A few months ago, I was asked to be one of a small group of people to do oral history interviews for my synagogue, in order to capture the history of the synagogue, especially with so many of the founders already gone. I’d done a few historical articles about the founding of the synagogue for the monthly newsletter, a few years back, so I thought maybe they’d want my notes, or that they’d want me to tell the stories I’d been told. But it turned out that they wanted my own stories, whatever I wanted to focus on, from my eleven years as a member.
“What about me? I have stories too!”
I was honored to be chosen, and overwhelmed with too many ideas of what to say, and scared to be on camera, but I was also busy teaching, and going to doctor visits, and I didn’t have time to wade through all of my ideas and come up with something to say at that moment, so I asked if they could wait until synagogue school was over for the year, and they said certainly, we’ll reach out in May.
But when I got a follow up email a few weeks ago, it wasn’t to ask me when I’d be available to be recorded, it was to announce that they’d finished the filming and I could press on this link to see the videos. And, of course, I felt hurt. And relieved. And disappointed, and angry, and confused. For some reason I can’t have only one clear feeling at a time. It’s exhausting.
“Tell me about it.”
I’d been gradually working through my ideas for what to say, in essay form, writing up each story to see which ones felt the most important, or the most tolerable to tell. Should I talk about being an unmarried, childless, disabled woman in a synagogue where young, wealthy families are the most coveted demographic? Or about the ways the synagogue has helped me to grow and to try out new roles and ideas in a safe place? Or should I talk about teaching in the synagogue school, or about learning with the clergy, or about how it was the older members of the congregation who embraced me from the beginning and it’s been so painful to watch them dying off or receding into nursing homes, or zoom? Or should I focus on the joy of the music and the consistent comfort of Friday night services, or about the frustration and disappointment I felt when it was the women in the synagogue who most rejected and dismissed the Me-Too movement, despite my efforts to let them know that I was a survivor of sexual abuse and needed their support?
I had a lot to say. And a lot of fear of saying it on camera, and being seen, or being edited out, so I guess I’m relieved to be able to put it off.
And, really, it’s possible that they decided to just go with the people who were ready to film right away and forgot to tell me that they wouldn’t need me. Or maybe they’re planning to do a second group later on, and assumed I’d figure that out, or that I’d been told. I don’t know. This oral history project is clearly still a work in progress, which is something I can relate to. In the meantime, I’m still working on my essay version of what I’d want to say in the video, cutting and adding and organizing, so that, just in case they still want to hear from me, I’ll be ready with something to say.
“We’ll be ready too!”
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
Mother’s day traditionally marks the beginning of the gardening season, even when the gardening has already been going on for a while, and most years Mom and I spend Mother’s day morning at a gardening store, filling up the trunk of the car with all of the plants and seeds and mulch and tools she might need, at least for the next week or two. But for Mother’s day breakfast this year, my brother and his eldest son came to visit, with bagels and cream cheese and lox, to celebrate Mom. My brother brought a bouquet of colorful yarn, and my nephew brought a big box of mushroom starters: three huge white blocks, one for Blue Oyster mushrooms, one for Lion’s Mane, and one for something called Piopino, each in their own bags, with a special instruction booklet.
The yarn bouquet, after some of the yarn had already beenunwound.
When my brother’s kids were younger we used to go for nature walks all the time, with Mom in the lead, and then the kids, and then me. We’d walk down by the river near their house, and the kids would climb trees, and collect rocks and leaves and whatever else they could find, unless Grandma warned them off of something yucky or poisonous. And when it was too cold to be outside, she taught them how to make little boats out of empty walnut shells and float them in a bowl of water; just because. As a result, my oldest nephew has his own vegetable and herb garden, with birds who call it their home, and for Mother’s day, he thought the best gift he could give his Grandma would be the chance to watch mushrooms grow, and he was right.
And after breakfast, my nephew and his Dad braved the woods behind our building, and the uncertain ground under a huge fallen tree trunk, to pluck two giant mushrooms, still connected to each other, just so Mom could see them up close and then put them in her garden, to inspire the other plants to grow big and strong.
Mushrooms on the dead tree trunk
My Mom’s love of gardening came from her father, whose yard was filled with flowers, and birds, and dastardly squirrels, and contraptions to keep the squirrels away from the bird feeders. But she didn’t do much gardening at the house I grew up in, partly because she was busy working and doing other creative things, but also because it just didn’t feel like a place where good things would blossom. Almost as soon as she divorced my father, and we moved to a new home, she started to garden. She planted her father’s lilies, and then strawberries and tomatoes and marigolds, and one year she planted pumpkins that took over the whole yard. And now she gardens all year long, planting seeds indoors and seedlings outdoors, and if she’s not planting, she’s weeding or preparing the ground for more planting later on. And she loves it! And Cricket loves it! And Ellie and I sit on the bench and watch them, and listen to the birds, and shrug, happy for them, though mostly bewildered.
