Bar Mitzvahzilla

Budding Shopaholic

2012-01-11T23:00:00.016-07:00

It's a typical Monday evening. Daughter and I drop off Bar Mitzvahzilla at his tutoring and then, since we're stuck in North Scottsdale for an hour, I drive over to a shopping center that has a rare treat: a Nordstrom Rack.

But first I have to convince the twelve-year-old. Somehow I've raised a non-shopper. She doesn't want to go clothes shopping, she declares. She'd rather go to Michael's and buy more craft project items that we'll never use and end up stuffing in a closet somewhere.

I drag her in there and get ready to do some power shopping, or at least power looking. By then we only have about half an hour before we have to get back to pick up Bar Mitzvahzilla so map out my shopping expedition well. I decide I can only handle a foray through the shoe department.

Well, lucky me. Daughter and I are the same shoe size suddenly. Both 7s.

Then something happens. While I'm looking, and eliminating, and eventually buying nothing at all, Daughter has a tweeny/teeny moment. She has a moment in which she suddenly bursts from being a gangly, wild, child thing into being a woman.

Basically, she commandeers the cart, careens through the shoe department and picks out about twenty pairs of shoes.

I nod my head knowingly. I knew the shoe gene - not to mention the shopaholic gene - had to be passed down somewhere. She might have been pretending all these years with her resistance to shopping but look what happened when I got her in that forest of shoe racks! Though, of course, I can't buy her twenty pairs of shoes. Turns out that right at that moment that she's turning into me I turn into my own father. I say, "What do you think - I'm made out of money?" Neither of us has ever heard me say this before. She has to eliminate all but one pair.

The next week, I tell her we should go to Old Navy for our break during tutoring. She gives me a thunderous look. She doesn't want to go. She can't stand to go. Why does she have --

She walks in, sniffs the air, and immediately starts stacking clothes in my hand. The next thing I know she's in the dressing room.

Born of a shopaholic and a cheapskate, she'll never know a moment's peace. And neither will I.

Are you a shopper or frugal? Have you ever noticed that you've passed those traits on to your children? Are you turning into your own parents?

Thanks for reading,
Linda Pressman, Author of Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie

The Voice from the Bed

2011-12-11T23:53:00.006-07:00

My mother was sick recently. Like really sick. Hospitalized sick.

First there was my mom at 80 - spry, the mall walking, seniorcizing ball of energy. Then there was her auto accident a little over a year ago and things changed. Suddenly there was my mom, her couch, her TV remote and her phones lined up in front of her. A smaller life and an older mom where suddenly taking a walk meant walking to the kitchen.

So she got sick like that, just sitting on the couch with not even a breeze blowing by and it was the usual mayhem in the hospital - seven sisters showing up here and there, and grandchildren and husbands and the nurses wondering exactly how many offspring one woman could have anyway?

I knew I had to leave for Chicago right before she was getting out since I was appearing at a Jewish United Fund event for my book but how was I supposed to leave her that way?

I was pondering that, sitting in the hospital room, the oxygen machine hissing away, watching the IV drip, when I suddenly heard my mom's voice from the bed.

"What are you wearing for the presentation? You bought something new?"

Like swimming out of the murky depths of old age, my mother suddenly reappeared before me, as evidenced by her lifelong obsession with the buying of clothes. I breathed a sigh of relief. Nothing could convince me my mother was on the mend more than her quizzing me about clothes.

(that's me in the center at JUF event)

"I have a great outfit, Ma. A brown sweater dress, Clark boot shoes, brown tights and a jacket."

She looks at me askance. She's unhappy, but not exactly with my outfit. She's unhappy that I've taken care of it already and out of my own closet without going shopping. Going shopping in my closet doesn't count. With my mother every event must be shopped for anew even if you have the clothes already. Then she moves on to a different event.

"What about for Joan Rivers?" Somehow, she can't remember how to boil an egg but she remembers my itinerary in Chicago with a mind like a steel trap.

"Gray dress, black jacket, black boots and tights."

She nods but I can tell that she's a little let down. She really wanted to plot out a shopping trip, a meandering path of me traipsing from store to store to store searching for the perfect outfit. Or, based on her history as a lifelong seamstress, her sewing it for me.

When I see that she's about to question me about all the other clothes I'll be wearing and, more importantly, whether I'll be dressed warm enough, I take over and I become the mother again.

