for preschool Chanukah party, songs, dance, and black light.
Huge victory.
Grater?!? Where’s the grater?
Found it.
And it’s clean.
Ready to make latkes. Here you go.
Take it. Take the potato, too. Wait don’t forget it’s late already past over there under the couch no upstairs in your room under the laundry basket i don’t know maybe okay fine call me at work later and let me know you’re home so I don’t worry I’m always worried what did you eat today tomorrow I promise tomorrow i know I’m sorry on Monday.
I’ll make it to the party on time.
Clean shirt in his backpack. Clean shirt. He’s got a clean shirt.
As if jet lag, back-to-school prep, protecting my kids from a polio outbreak and returning to work after a 2 1/2 week long digital detox wasn’t stressful enough, now I have to worry about a Syrian attack before Thursday.
Wait.
TOMORROW is Thursday?
Holy crap.
HOLY CRAP.
I should have bought more Tums while I was in the States.
Or I should have taken a longer vacation.
Either way, I am in deep doo doo because my stomach just can’t handle the stress.
Last night was the first full night sleep I have gotten in three days. THREE DAYS.
And tonight I have to attend a women’s birth circle on Hannaton. (Don’t ask.)
I sat alone in a movie theater in Haifa last night.
There were other people around me — strangers.
An American guy and a Russian girl out on a date.
Two elderly couples.
A grandmother, a mom, and her teenage daughter.
There were people in the theater, but I might as well have been alone.
It was that kind of movie experience.
The expression on my face moved in rhythm with the fictional couple’s tension and release.
I smiled.
I laughed.
My eyebrows furrowed.
My heart swelled and sunk.
Like the couple on the screen, I remembered 1994.
Except I wasn’t in Vienna with them when we first met. I was in Washington, D.C., sitting in a dark hall next to a good friend watching a free showing on campus of Before Sunrise, starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy.
Courtesy wikipedia
I left that movie theater in Washington, DC in love.
In love with an idea.
In love with this fictional romance.
This couple.
It’s pretty easy for me to pinpoint what I was so smitten with — the Ethan Hawke character was certainly the kind of guy I was into at the time. Intellectual, but funny. Confident enough, but still obviously insecure. Boyishly handsome.
But most of all, I loved that their romance –Jesse’s and Celine’s — was centered around conversation, connection, and culture.
This type of romance — not the kind featuring princes and princesses — was, to me, the stuff of fairy tales.
But how often do we get to see how the fairy tale turns out once the prince starts going gray and the wife’s eyes are underlined by heavy bags?
We don’t.
And it’s this reason why our image of romance is so royally fucked up.
Before Midnight is exactly the kind of film experience — and happy ending — we need more of.
“Happy ending?”, asks anyone who has seen Before Midnight, the 3rd installment of the trilogy, which finds Jesse and Celine married, approaching middle age, and discontent.
Yes, happy.
Real life, up-and-down, work-hard-at-it, happy.
Watching Before Midnight, we ride for two hours along with the couple through highs and lows during their family vacation in Greece — highs and lows not atypical of a middle class couple with young children.
As I observed Celine and Jesse, I could tell they are still clearly in love — or, at the very least, in “like.” They enjoy being with each other; they support each other. At times, I even found myself envying their verbal repartee, the ease with which they bounce off each other clever, but relatively harmless jabs.
They seem good.
Solid.
Until they don’t.
Midway through the movie we also come to understand exactly how very detached they are from the magic that first enchanted them.
And yet they long for that magic. You can tell.
There exists a struggle in each of them between wistfulness and resign.
But the fact they struggle at all is, in my opinion, a good sign.
Any couple who still wants the magic is a couple who can most likely make it.
If they work at it.
Before Midnight illustrates the work that is behind long-lasting love. It lays out in ugly truth how hard marriage can be. And how easy it can be, when you are willing to put in the effort and accept your partner … even when the person who once enchanted you is buried beneath years of diapers, laundry, or uninspiring monotony.
The couple’s dilemma and resolution at the conclusion of the film was better than any “happily ever after.” As the credits rolled, I felt my shoulders release and was overwhelmed with a sense of gratitude. Grateful for the gritty, yet satisfying, conclusion at the end of Before Midnight. And grateful that the idea I fell in love with in 1994 was one that could last. That could make it…somehow.
I sat alone in a movie theater in Haifa, and breathed in deep the longing I sometimes find lodged in my throat. But I breathed out wisdom and understanding.
Of course, she always has a good reason. In this instance, she wanted a nose ring.
You know, like the one Jasmine has in the Disney makeup tutorial I let her watch 50 times a day?
Which made a lot of sense until I went back and watched that video (while simultaneously criticizing myself for being the kind of mother who allows my 5 year old to watch such junk), and realized that Jasmine doesn’t have a nose ring — nor does any other Disney princess.
So, either she was referring to the Goth makeup tutorial that was recommended to her in the “Related Video” section on YouTube or she just wanted to stick a bead up her nose to see what would happen.
Either way, I still have no idea exactly why she would stick a bead up her nose.
Perhaps, she’s just curious. Perhaps that’s also why she swallowed a penny when she was 4 or why she cut off own hair when she was 3.
Marry her natural curiosity and stubborness with her Israel upbringing, and you got a start-up superstar in the making.
But she also possesses a virtue most entrepreneurs could use a little more of.
Humility.
When she realized last night that the bead was good and gone far up her nostril and no 5 year old digging was going to get that sucker out, what did she do?
She asked for help.
“HELP! There’s a charuz stuck in my nose!” she cried to anyone who would listen. Charuz is the Hebrew word for bead. (Guess who was the one who figured out what she was saying? Score one for the immigrant mother.)
My husband, two sons, and I all gathered around to her to evaluate the situation.
You could see she was scared and wished she had never stuck that bead in her nose in the first place.
But she didn’t cry. She didn’t scream. She just listened.
First my husband looked inside. “I can see the bead,” he told us, silently thanking God for small favors.
“Hold the other side of your nose, and blow,” I told her.
She had never done this before. It was new to her. Up until now, as much as we’ve tried to teach her how to blow her nose, she’s only been able to sniff in.
She gave it careful consideration, as all four of us showed her how to blow out our own noses, instead of sniffing in.
My husband held her other nostril, and then instructed her, “Now blow!”
She looked at us, seeking our backing and support.
We all smiled expectantly.
Truthfully, what I expected was a trip to the emergency room.
But, she did it!
She blew the sucker out on the first try!
A snotty, but glittery pink bead flew at G-force speed across the room.
We all cheered and danced around her. Siman tov uh Mazal tov!
We kissed her. We hugged her. We congratulated her.
And of course, we listed off again all the appropriate and inappropriate things for inside one’s nose, mouth, or any other orifice. And we emphasized that beads don’t belong in any of them.
For now, at least.
After the incident had passed, and relief had washed over all of us, my daughter came up to me and said, “I was so brave, wasn’t I?”
I hugged her, and agreed. “Yes, you were very brave.”
“You know what was really brave?” I asked her.
“What?” she said.
“Asking for help. Sometimes that’s the scariest thing for someone to do.”
“You’re right, Mommy,” she replied, not necessarily because she agrees, but because in addition to being curious and humble, she is also wise.
She knows that next to “I love you” and “You’re pretty,” “You’re right” is the answer mommies love most.
and yadda yadda, an aliyah blog 