“What’s your problem?”
Within days of the Mother’s day visit, the new mushrooms were sprouting, magically, from those plain white blocks, and our neighbor was deep cleaning her bird bath to accommodate all of the birds returning to the yard, and there were pink and orange tulips, and magenta rhododendrons, and purple irises, and red azaleas, and green everywhere, including on the pawpaw tree.
Piopino
Lion’s Mane
Blue Oyster
We are now in pawpaw counting season. First the red flowers had to appear on the tree, and darken to crimson and then to a reddish dark brown, and then, as the flowers died and fell away, the baby pawpaws appeared from the wreckage. So now starts the long summer of watching the pawpaws grow, and worrying that they will be eaten by passing birds, or squirrels, or that they’ll fall off in the rain, or die off for lack of nutrition. The counting becomes even more difficult as the leaves grow to their full size and obscure the growing pawpaw fruit, but I try to accept it, because the leaves are doing their best to protect those baby pawpaw fruits from disaster.
Baby pawpaw fruit
It’s funny, just as Mom spends her summers tending her garden, I kind of do the same with my writing. We plant our seeds and nurture them and weed out the overgrowth and anything that’s getting in the way, and hope that something comes of all of the worry and the work. And each year we overplan, and barely get through half of what we hoped to accomplish. I can’t make the summer expand to give me the time and patience to do everything I want to do, just like Mom can’t use the whole yard, and then some, to plant all of the flowers and vegetables she dreams of harvesting in the fall. But we do what we can do.
“Isn’t it nap time yet?”
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
A friend from my synagogue suffered a loss recently and, of course, I needed to go to her house for a Shiva visit. Traditionally, Shiva (which means “seven” in Hebrew) is the seven days of mourning after the funeral, when people bring food to the mourner’s home and stay for services so the mourner won’t have to leave their house in order to say the Mourner’s Kaddish in community. In our progressive synagogue the amount of time spent in Shiva is usually shorter, often only one or two days, because seven days of sitting is a lot, and because the short time period makes it easier to be sure the house will be full of guests each night, instead of having nights when no one but the rabbi shows up.
“If they offered chicken treats they’d get a crowd every day.”
Shiva visits make me anxious though, especially if I get there too long before the evening service, and have a lot of free time to sit around and chat with the other visitors while waiting for a chance to speak to the mourners. There are people who are good at these sorts of things: people who know what food to bring, or if they should even bring food at all, and know what to say to the mourner, and where to sit, and how to offer help, and how to talk to whoever else is around. That is not me.
“Me neither.”
I have social anxiety (along with Generalized Anxiety and Panic Disorder and a few hundred other things), so the idea of walking into a private house, full of mostly strangers, is already a big deal. There are also, usually, a lot of family members I don’t know, and friends and neighbors I’ve never met, and fellow congregants who I may have seen once or twice before, and I’m supposed to be able to navigate through the crowd, making polite conversation, until I reach the mourner to say, what? “I’m so sorry for your loss” is the most common and reliable thing to say, and I am sorry and it is a loss. But I tend to feel like I should suddenly be the most outgoing person on the planet, and ease the mourner’s grief in some brilliant way, and offer insight and comfort and support and …. I expect a lot of myself. I think that’s part of why being a social worker didn’t fit me. I often got home at the end of the day of field work with a long list of things I hadn’t accomplished, or didn’t understand, or couldn’t manage, or didn’t have time to do, and the guilt was unbearable.
Given all of that, I felt a strong impulse to skip this Shiva visit altogether; to pull the covers over my head and pretend it wasn’t happening and that no one would miss me. And the fact is, no one would have criticized me, or even commented, if I hadn’t gone, but I knew I would feel awful, so I had to go.
To make the visit more manageable I went as close as possible to the start of the evening service, to limit the chat time. The prayer service at Shiva is pretty short and is mostly there to facilitate the saying of the Mourner’s Kaddish, but even those few familiar prayers can be comforting in the midst of all of that grief and pain.
In a regular service, at my synagogue, the Mourner’s Kaddish is said by those who are in mourning, or remembering a loss, and only the mourners will stand, but at Shiva we all stand, and we focus our attention on these particular mourners, in this particular house, rather than on mourners in general.
I like that idea, because then, at least for the first week of mourning, you can think only of your own pain and loss, and know that others are thinking of you and praying with you; and only after that week do you go back to seeing yourself as part of the community of mourners, all mourning different losses.