When I return from Chicago, she's out of the hospital but back on the couch, the oxygen hissing next to her. But there's still part of her there. I visit her the morning after we return, sit down next to her on that couch. She says, "How'd the outfit go?"

Is there any one topic that your parent(s) love talking about or that you know when they bring it up that they're on the mend? Any aging parent issues?

Linda Pressman
Author of Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie

My Mother's Closet (a Faceshuk post)

2011-12-04T22:54:00.003-07:00

Daughter is now twelve. This means a few things. Like she's sprouted up to over 5'3. (Though, somehow, she still only weighs 89 pounds...) It also means adolescence - female adolescence - has set in causing her to fight with me each day like I fought with my mother before me.

But it also means this: her clothes doesn't fit anymore or they're too babyish, or not cool enough, or any of a thousand other reasons she can no longer wear them. She stomps into my bathroom while I'm getting ready each morning, says she needs to go shopping, and then goes shopping. Right then. In my closet.

On the one hand I know I should be pretty grateful she wants to go in there. I am 39 years older than her, after all. Also, I'm glad that we actually fit in some of the same clothes especially since I don't weigh anywhere near 89 pounds. But what's the chance of me having anything hip enough for her?

Turns out that the clothes that are now too young for me are just the right age for her. The clothes I monitor carefully, aware that there's a thin line between dressing well and looking like I'm longing for the 1970s and my own teen years. The stuff that doesn't make the cut gets trotted out for the tween.

This wasn't something I could do when I was a kid in Skokie. First of all, even if our mother's clothes had been attractive to us, I had five older sisters who would have gotten there first. Second, her clothes were never going to appeal to us. I was 12 in 1972, for goodness sakes. I wanted - needed - hippyish clothes, maybe a leather bandanna for my forehead, a halter top, bell bottom baggy jeans, maybe a fringed vest.

My mother's closet was not the place to find these items. The most noticeable thing upon opening its door was the smell of mothballs. Then there were the brocade dresses, the handmade suits, the torturous pumps, the foundation garments. My mother's clothes could actually stand up and walk around by themselves, they were that stiff, they didn't need a human body in them. For a free-wheeling 12-year-old who didn't want to dress like Jackie Onassis, that wasn't the look I was going for.

But here in Scottsdale, in 2011, with a mom who writes at home and has her professional clothes gathered neatly in one side of the closet, it's a windfall for the kid. She looks around at the clothes I think would be perfect for her, rejects them all, steals my favorite top off its hanger and sneaks off before I completely notice what she's doing.

As I'm exiting the bathroom I notice another thing: Bar Mitzvahzilla coming in half-dressed, insisting he also has no clothes to wear. The last thing I see is him heading off to his own shopping spree - in Husband's closet.

Did you ever "shop" in your mom's or sister's closets? Can you? Does your daughter "shop" in yours?

Thanks for reading!
Linda Pressman, author of Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie
Available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, Indiebound, in many local libraries, and at Changing Hands in Tempe.
(The "Faceshuk" in the title and this code: 3daa678fe7c57f042a0645dfc6668578 are intended to establish my blog ownership on the Faceshuk site. Check it out!)

Animals Past and Present

2011-10-26T22:38:00.003-07:00

I'm sitting at my desk, working diligently, when two furry animals suddenly decide to stand on top of my work area, blocking out my screen.

Oh yeah. They're my cats. Our bright idea of about six months ago: adopting sister kittens.

We thought that our kids should have pets before they completely grew up; that it would help them stop being self-centered and care about something smaller than themselves. In that we were right. What I didn't expect was that with their silent, mysterious presence and their baleful glares when their food bowl is empty, how much I have to stand around staring at the cats, trying to read their minds, asking them to lead me to whatever is wrong, like Rin Tin Tin or Lassie.

I finally realize what this all reminds me of. It reminds me of the worst days of being single; in particle, of what it was like being in a relationship with the very Bad Boyfriend I once had.

Like him, the cats don't talk much. I have to sit around trying to guess what they want, what mood they're in, try to read their minds. I never know if they like me so I wait for a little bit of parcelled out affection but end up wounded each time they run from me. They use me for food and shelter. As a matter of fact, I don't remember them ever paying for anything. And sometimes they spend the night cuddled with me and sometimes I just don't know where they are.

Basically, they're using me.

One big difference? Unlike the Bad Boyfriend, who I had delusions of marrying, I actually am married to these cats.

