter that is serious to both of them
but they’re considering giving up
because of stomachaches.
On Wednesdays they listen to
Van Morrison for inspiration.
On Fridays he makes her a spinach and goat cheese omelette
and takes out the recyclables
and this is their life
I imagine
unless one of their kids is sick –
then she is downstairs
on the couch watching
Phineas and Ferb and
gritting her teeth in
frustrated agony
the way writers who are also
mothers grit their teeth.
She considers calling the nanny
but she won’t while he is upstairs cutting up
old books
to make new books
new stories.
She’ll wait.
Or that’s what I’d do.
Wait and wait and wait
and grit teeth
until Wednesday when the fever breaks
and she takes
her laptop
to the café down the corner
and stays there
til the sun goes down
til closing time
so he can sing the kids to sleep
and she can see if her Wikipedia page
is longer than his or
for once write a novel on the napkins
like she’s wanted to for
the last three years
and glue them together
with Juicy Fruit gum.
Fresh! Magical!
Sometimes, she writes
in her journal
how she wishes the internet would break
so she could start over
and find the wooden desk
in New Paltz first.
Or marry a carpenter.
And this is when
I understand why
she is keeping her name
and writing poetry again
and practicing the Law of Attraction
on the door to the cafe
daydreaming it’s a portal
to that kibbutz she volunteered on
in the summer of 1990-something
a kibbutz in the Lower Galilee
a lemon tree in the front yard
that looks remarkably
like the one I see
through my bathroom window.
“Ever since Gwyneth Paltrow became famous in her early 20s, she has made women feel bad about themselves…” begins Jessica Grose’s article in Slate this week.
Ouch.
This makes me want to write something along the lines of how ever since Jessica Grose starting writing articles in Slate she’s made celebrities feel bad about themselves.
Except I don’t know Jessica Grose.
I don’t know anything about her.
In fact, while I may have read her articles on Slate before, I don’t remember any in particular.
It’s not a jab. It’s just to illustrate how little I know her.
Which is why I can’t imagine laying blame on her for feeling bad about myself.
What has Jessica Grose done to make me feel like an unattentive mother, unaffectionate wife, less-than-compelling blogger?
(Oops. Did I just overshare?)
It’s not that I don’t get the point — how the media, let’s say, perpetuates an unattainable image of women or mothers. But blaming the media is very different from pinpointing one particular celebrity, especially one who actually has made it a point to do GOOD in the world.
It’s mind boggling to me. I feel compelled to defend Gwyneth, except I don’t know her.
But what I do know is that Grose’s article didn’t inspire in me a feeling of comraderie.
It made me feel sad for Grose. And for women who truly ascribe their feelings of inadequacy to female celebrities.
The accusations against Gwyneth, in particular, continue throughout Grose’s entire piece, which was sparked by the recent announcement of Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin’s split. Grose shames Gwyneth (not Martin, by the way, but Gwyneth) for how she chose to announce her separation. The language she chose to use. The means by which she communicated it.
As if getting a divorce and having to actually ANNOUNCE it wasn’t bad enough.
“Underneath that psychobabble,” Grose writes, taking issue with the phrasing “Conscious Uncoupling,” “is the message that goes along with all Goop productions: Even Gwyneth’s separation is better than yours…”
Is that what’s underneath the “psychobabble?” Really?
I didn’t get that at all. Perhaps if I was in the middle of a messy divorce, I’d be envious of couples who seem outwardly to be approaching separation maturely.
My response? I actually considered for a minute or two that Paltr
ow and Martin might be trailblazers. Better coverage of “conscious” uncoupling than the ugly divorces we normally expect from Hollywood.
Unless, of course, we want celebrities to feel heartbreak and pain because it makes us feel a little better about our own.
The truth is finally spoken out loud at the end of the article when Grose writes of Gwyneth and another celebrity mother, “Their stories are meant to make mere mortals feel inadequate.”
Huh?
I may be susceptible to the “new-agey psychobabble” Grose mocks (I used to be on Goop’s mailing list), but I am under the impression that Gwyneth Paltrow is as mortal as the rest of us are. Maybe even moreso, since she is living her life on a worldwide stage.
Could be that I was won over by the restaurant scene in Notting Hill
but I operate on the assumption that even famous actresses feel shame, anxiety, humiliation, fear. I don’t see any reason to perpetuate the stereotype that they don’t.
My takeaway from Grose’s article is not an urge to join a rallying cry for honesty in media. It’s not a desire to band together as “normal moms” with limited budgets to spread rage about the injustice of personal trainers or nannies or vegan chefs.
I just feel sad.
For women who feel so disconnected from themselves that they have to look to others as perpetrators of their unhappiness.
Women who feel compelled to publicly shame other women, through blogs or through gossip.
And for this reason, I almost didn’t write this blog. I worried that by writing this post I was doing the exact same thing Grose was with her piece on Paltrow.
And then I remembered intention.
And how intention, God willing, often shines through, even when the language we are using may be misconstrued as branding, marketing, or public relations spin.