In the end, the Shiva visit went fine. The mourner hugged me as soon as I arrived, and when I asked about her loss she was able to tell me, and those around us, about the last days of her loved one’s life. She did all of the work; I just showed up, sat down, and listened. And I realized that I was proud of myself for just showing up. I didn’t change the world with the few words I said, but I was there for her and I said and did what I could. And that felt good.
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
I’ve been binge watching Queer Eye on Netflix lately, ever since I ran out of episodes of the Great British Baking Show. I was a big fan of the original Queer Eye for the Straight Guy on Bravo, where five gay guys make over one straight man, and I’d heard that they were doing a new version of the show a few years back, but I didn’t have Netflix at the time so I mostly forgot about it. And then, when I started watching the new version a few weeks ago, I was worried that it wouldn’t be as kind as the original, or as funny, but it turns out that it’s even better. They’ve expanded the original purpose of the show to include makeover subjects who are male and female, gay and straight, trans or nonbinary or whatever, and they’ve made the show more empathetic and more actively accepting of differences. And it’s wonderful!
I’ve been watching the seasons backwards in time, because that seems to be how Netflix works, so I’ve seen them in Austin, Philadelphia, Missouri, Georgia, and even Japan (!) so far, and I’m loving that they do a deep dive into each state, working with a cross section of people of different genders and ages and ethnicities and ways of life.
“What about dogs?”
And as we go backwards in time, I learn more and more about the difficulties each of the Fab 5 has been through in their lives and how they’ve coped, or not, and what they’ve learned that got them to this point in their lives. I love Jonathan Van Ness, the grooming expert. I never thought I could get used to someone with a beard who wears high heels and dresses, but the look just seems so right on Jonathan, with his/her/their childlike joy and sweetness. It’s clear that they’ve been through a lot, including being bullied as a teenager, but all of that seems to help them be present and generous with the makeover subjects in their own grief and pain.
Then there’s Tan, the fashion expert and Englishman of Pakistani descent, who seems so posh and above it all on the outside but is willing to be vulnerable and talk about his own difficulties coming out to his family, and his fears and excitement about welcoming his first child with his husband. He can also just be silly and playful with the rest of the guys, as long as it doesn’t mess up his absolutely perfect hair.
And Bobby, the interior design maven, has talked movingly about his Christian upbringing and being homeless as a teenager when his family couldn’t accept who he was, and Antoni, the food and wine guy, has talked about his difficult childhood and his broken relationship with his mother, and Karamo has talked about his life as a child of immigrants and a father of young men, and all of it is brought to the table to make the makeover subjects, and the audience, feel more comfortable, instead of intimidated by the gorgeousness and the abilities of the five guys who have come to be of service.
The fundamental theme of this new version of the show isn’t, “you need to dress, act, look, a certain way to have a better life,” instead it’s “you deserve the help we can offer you, because no one can do it all by themselves.”
It’s also a lot of fun, with dogs, and dancing, and playfulness and, oh yeah, there was that one time when Michelle Kwan showed up to help a ten year old girl and her father bond over figure skating!!!!!!!!!!!
“I would be a great figure skater!”
So, of course, after watching a few seasons of the show, I started to think about what an episode about me would look like (though I should probably go on a medical mysteries show first, where they could figure out what’s wrong with my health and get me to a place where I’d actually be able to make it through a whole week with the fab five). I don’t know how my neighbors would react if an SUV rolled up and five fairy godparents rolled out and stomped up to our door. We’d probably get noise complaints. I’m also not sure there would be room for everyone to be in the apartment at one time, especially with Cricket barking her head off and trying to bite their ankles.
“That sounds like Cricket.”
On each episode, the fab five comes up with a goal that the “hero” (what they call their makeover subjects) can reach by the end of the week: building a man’s confidence so he can propose to his girlfriend; preparing a man for the new baby that’s about to arrive; helping the trans woman feel ready to welcome friends and family to her home and especially to reconnect with her father. But I’m not sure what the goal of my makeover could be. I’d love to have help figuring out my hair and skincare and makeup with Jonathan, and my wardrobe could use a lot of support from Tan, and it would be great to have Antoni help me get back into cooking, and Bobby could redo the kitchen/dining area and make it possible for more than one person to be in the kitchen at a time without playing human bumper cars. But none of that is a cohesive goal, and that’s where Karamo comes in. Karamo’s area of expertise is called “Culture,” but really he’s like a therapist or social worker, there to help the makeover subject find more confidence or recognize what’s missing in their lives. And he’s great at it. He’s the kind of social worker I wanted to become: confident, thoughtful, imaginative, energetic and outgoing. But I don’t know which of my many limitations he’d want to tackle, and I’m afraid I’d fail to live up to his expectations, and I’d end up crying and screaming and hiding under the bed, and the director would yell cut and all of the loving and helping would just disappear.