Ever notice human traits in your animal friends? Even bad ones? Cat lover or dog lover?
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I've had difficulties commenting on my own blog and other blogspot blogs for months, as well as other technical difficulties. Bear with me; it appears to be better now!
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Linda Pressman author of Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie
Top Rated on Amazon and available there, on bn.com, local libraries and other retailers. See the tab above to read an excerpt!

Jet Lagged

2011-08-17T21:26:00.000-07:00

First there was just the fact that I needed to write a blog post. After all, I had a lot to write about. It was summer in Arizona. That's always seemed to lend itself to a lot of whining.

But then, when mulling over vacation spots, I somehow convinced Husband to run wild and free and farther than he'd ever gone before. We suddenly booked four flights to Israel. With two weeks notice.

I could still have written a blog post, but then again, we only had flights booked. We had no place to stay. Can I even try to count how many nights I sat in my office instead of working, with one web browser up with a Google map of Tel Aviv, another of Jerusalem and yet another with Vacation Rentals in Israel?

There were the flights: seventeen hours there and eighteen hours back. There was the jet lag, a day on the way there and a week long after we got back. There was the crazy, mixed-up, beautiful insanity of being in Israel, of going on tours with our guide driving around hairpin turns with a Jewish Bible in one hand and the steering wheel in the other. There was my broken hair straightener, which led to me being assumed for Israeli everywhere we went, with my gigantic head of something almost resembling hair. There was the moment the four of us were crammed into a minuscule grocery store, frantically trying to buy food for the Sabbath, and staring at the all Hebrew packaging around us. We had no idea what anything was. There was standing at the Western Wall, with women all scrambling for a spot to talk to God, standing there crying, one next to another.

And just when I was figuring things out, just when the money wasn't looking like play money to me any longer and I could actually figure out what the change was in my wallet, just when the sounds around me started to sound familiar - like language - we left.

How was your summer vacation? Have you ever been on a vacation and left a piece of yourself there?

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This week Kristen over at Motherese has posted a book review of Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie and will post an interview with me tomorrow. She is also giving away a copy of the book, the winner will be drawn from those who leave comments. Please head over there!

The Difference Between Boys and Girls, Part I

2011-07-04T18:05:00.000-07:00

I'm dashing off to my exercise class, leaving the almost 16-year-old watching the almost 12-year-old. They know the rules: on this particular day of the week they have to do three chores each. These chores are pretty well established and, considering how sloppily the kids do them, easily done. Stainless steel, toilets, vacuuming, mirrors, countertops.

As I run out I say to Daughter, "No TV or computer until you do your three chores!" There's no reply, which, in retrospect, seems ominous. But I do hear a final click of her hands on the keyboard.

I finish my exercise class, get in my car and call home. Daughter answers. I ask, "What chores did you do?" I'm genuinely curious. I'm optimistic, upbeat, expecting a list in response. Maybe a list of the easiest stuff she could do, but a list nonetheless.

She says, "I didn't watch TV or go on the computer."

"So?"

"So I didn't do any chores."

I take a deep breath, not wanting to scare anyone in the parking lot I'm in by yelling loudly. I ask her to put Bar Mitzvahzilla on the phone. Although by now I'm expecting the worst, I ask him the same question, "What chores did you do?"

"Stainless steel, toilets and vacuuming. Can I go? I'm watching TV?"

Ah, the differnce between boys and girls. Part I.

Ever had this sneaky over-interpretation of your instructions happen with your kids? Ever wish you had just a little more time to lay out exactly what you want them to do ahead of time, with all the possible caveats so that there are no loopholes?

Linda Pressman,
Author of Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie, now on Amazon, Barnes and Noble.com, Books-a-Million, Powells, at Changing Hands, on Kindle and in libraries.

Paper Jam

2011-06-23T23:32:00.000-07:00

Here's the scene: it's my bedroom. The bed, to be exact. Nicely made, every thing looking normal, except there's a very large and disorderly pile of papers on the bed. Very, very large.

Suddenly the pile of paper moves. It breathes. It coughs. A voice can be heard from inside the pile of papers - my voice - exclaiming at the volume of paper, the quantity of paper, the sheer duplicative quantity of paper.

Of course - it's the camp paperwork and I've gotten buried beneath it.