Gwyneth’s intention — even though I don’t know her personally — came through loud and clear to me in the quotes attributed to her yesterday.
She’s not looking to hurt or attack anyone. She’s not looking to rebrand marriage or divorce or motherhood.
She just thinks before she speaks.
Before she acts.
That’s what came through to me.
She thinks before she speaks.
And this is a brand I’m happy to be an early adopter of.
The first sensation
is a swell
in the space
behind the back of my tongue but before my
esophagus.
What is that space called?
High up
on the other side of gagging?
I call it my crying space.
The space tears come from.
Ha!
You thought crying started scientifically in some space
known as
ducts,
No way, Jose.
Crying starts as a lump —
there in that undefined on the anatomical map because it’s function is almost obsolete
like the appendix.
Except it functions still.
I know it because I try to make it stop sometimes and it won’t.
Good cries
Bad cries
Nervous anxious I don’t want to talk to you right now cries
How could this happen I don’t understand it cries
My baby’s okay my baby’s ok my baby’s o.k. cries
And you …
you little one little new one little brand new life that just began first as an idea then as a mister mister then as a real live thing in the world as a lump in my throat cries.
You started in someone else’s belly but for me you start now as a lump in my throat trickling up through that space between my esophagus and the back of my tongue.
I breathe in relief and gratitude and respect for your mother.
(I also sigh a long sigh called MOTHERHOOD because this is what all mothers silently sigh the minute a new baby is born and all our collective memories swirl together in an almost scream.)
But then I stop.
You are you. Something new.
The lump, I swallowed it.
You are in my stomach now. In the space I hold allllllllll my love. All my love is there. So much. Too much. Old love. New love. If I could keep it all there I would but I can’t and it turns into lumps sometimes. But what’s there in my belly, all that love, keeps me alive and going and facing forward.
Love. New love.
New life.
You.
This is not a post about gun control. It’s not a post about violence prevention in our schools or in our towns.
It’s a post about growing up — my growing up — as a mother.
And the single greatest lesson I have learned in my ten years, 364 days of parenting.
Ready?
I know nothing.
Absolutely nothing.
If I look at myself now from the future, this will always be true.
Each day, as a mother, I am growing and learning and changing. And when I look back at the mother I was two years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago, I understand instantly how little I know. And in knowing this, I know everything.
When my son, who is turning 11 this weekend, was a little boy and started to amass little boy toys, we had a rule (my rule): No guns in the house.
As my son transitioned from dinosaurs to Playmobil, the rule shifted a little: No handheld toy guns in the house. But Playmobil policemen were allowed.
And as he grew, in a house that didn’t allow guns, he still played with imaginary ones, as boys do. I could’ve attempted to enforce a new rule, “No pretend guns with clothes hangers,” but by that time I started to realize, just a little, that I might not be able to prevent imaginary gun play and so I instated a new rule: No video games or computer games with guns.
This, I knew, would prevent my son from turning into one of those scary people on the 6 o’clock news; I just knew it. Video games and TV were really the culprits in the downward cycle of violence in America. If our children didn’t see it on TV or in video games, we’d all be safe. I was certain of it.
But, as you probably have gathered by now and mothers more seasoned than I already know, my son grew older. He started to do things on his own — when I wasn’t around. He played shoot ’em up computer games at friends’ houses where rules didn’t get in the way, and watched Clint Eastwood movies on YouTube. And one day, last year, got a Nerf gun as a gift from his classmates for his birthday.
On that day, I had to choose: Would I rescind a parenting decision I had made 10 years prior? Or stick to my guns, so to speak?
I let the Nerf guns in.
I held up my palms to the air that day and looked skyward and said to someone (or no one) in that defeated mother’s voice:
“What, really, do I know?”
And an answer came down from somewhere or nowhere: You know nothing. And yet …
And yet, my son seems to. He seems to know something.
A year later, the kid has amassed a Nerf collection — guns, foam bullets, a vest. And despite this, seems to know the difference between right and wrong. Play and reality. Seems to be able to function appropriately with peers — completely against my assumption 10 years ago about what happens to boys when they start playing with guns.
In a twist that feels unfathomable to me — a woman who once thought her sons would never handle a toy gun — my son is hosting 20 of his friends today at a paintball party. It makes me uncomfortable a bit; it does. I find myself asking this morning: What does this say about my son that he wants a paintball party? Worse: What does it say about my parenting that I am allowing it?
And the only answer I can come up with is:
I know nothing.
This is my BIRTH-day gift.
This knowing does not release me from fear or from self-blame for whatever my son may choose to be or to do in the future. But, rather, allows me to be free to love in the best way I know how … today.
I am certain that I will keep making rules for my children. Just as I am certain I will always be afraid for them.
But, I suppose, that with each passing year, as I understand more and more how little I know about what my raising them will ultimately lead to, I will allow myself to let go.
To trust them to raise themselves.
And hope that my loving them was enough.
Because really, I know nothing.
and yadda yadda, an aliyah blog 