I wish, so much, that the Fab Five could have come along when I was a teenager; they could have helped Mom get the divorce agreement she deserved, including the house, and then they could have redecorated the house to wipe the darkness away and made it into a place where we could thrive, so I could have started my adult life on an even keel, instead of having to spend decades shoveling the shit out of the way before I could even breathe fresh air.
Because, really, a haircut and a new wardrobe and a nice big kitchen would be lovely, but they wouldn’t be enough. There’s too much structural damage underneath, inside of me, and even a week full of hugs and reassurance that I’m okay the way I am wouldn’t be able to fix all of that. And that makes me so angry!
But as it is, the scope of the show doesn’t allow for helping people like me, with more complicated problems that take longer to address and don’t wrap up so nicely at the end of a week. I wish they could have a “special episode” every once in a while, or a spin off, where they could spend six months to a year checking in on someone, building the relationships over time, and problem solving when the first idea for how to help doesn’t quite work.
Towards the end of many of the episodes I start to feel anxious about what’s going to happen to this person once the five guys leave, because they’ve clearly built relationships and trust and dependence over the week. And that’s when the tone of the show changes and the guys go back to their headquarters and sit on their couch and watch, and judge, a video of how the makeover subject handled their end of show challenge (cooking something, choosing an outfit, coming out to family, proposing to a fiancé, etc.). I think the intention, or at least the impact, of this physical and intellectual distancing by the five guys, is to create more emotional distance for the audience, so that saying goodbye doesn’t feel quite so painful. And I understand the need for that distance, but there has to be a way to create it without being so judgmental, and without making the participants take a kind of final exam at the end of the episode to prove they deserve the help they’ve received.
I wish there could be less emphasis overall on how much this particular participant deserves the help, and more focus on just how much we all need and deserve help and kindness. I think that feeling of generosity to ordinary people shined the brightest in the Japan episodes, where they didn’t know all of the cultural hierarchies and therefore were able to see each individual for who they really were, without prejudice.
It’s unlikely that the show will be coming to New York anytime soon though, given how many other states still need their attention, so maybe by the time they get to me the show will have become even more compassionate and I will have become more ready to embrace all of the wonderful things they have to offer, most of all their kindness and attention.
“We’re waiting.”
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
When we all go outside together for an evening walk (me, Mom, Cricket and Ellie), Ellie has taken it as her job to escort her grandma. She won’t leave the apartment until Grandma is with her, and she won’t go down the stairs until Grandma takes the first step, and often, unless she really, really has to poop, she’ll walk next to her Grandma at a leisurely pace, while Cricket drags me up ahead. It’s a lot of pressure for Ellie’s small shoulders, but she seems to have accepted her role as “the good one.” She really had no choice, though, with Cricket as her sister.
“Are you talking about me?”
Ellie comes when she’s called, even when she’s busy chasing a squirrel (she came to us like this, that’s why we kept her original name instead of choosing another insect to name her after). And she will give up on a barking campaign (for food, attention, or outings) as soon as she realizes that it’s not helping her get what she wants, whereas Cricket will shriek endlessly no matter how little response she gets, and no matter how little she actually needs whatever she’s begging for.
Ellie will gladly eat kibble for breakfast, as long as there’s something tasty sprinkled on top to get her started, whereas Cricket will eat off the cheese, from both bowls if possible, and leave the kibble behind (Cricket will finally eat the kibble in the middle of the night, when she thinks no one notices, but we can hear her tags hitting the bowl. Shh.).
Ellie tolerates me wiping off her eye goop on a daily basis, as long as she then gets head scratchies and a back massage, whereas Cricket will growl and bite if I go anywhere near her eyes (to be fair, Cricket’s eye goop is much more like concrete than Ellie’s softer goop).
Ellie was a breeding dog for the first four and a half years of her life, and once she got spayed she was thrilled to be done with all of that. So when Kevin, the mini-Golden Doodle, is out, and Cricket hops over to him like a baby goat, Ellie speed walks back to our front door and waits to be let back inside. I think Kevin’s enthusiasm and energy and curiosity freak her out, even though he’s a much nicer and more empathetic dog than Cricket would ever want to be.
Cricket’s favorite activity, aside from punching Kevin or barking at Grandma, is sniffing the grass (Mom recently found out that Cockapoos in particular need to do a lot of sniffing, for the intellectual stimulation). And Ellie, sweet as she is, has really tried to get interested in sniffing, for her sister’s sake, but it’s just not her thing. She prefers to chase cats, zoom around the yard in figure eights, and then sit and rest with her people until it’s time to go back inside and sleep. Or eat.