My kids have gone to the same summer day camp almost every summer for the last six or seven years. The first year the amount of paperwork was a terrible surprise. I paid the camp fees, filled out a nice little two-sided sheet with our family information and a credit card number and, with a smile on my face, prepared to walk away. Suddenly I was handed a brick of paperwork and told to complete the forms contained in it for each child and then registration would be complete.

There's the normal stuff in there, like the contact sheet with phone numbers, and then there's stuff like the "Get to know your camper" sheet where I have to tell them about my children's psychological foibles to maybe smooth their way through their weeks there. Husband and I have had no small amount of fun over the years imagining what we'd really like to write under "Child's Three Favorite Activities" as opposed to what we actually write there. Not to mention the "Three characteristics that best describe your child." There's the challah order form, the lunch order form, the aftercare form - which needs to be filled out whether we use aftercare or not - and the friend request form. Then there's the one form I have to fill out twice: the medical/immunization form.

I've come to realize this form is created only to torture me since I must obtain my children's immunization records and then transpose those records onto the form. Each year I peer quizzically at the immunization form from the doctor's office, where they've abbreviated certain shots under one name, and tried to match them up to the form, where they've abbreviated them another.

As the years have gone by, my dread of doing this paperwork has sometimes become a deciding factor in whether my kids will go to camp, kind of like the "Sponge-worthy" Seinfeld episode. Is it paperwork-worthy? Is one week of camp worth it to fill out the paperwork? A resounding no. Two weeks? Three?

I jump back in the pile, pick up my pen with my claw-like hand, and finish the task.

Are your kids in summer camp? How voluminous are the enrollment forms? Every get overwhelmed and discouraged by paperwork?

Blame it on the Blemishes

2011-06-13T22:03:00.005-07:00

I have an important motto I've made up myself that is related particularly to the raising of children. At least I think I've made it up.

It didn't occur to me quite away because, frankly it wasn't needed. It occurred to me when Bar Mitzvahzilla went from being a smooth-faced twelve-year-old several years ago, into a raging, hormonal thirteen-year-old. And then the pimples came.

It was a normal night. The kids were up too late. The husband causing a ruckus in the house because those same kids had managed to mess up the house in the most minute ways; ways that seemed intended to drive us to the brink of insanity. I was hiding in my office, trying to get some writing done and wondering - lamenting - why my office didn't have a door. Oh yeah, I know. Because it's the living room.

Then Bar Mitzvahzilla marched in for a goodnight kiss. No knocking because, of course, there was no door. He presented a face full of pimples for me to kiss. And I, of course, kissed the pimples.

It's not like I spent my life purposely kissing pimples. The common wisdom when I was heading into high school was that you could catch these things if you made out with a boy who had them. Since I already had enough of them to send makeup counter ladies running in horror from their stations in the mall, I wasn't going to purposely rub faces with someone who had worse pimples than me. There was also all the other stuff we believed about our skin right then: chocolate causes pimples. Rubbing alcohol will cure pimples (topically, not as a drink...). Use a blackhead popper on your pimples (hello, scarring!). We even believed that one day soon we'd grow out of them.

And, just like my nascent belief, as a teenager, in the fact that a ten-pound weight loss could change my life, I also believed that if I strategized just right, I could declare war on the pimples, and fix my social life.

I don't think Bar Mitzvahzilla was philosophizing quite as much as I had, as an adolescent girl. But he did march into my office for a kiss. So here's my motto, reiterated in case you missed it, used in the fullness of loving parenthood: Kiss the Pimples. And then get that kid to a dermatologist.

Any horrible acne stories from your youth? Archaic beliefs or practices? Any experience with this situation? Anyone else spend a lot of time in the dermatologist's office and not for Botox and Juvederm?

Linda Pressman, Author of Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie
available on Amazon, Kindle, Barnes and Noble.com, libraries and other retailers

To Sleep or Not To Sleep

2011-06-05T21:51:00.002-07:00

One thing about giving birth to Bar Mitzvahzilla - besides him being born a pound and a half, besides the whole prematurity thing, besides the coming home with an apnea monitor and an oxygen tank - he was never one of those kids who would fall asleep in the car.

We had to go a lot of places when he first came home from the hospital. Four times a week back to the pediatrician to monitor his weight gain and recovery from recent hernia surgery; a cardiac surgeon; an ophthalmologist; other specialists. And they were all very far from my house, like near the hospital where Bar Mitzvahzilla had been born. Could he have fallen asleep one time?