There are times when I worry that Ellie might be missing out on things because she’s so careful to be a good girl, and to please her people, and especially to avoid annoying Cricket. And I worry that having Cricket as her sister has kept her in second place, as the easy one and the good one and the sweet one, and never as the squeaky wheel that gets all of the grease.
On the other hand, maybe this is who she really is. She loves to stretch out in her own space and rest; she loves to eat; she loves to run; she’s shy around other dogs and people, but has learned how to share space with Cricket and even to cuddle with her people a little bit.
In fact, Cricket’s the one who taught Ellie how to bark for what she wants, and to try new foods, and to run, and to cuddle. Cricket, who can be a terror, and standoffish, and stubborn, has now made a safe home for two rescued breeding mamas (Miss Butterfly was her first), teaching them how to be dogs, and how to lean on their humans, and how to enjoy snacks and scratchies and always ask for more. Not a bad record for such a curmudgeon. I think Miss Ellie would even agree with me about that, though she’d throw in some side eye too, because Cricket has taught her the joys of sarcasm on top of everything else.
Oh wait, that might have been me.
“Yep.”
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
For a few weeks, recently, my mother was worried about me. Okay, she’s always worried about me, but more worried than usual, because my blood pressure was high. My blood pressure has been relatively high since December, but my primary care doctor wasn’t especially worried, so I ignored it. But then I went to the gastroenterologist, to finally see about my first colonoscopy, he said I’d need an okay from the cardiologist before he could move forward; so I went to the front desk and made an appointment with a cardiologist in the same office, where the wait is approximately an hour and a half and the doctor generally ignores whatever I say.
But while I was waiting for that appointment to arrive, my blood pressure (measured on a home blood pressure monitor), kept going up and up, especially the bottom number. And Mom said I couldn’t wait for my scheduled appointment and instead made me an appointment with her own cardiologist, for the next morning.
“I could ignore you without all the waiting!”
I got up early and grumbled as she drove me to the doctor’s office, and then I grumbled through the tech taking my blood pressure four times, twice on each arm, and then through an especially thorough EKG, and then there was an Echocardiogram in another room and blood tests in a lab down the hall. I was exhausted from the whole ordeal, but I had to go to work afterwards, so I grumbled as much as I could at home and then switched into teacher mode on the drive to the synagogue and tried not to grumble for the rest of the day.
“Unsuccessful, Mommy.”
The next day, after tests showed I didn’t have a blood clot or heart damage, the cardiologist prescribed a diuretic and told me to call my gynecologist to see if she could change or just stop my birth control pills (prescribed for Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome and painful periods), because they could be raising my blood pressure and adding to the risk of blood clots.
I started the diuretic the next day, and stopped taking the daily birth control pills, and after a week, my blood pressure was back to normal, but I was dizzier than usual, and in more pain and still dealing with all of the other long term issues no one has been able to explain (headaches and dizziness and exhaustion and muscle pain and intermittent walking problems and nausea and belly pain).
Then I had to go for more blood tests and an echo stress test (which is a beast of a combination, with a treadmill and a thousand wires and a torture device rammed into my rib cage at random intervals), and I was told that my Normetanephrine and Aldosterone numbers were off kilter, both related to the adrenal glands in some way, and a possible cause for the high blood pressure, and I’d need to see an Endocrinologist and a Nephrologist for further testing. No, wait, not an Endocrinologist but a Gastroenterologist, but not the Gastroenterologist doing the colonoscopy…oy. So I had to put off the colonoscopy, which means I’ll have to go for an extra consult closer to the colonoscopy or else the insurance won’t cover it, and then there’s the new Gastroenterologist, who is hopefully the right doctor and not a miscommunication, and then I may still have to go to a Nephrologist, and who knows how many tests and appointments will come from all of that, or if I even have an issue with my adrenal glands, or if it’s at all related to the rest of my symptoms or yet another tangent.
And, yes, I know I have to do all of it, of course. But I’m so tired, and I’m in more pain than I was before, and I still have to teach, and the weather is getting warmer, which makes everything worse, and… I clearly have a whole lot more grumping to do before this is over.
Harrumph.
“Harrumph.”
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
My Mom turned eighty this year. We didn’t celebrate much on the day itself, because I had to go to work, and since it was just before Passover my brother couldn’t come in person – though he made sure to send lots of gifts. When I went to work that day, I really wanted to whine and complain to someone that I couldn’t take my Mommy out for pancakes (because breakfast for lunch or dinner is her idea of Nirvana), but I didn’t tell anyone. In a way, I felt like if I didn’t tell anyone, and avoided the official celebration of the big birthday, the evil eye wouldn’t be able to find us.
“Hurry! We have to hide!
I’m not usually a superstitious person, but it comes up when I’m faced with things I can’t control.
My grandfather, Mom’s father, died at 80. And her mother died at 85, after hip surgery.
I guess I figured that as long as Mom was still in her seventies, everything would be okay. But eighty?
Mom had a rough time last summer, with hip surgery, and hip revision surgery, and a third hospital stay when the two surgeries and sleeping on only one side for months, led to her left lung filling up with fluid. Pretty much every day of last summer was filled with anxiety that I would lose my Mommy.
But then things got better. She recovered from the surgeries, and found better doctors, and committed to physical therapy, and even started to take daily walks on her own without any nagging from me. So I focused on other things for a while and forgot to be anxious about her health. I barely even registered the big birthday coming up, until it arrived and the number just walloped me.
I rely so much on my mom – for my emotional health, for practical advice and support, for dinner. And I want to celebrate her successes, and her obstinate and energetic love of life, and I want to celebrate how lucky I am to have the mother I have, but I’m so afraid of what will happen if I say the word eighty out loud.
“Shhhh!”
I was in a bad place, but then I started to comfort myself with the fact that Mom has an aunt, her father’s sister, who is now 107 years old and still clever and opinionated and loving; and my mom is the youngest of three sisters, all still alive and kicking. So maybe the evil eye isn’t interested in our family anymore; maybe we’ve had enough trouble for both of our lifetimes.
And then I heard Mom cough. It was a random cough, probably because the trees on both sides of our building are filled with allergens and we had the fans on, but it sent me back to last summer when she was struggling to breathe. The fear is always there in the back of my mind, asking me if I should worry when she forgets that she already told me the story about the friend I don’t even know, or if I should worry when she gets tired, or grumpy, or when she isn’t up to walking the dogs with me (more often than not, I’m the one who’s not up to walking the dogs, but that’s a whole other story).
“You’re not coming out with us?”
I’m torn. Do I tiptoe around this birthday and just pretend that Mom is turning seventy-nine every birthday from now on? Or should we celebrate BIG this year, and go on trips and eat pancakes for dinner, and buy enough books and fabric and yarn that it will take her twenty years just to organize all of it?
But I think the best idea is what Mom’s cousin is doing: buying expensive concert tickets for her 107 year old mother, months in advance, to guilt her into sticking around. Because, really, what kind of mother would want her child to waste so much money?
“Do whatever you have to do!”
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
We have a blue Ikea bookcase in the hall that has been tilting for a long time now, but there’s been so much else going on that it never seemed important enough to try to fix it or replace it. We have bookcases everywhere, and I have five in my room alone, so one tilting bookcase didn’t seem like an emergency; until one of the shelves fell, and even then we just put “shelf pins” on the shopping list and eventually bought some, and of course, forgot to put them in. And then another shelf fell. And I still can’t be bothered to deal with the damned thing.
The Broken Bookcase
It’s not that a bookcase is such an expensive thing to replace, especially if we get another one from Ikea, its more that we’d have to actually go to Ikea, carry the heavy box to the car and from the car to the apartment, and then put the thing together, oh, and also empty the broken bookcase and take the broken pieces down to the garbage and refill the new bookcase.
I don’t have the energy for any of that, let alone all of it.
I’ve been trying to clear out the “extra books” from my collection for years now (so that we wouldn’t need so many bookcases), by re-reading the books that I’m on the fence about. I’ve already filled two boxes with books I no longer need, but giving books away is harder than you’d think. The library never wants them, and finding a place that wants the books, on the third Thursday of the month, at twilight, still requires carrying heavy boxes of books out to the car. So at this point I still have a box of discarded books on the floor, next to the bookcases, and I still have three shelves full of books to read through. I also have a bad habit of ordering more books all the time.
“She’s going to throw out our toys to make room for books, isn’t she?”
This feels like a metaphor for the way my brain has been lately: overwhelmed with ideas to follow up on, all resting on iffy shelves and waiting for me to start culling through them; but I can’t even think straight enough to do the culling before another ten or twenty ideas pile on. I feel like every day I’m looking at these tilting shelves in my brain, knowing that it’s all going to overflow at any moment, with no idea how to stop it.
I decided to take a break from going to online Hebrew classes for a few months, because I’ve been struggling to stay focused during the classes this past semester, and because the time I spend in those classes and doing the homework for them has kept me from doing other important things on my to-do list. I’m hoping to get back to the classes over the summer, when I have more free time to focus, but I feel the loss of the socializing and the Hebrew already. I still don’t even know what to do with all of the Hebrew I’ve learned so far, or why it’s been such an obsession for at least two years, if not my whole life.