Instead I'd be driving along the interminable mountain passes of Phoenix on a thirty-minute ride downtown with a squalling by then four-pound baby sunk into a rear-facing car seat facing away from me in my car. Do you know how this drove me nuts? Can you imagine how many times I had to stop to make sure he wasn't strangling on something in the sunken tunnel of his car seat? Because he couldn't really fill the thing up.

Now Bar Mitzvahzilla is nearly sixteen. A big clunk, really, and thank goodness for it considering his beginning. I pick him up at school and he is irritable. Everyday. I guess he doesn't remember those heartbreaking scenes from next to his incubator. Finally, we descend into silence after he realizes that, whether he likes it or not, one particular day I'm bringing him to our store to work. Then it gets too quiet. He's sleeping.

A kid who could never even close his eyes as a tiny newborn now finds that the motion of the car lulls him tranquilly to sleep, in bright daylight and at nearly sixteen-years-old.

I shake my head at the contradictions of parenthood, happy for the silence from my teenager, wondering if every time he fights with me I could just somehow trick him into the car and make him falls asleep. Then I drive on, towards our store.

Did you have a kid who fell asleep in cars or stayed alarmingly awake? Any annoying sleep tales of teenagers?

Linda
Author of Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie
Available on Amazon, Kindle, B&N, and other retailers

Daughter vs. the Wall

2011-05-25T21:36:00.002-07:00

Lately Daughter's been on a cleaning spree. Not of our kitchen island, on which she has scattered arts and crafts supplies and anything and everything she could dump on there. Not of our family room where she has snuck plates, wrappers, cups, and cans, treating "her chair" in the middle of the room like it's her private garbage can, while not having anything actually make it into a garbage can.

Instead, she's suddenly started cleaning out her room. First she had an idea, which she presented to me and Husband in compelling detail: her room is too small and we need to take the wall down between it and the room next door. She had some drawings handy for how this would be accomplished, had chosen paint colors, and had a white board showing the eventual placement of her futon (she doesn't actually have a futon) and her walk-in closet (ditto). Every morning during my recent illness, the first thing I saw when I cracked my eyes open was Daughter standing at the foot of my bed with her white board and easel, ready to provide me with a detailed presentation on the subject. And, by any chance, do I happen to have the blueprints for our house laying about?

Husband expressed some doubt that she could actually keep a space twice as large clean. "Let's see you clean up the room you've got and then we'll talk about it," he said.

His statement, I'm sure, is what triggered the cleaning frenzy.

This is how our lives were before: once a year or so, Daughter would lure me into her room on some pretense, I'm not sure what, and I'd find myself still sitting there about two days later sorting through junk, Daughter by my side and two gigantic bags nearby - one for giveaway and one for garbage. We'd slowly move through the room until it was clean, or at least vacuumable.

But Daughter, in her present cleaning frenzy, is handling things differently. She is slowly divesting herself of everything in the room, till now it resembles a prison cell or nun's chamber. Basically, there's a bed in there. She's emptied out her dresser, one whole side of her closet, packed away some chairs she once loved, and has told me she doesn't need her bookshelves anymore. Or books.

I'm unsure of what's exactly going on here. Is she moving out? Because she's only eleven. I'm all for the kids moving out but I had kind of thought they'd wait till they got through middle school.

Husband thinks he can hold her off, keep setting new and more miserable cleaning tasks for her, trying to avoid the home renovation issue, the big daughter/small room issue. But I know what's going to happen. With Daughter's indomitable will, once she's done with her emptying, she'll take down that wall herself.

Do you ever recognize a will stronger than your own in your child or children? Messy kids? Determined kids?

From the Sick Bed

2011-05-16T23:54:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I'll admit it, I've been sick. Like really sick. Right when I'm supposed to be full of energy, launching my newly published book into the stratosphere, promoting it, signing it, mailing it off to editors and columnists, what am I doing? I'm laying in a heap on my bed, my eyes replaced by Xs, like a cartoon.

And what's worse is that I have a mysterious type of ailment. Part asthma. Part exhaustion. Part massive throbbing headache. Could it be the years upon years that I've spent staying up till two in the morning writing the darn book? Could it be all the years of getting four to five hours of sleep per night, all catching up with me at once?

Gone are the days of me waking up like a robot, showing up at my exercise class, magically appearing everywhere I'm supposed to be. Now I'm lucky if I can lift my head from my pillow. I crawl out of the house just in time to pick up Bar Mitzvahzilla from high school at 2:20 each day and then I creak over to Daughter's school to get her at 3:15. And that's the total of my big daily activity. I walk back in the house and fall back on my bed exhausted. I can feel my muscles atrophying.

Yet, somehow, when Husband hauled me off to the ER, I wasn't sick enough for them. They triaged me right to the bottom of the list, making me wait six hours and talking to me about the "impression of not being able to breath." Although with all the tests they did I guess I know it's not fatal.

You know you're really sick when, instead of the daughter taking care of the elderly mother - like I normally do - the eighty-year-old mother has to call me ten times a day worried sick about whether I'm dying. Today she even had my nearly deaf eighty-six-year-old stepfather call. I could hear her yelling at him in the background as he fumbled with the phone, "WHAT BOB? YOU CAN'T ASK HER HOW SHE IS?"

And, because of the hearing thing, because of the eighty-six-year-old thing, when he asked how I was, it was just simpler to say, "Fine, I'm fine."

And maybe I will be. Tomorrow.

Ever had illness get in the way of your plans? Ever had to become the patient when you've been the caretaker?
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The Un-Mother's Day

2011-05-09T22:01:00.004-07:00

I didn't really get anything for Mother's Day. Even I had to confess that I didn't deserve anything.

It wasn't because I'm not a good mom. I'm a good mom. When you take the Exemplary Mom days and the Pathetic Mom days and average them out, I think I come out a solid, average Good.

But here's why I didn't insist on a monetary gift. In our family we have a bunch of our own personal "holidays" that come up in rapid succession early in the year - Husband's birthday in January, our anniversary in February, my birthday in March. If you wiggle that around a little (and, compulsive shopper that I am, I do wiggle it around a little) I manage to loop Chanukah in from December, Valentine's Day in February, and spread it out into Mother's Day in May, which has the affect of leaving Husband not knowing if he's coming or going. It's a nonstop spoiled wife festival, to the point where I practically have him buying me a present for his birthday in January and wondering if perhaps we should start celebrating April Fool's Day, with him the fool.

So this year I let him off the hook for Mother's Day. We celebrated with the one mother we have between us, mine. A present for her.

I'll make do with the one I got for Ground Hog Day.

Do you get spontaneous gifts from your partner or do you feel like you need to hypermanage this issue? Are you a great, spontaneous gift-buyer?

Kitchen Dysmorphia

2011-05-01T23:54:00.001-07:00

This week, having a little more time on my hands since my book got published, I returned to my kitchen.

Not that I haven't been in there at all during the months I was editing the manuscript. I was in and out. When procrastinating my work, I'd grab something to eat in front of my TV, watching the stupidest shows I could find (Hoarders and Say Yes to the Dress). When not procrastinating, I'd grab something to eat in front of my computer.

This week I got ambitious. I started cooking.

My family looks on my cooking ambitions with some trepidation. For some reason, maybe it's coming from a gigantic family, maybe it's the deprivation my parents experienced during the Holocaust, maybe it's because I used to be much bigger and part of me wants to eat a house, but I can't seem to cook normal quantities of food. I only cook for armies.

When I make barley soup, I overestimate the amount of barley needed - the barley pearls are so tiny, who can tell how many is the right amount? Suddenly I end up with sludge-like soup, quicksand textured soup. A mallet is needed to stir.

This week I made a chinese noodle salad. I used twelve packages of ramen noodles. Twelve.

But then, of course, I panicked. What if twelve packages of ramen noodles weren't enough? Maybe I should put in an extra pound of spaghetti noodles? Well, I'm here to tell anyone who's curious about it that you can't actually boil twelve packages of ramen noodles and one pound of spaghetti in any normalish kind of soup pot, unless maybe you're a witch and own a cauldron.

So I'm the bane of my family. They're terrified to see me enter the kitchen, to see me hauling up my gear - three, maybe four, soup pots for the one dinner that night, bags of potatoes and onions - they're terrified because there always will be a lot of leftovers. Like for the whole neighborhood.

And tonight? I threw those noodles away.

Does anyone else cook the wrong amount of food all the time? Cook for an army when there are many less than that living in your home? Worry about never having enough?