I feel like there’s a path I should be on, and a long term goal I should be working towards, and that Hebrew language learning is part of it; but I don’t know what that goal is. I don’t want to move to Israel, and I don’t particularly want to go back to school full-time to become a translator or a rabbi or a cantor. I would like to go deeper into Jewish education, if I can, working with teens, maybe, as well as with the younger kids, and maybe even doing curriculum development. But I don’t know of a path to get there, and I don’t want all of that to be instead of writing my novels – the notes for which have filled up a bunch of shelves of their own.
I feel like there’s a whirlwind in my brain, pushing me in different directions all the time, keeping me confused and off kilter, and I’m worried that my internal bookshelves are as wonky as the ones in the broken bookcase in the hall, and it will all tumble down at any moment.
My hope is that once synagogue school is over for the year, I’ll be able to concentrate on all of those ideas whirling around in my brain, and organize them, and maybe even choose some to work on. But I’m afraid I’ll be as busy with doctors and tests this summer as I was last summer, without much improvement in my health to show for it, and those wonky internal shelves will just keep tilting.
But I keep slowly reading through my piles of books, and writing down all of my ideas, and sorting and discarding when I can, because this is how I move forward. It’s not especially practical, or fast, but it’s the way my mind works, so it will have to do for now.
“It’s important to just be yourself, Mommy.”
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
Cricket has been having trouble jumping up on the beds recently, but instead of resting on the floor or calmly asking for help (Butterfly used to snuffle at my hand to ask for uppies), Cricket shrieks endlessly. It’s not just barking, it’s at the top of her vocal range, where glass really should be shattering all around her.
She takes CBD oil to manage the regular pains of aging, and DES for her previous incontinence issues, which have both helped her tremendously, but they haven’t stopped the aging process altogether. She’s thin, and she has to wear sweaters because she’s lost a lot of hair, and her vision is blurry and her hearing is, let’s say, imaginative. But she is still the complicated, demanding diva she always has been. So when she started to struggle more to get herself up onto Grandma’s bed, after her middle of the night visit to the wee wee pad, she would stand next to Grandma’s bed at three or four or five in the morning and bark her head off, demanding to be lifted back up onto the bed.
Mom’s answer was to cover her head with a blanket and try to ignore the noise, because that’s how she’s managed Cricket’s long-time habit of trying to bark her awake in the mornings, but I could not ignore the noise. After I’d been woken up two or three nights in a row to lift Cricket back up onto “her” bed, I insisted that we give the old doggy steps a try.
We bought the doggy steps for Butterfly, way back when, because her legs were too short for jumping onto and off of the beds. She was eight years old and fresh from her last pregnancy at a puppy mill when we first brought her home, and she had heart problems and diabetes and lumps and bumps and broken teeth, so I wanted her to have the best life possible in the years she had left, and I thought the doggy steps would help. I also assumed she’d just know how to use them, magically, but it took weeks of training, and each step required a new chicken treat. Cricket’s contribution to training was that she would try to steal the chicken treats before Butterfly could reach them, though she used every possible machination to get to the treats without ever putting a paw on those doggy steps. By the end of training, Butterfly was only okay with walking down the steps, and not up, but at least it gave her a little more independence. Cricket, on the other hand, continued to treat the steps like hot lava to be avoided at all costs.
So it made sense that Mom was skeptical about Cricket being willing to use the steps now, at almost sixteen years old. And my first attempt was a predictable disaster. I put the doggy steps at the end of my bed, while both dogs were napping, and when they woke up to the smell of whatever Grandma was having for lunch, they acted as if a scary dragon had arrived to stop them from reaching the floor and they maneuvered so far around the steps that they slammed into the dresser when they jumped off the bed.
But I wasn’t willing to give up. I thought, maybe the problem was that Cricket’s desperate need was to be on her grandma’s bed, not mine. So I put the doggy steps at the end of Mom’s bed, and the next time Cricket wanted to go up, instead of lifting her straight onto the bed, I lifted her onto each step, one at a time, making sure all of her feet made contact, until she reached the top and walked off onto the bed. And then I did it again, and again. And then Mom, still skeptical, put a chicken treat up at the top of the steps, and showed it to Cricket, and Cricket walked up the steps on her own. And ever since then, Cricket walks up those steps whenever she wants to, even when Grandma isn’t on the bed to welcome her. There was almost no learning curve at all.
And I realized, once again, that with Cricket motivation is everything. And I think I might be more like Cricket than I realized. I don’t try to be stubborn or be a lot of trouble, but when my anxiety is high and there are no rewards big enough to overcome it, I can’t learn anything. I can just shake, or cry, or shout for help. I don’t mean to be like this. In fact, I’ve done everything I know to fix it. But nothing really works, until it works. Once the anxiety recedes enough, and the motivation is strong enough, suddenly things that seemed impossible become possible. But I never know when that turning point will be reached. So, like Cricket, I stand right outside of the Promised Land, wailing, begging for entrance, sometimes not even knowing who I’m crying to, waiting for the steps forward to finally become clear.