Book Come Lately

2011-04-24T22:08:00.001-07:00

A long, long time ago - okay, December - I said that my book would be out in about two weeks. That would have made it the middle of January. Needless to say, it wasn't. My book, Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie, was just released this past Tuesday, April 19th, which would make it about three months longer than the two weeks I estimated. That's all. About normal for my usual combination of procrastination and angst.

Why did I say that my book would be ready to roll in two weeks? Was I insane? Was I intent on causing myself full-blown depression and paranoia? Did I need even more pressure on myself than the regular pressure I had of just trying to write a book about being raised by somewhat insane Holocaust Survivor parents in a Chicago suburb in the 60s, the sixth of seven daughters, where normal was very abnormal, indeed?

Obviously, I said it'd be done in mid-January for a couple of reasons. First of all, I believed it. Second of all, I underestimated the poisonous combination of a neurotic perfectionist (and, trust me, a book can never be perfect) and a book project. Third of all, I had to get used to the idea that writing memoir is like running through the streets naked. Did I really want to run through the streets naked?

Then the intervening months took place. Like anyone who's gotten used to blogging, I missed it, but felt I'd pinned myself in. The next blog entry had to be about the book being published. How could I skulk back here and act like everything was normal with no book in hand?

So here I am, back in Bar Mitzvahzilla-land, the blog now moss-covered, stale, somehow frozen (so to speak) on a snowy December day in Flagstaff, my kids now four months older. Now, thank goodness I can leave the insanity of my childhood behind and get back to normal - the usual insanity of my everyday life.

Do you miss blogging when you take a break, or miss reading blogs if you take a break from that? Do you write down topics so you can cover them later or are they forever gone?

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If anyone would like to lend a hand with my virtual book launch, email me at barmitzvahzilla@hotmail.com or leave me a comment here. All help is appreciated!

The Need to Freeze

2010-12-27T23:29:00.000-07:00

There are many things illogical about living in Arizona. There's the summer, for instance, when we get very excited as the weather "cools down" to 105 degrees. There's the general weirdness of people decorating cacti for Christmas because that's one of the only living things in the front yards. Okay, there's even the general weirdness of being a Jew in Arizona - being rare, like a unicorn or Big Foot.

But one of the strangest things about being an Arizonan is the way we all go seeking snowy weather in the winter, like there's some genetic need to freeze built into our DNA - like the salmon swimming up river in Washington State - and we head out. Since I was born in Chicago and Husband was born in Milwaukee, you'd think we'd have worked this need to freeze out of our systems as kids, but no, here we are, in the middle of our now annual exodus to Northern Arizona.

So even though I've lived in Arizona since 1973, even though I hadn't seen snow since my that last winter in Chicago, last year when we got to Flagstaff it all came back to me. I immediately remembered it all. Layered clothes, bundled up, always prepared. Similar to the Brownie I once was, but the snowy version. And last year it made sense. It was a glorious winter wonderland. Freezing cold with pristine, untouched snow everywhere, we didn't have to bother with a dedicated sledding area; everywhere we looked was a sledding area. We went sledding behind our hotel; we practically went sledding to our car since each night it was frosted in.

This year, except for some gray, piled up frozen slush, there's virtually no snow. Patchy hillsides with slush, mud, rocks and trees, so we can break our necks hurtling down a mudslide on our speeding snow disks.

We try to put a positive spin on it for Bar Mitzvahzilla and Daughter. It's still cold, right? It's good to be cold, right? How nice to be away from home on vacation! And look at the nice hotel we're staying in! Free breakfast everyday! And now, with all that stupid sledding out of the possibilities, we can spend all our time eating out, right? Let's go to another bookstore, kids!

Are we going to get away with this? Let's put it this way: Daughter was packed a week before we went on vacation. She made a list of all the restaurants we'd go to ahead of time and the days we'd go to each. Both kids are up at the crack of dawn, dressed and waiting for Husband to awaken and take them to the hotel breakfast. Children this neurotic aren't going to let us get away with anything.

Next year: Tucson.

Do you go on vacation seeking something in particular at different parts of the year? Have you ever sought out snow intentionally or is the seeking always for beach and sun? Anyone else have kids this driven?

I'm happy to report that I'm getting close to publishing my book and hope to have it available in the first half of January. I'll post here when it's available in both in print and e-book form and am sorry I've been so sparse lately with blog posts. Thanks to everyone for all your encouragement.