I hope that when my doggy steps, or the equivalent, finally appear, I will be able to learn how to use them as quickly as Cricket has. She is, as always, my best teacher.
“What about me?”
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
There is a group of cats that has taken to visiting the backyard of my co-op. So far I know there are at least three of them, a grey one with white feet, and a white one with black markings, and a black one with white markings, though there may be more. It’s hard to count them because they often come around one at a time during the day. When they see Ellie coming out of our door they start to run, and Ellie chases them until they jump up into the retaining wall, out of her reach. For some reason, they have a habit of “hiding” on the third or fourth tier of the retaining wall, behind a single flimsy branch, as if Ellie would be able to see them up there if they weren’t camouflaged by this wondrous work of nature. Except, Ellie can’t see them at all, because she’s a dog and has limited vision and can’t really see things unless they are nearby and/or moving. Generally, Ellie prowls around at ground level searching for clues of the cat’s whereabouts, while I stand right in front of the hidden cat and try to make conversation.
Not one of the current cats, but probably an ancestor.
The cats never answer my questions, though, which is very disappointing. I keep asking them where they live, and how they’re doing, and they just ignore me and watch the dreaded Ellie down below. Cricket isn’t interested in the cats at all at this point in her life. In fact, she has given up on cats and squirrels and birds altogether and has focused all of her attention on trying to get Kevin, the Mini-Golden-Doodle who lives two buildings over, to play with her.
Eventually, after Ellie has forgotten about the cat in the retaining wall, and Cricket has, reluctantly, accepted that Kevin isn’t going to come out to play, the dogs let me take them back inside and the cats go back to what they were doing before, usually hanging out under the bushes in front of my building, because it’s the best place from which to spy on the mourning doves, who spend a lot of time near there (my neighbor is very generous with bird seed). A few times we’ve found piles of grey and white feathers in the yard, with no sign of the bird who used to wear them. I try to believe that the bird has survived the attack from the cats, somehow, because there’s no sign of the body or bones or blood, but half a bird’s worth of feathers is a lot, especially when there’s so much of the soft fluff that comes from the layer closest to the bird’s body.
“I didn’t do it. I was sleeping the whole time.”
I don’t know if these cats have homes, or humans to take care of them, and I don’t know if they are really hungry, or if they are more like Ellie, who feels like she’s starving two minutes after a breakfast of kibble, cheese, and chicken treats. They look pretty healthy, so it’s possible that they are house cats who are allowed out whenever they want, either that or there are a lot of people in my neighborhood who like to feed stray cats. It would be easier for me to accept the cats’ hunting behavior if they are feral, though it would still be hard to forgive. Those mourning doves are so awkward and well-fed that they really don’t stand a chance against a gang of cats.
One of the Mourning Doves searching for snacks.
And yet, despite all of that, I still look forward to seeing the cats. Part of me even wishes that the cats would realize that Ellie isn’t a threat to them, and would see her as a potential friend, because she needs one (Cricket doesn’t count as a friend; she’s a sister, which, if you ask Cricket, is a whole other thing). Ellie would love to catch up to one of the cats and have a loud conversation with them, or teach them one of her special dances (hop, hop, slide, hop, twirl, prance, jump, spin). But they don’t know that Ellie would never hurt another creature and is no threat to them; though she’s been known to hurt Kevin’s feelings when she “hides” on our stoop every time Kevin comes around.
“I wasn’t hiding, I was waiting for you to let me back into the house so I could escape from, Kevin.”
I’m allergic to cats, so I can’t have one of my own, either for my sake or for Ellie’s, but I wish I could. I miss my old friend Muchacho, the cat who lived here when we first moved in about ten years ago. He lived in one of the apartments nearby, with his human, but he came and went through the window as he pleased. He was so friendly that he’d let me pet him, and even pick him up once or twice. It was a real loss when he died, because even though I still have neighbors with cats, they are all indoor cats and I rarely see them. These visiting cats are nothing like Muchacho, of course, and they are unlikely to let me get anywhere near petting them, but part of me believes that if I’m friendly enough they will change their minds. I even worry about them when they’re not here, almost as much as I worry about the wellbeing of the birds when the cats are here. I wonder what the cats are thinking, and where they go when they aren’t in our yard, and if they have human families, or feline ones, or enough food or shelter. I haven’t, yet, tried to chase them up into the retaining wall the way Ellie does, hoping for answers to all of my questions. But I’ve been tempted.
Muchacho
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?
rachelmankowitz 