A Wildebeest Kind of Winter

2010-12-16T23:35:00.000-07:00

I was driving in my car with Bar Mitzvahzilla, then three, in December 1998. Of course there was no snow, this being Arizona - instead there were Christmas lights on all the palm trees and cacti in the neighborhood, especially the yard of one neighbor who seemed determined to offset our unlit Jewish house by putting up so many lights that his house could be seen from outer space.

I was ready for my his questions. He'd been too young the previous two years to notice anything as we drove around our tiny Jewish world - to our synagogue, to his Jewish preschool and back to our Jewish home. This bubble had to burst sometime.

It wasn't like he hadn't been exposed to the outside world. My family is so diverse it's like a United Nations conference. I was ready for an age-appropriate discussion of religious pluralism. Sure enough, I noticed he was staring out of the window, his mouth open, his eyes wide.

He pointed at the neighbor's house and yelled, "Mom! A wildebeest!"

This I didn't expect. Of course, I knew there wasn't actually a wildebeest in my neighbor's front yard. Even my HOA couldn't be that lax. But I said, "A wildebeest? Where?"

He was pointing at a reindeer. I thought quickly. Should I tell him the truth or should I let him have a little magic for one more year?

I said, "Wow! A wildebeest!"

Sometime earlier that year Bar Mitzvahzilla had become obsessed with the movie "The Lion King." After watching it every day for a year, I came to like it, too. For some reason, his favorite scene was when Simba's father Mufasa fell off the cliff into the stampeding wildebeests. He re-enacted this in our home day after day, clinging to the clifflike edge of my bed, while I, Mufasa's evil brother, Scar, flung him off the cliff. Bar Mitzvahzilla would fall to the floor onto a herd of toy wildebeests that just happened to be stampeding by on the carpet.

So he was a little obsessed with wildebeests. Having them appear all over the neighorhood that December was an truly a wonderful thing.

After he noticed the first wildebeest in our neighborhood, we started taking walks each night for wildebeest sightings. There were the ones who moved their heads up and down as they fed, the ones that looked off to the side, watching warily for lions, the ones that were frozen, caught in mid-prance, or skittering in the hunt, running from hyenas. If something didn't make sense - like the wildebeest that leapt in the air with the blinking red nose - Bar Mitzvahzilla just ignored it. His only disappointment? That there were no elephants adorning my neighbors' lawns, no giraffes with their heads sticking up as tall as the palm trees, and no actual predators lurking in the bushes.

Eventually it ended. He grew older, and we had the talk we needed to have. But for a while, our neighborhood became an African savannah, with wildebeests magically standing in each yard and lions just around the bend.

Has your child ever made up their own answer to a question that was very different than the answer you may have given? Any obsessions with movies, watching them over and over again? Do remember seeing magically through your kids' eyes?

* Although I've always written original pieces for this blog, I wanted to tell my Wildebeest story so I reran it here. This piece originally appeared in the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix on December 11, 2009. Here's the link to the original piece: http://www.jewishaz.com/issues/story.mv?091211+winter

Mother, Interrupted

2010-12-07T23:29:00.000-07:00

Here's what happens when your mom is diagnosed with Alzheimer's. At least if you're me. There's this total scoffing at the doctor's diagnosis. There's the trotting out of a hundred tiny facts your mother remembers even better than you and you're thirty years younger than her. There's the railing at a system of treating the elderly that throws them into categories: one gets dementia, then next Alzheimer's. Next!

Then you notice that she loses a few words here and there. Easy words like the names of her favorite restaurant or the word "checkbook." Then you notice her conversation becomes a little constrained, topic-wise, like she only wants to talk about food, she can talk about it for hours, yet she only says the same thing over and over again - how good it is. You find yourself missing your mother and she's sitting right in front of you.

Then maybe there's an interim event - a fall perhaps, or maybe a car accident, in your case. And then there's no more room for denial. Denial packs a bag and slithers away in the middle of the night. When your mother is recuperating from her injuries, which means she's finally left her convalescing couch, her world becomes constrained. She stopped cooking during her weeks on the couch and now, she tells you, she no longer cooks. Nor your stepfather. Food just magically appears every day and, anyway, they don't eat much. Some rice, some noodles, maybe a piece of challah. And, yes, it's good. Very, very good.

The mother you had - the annoying, argumentative one, the one you used to butt heads with, the one who used to find a way to interject a Holocaust story into every conversation until you were sure you too had lived in the forest running from the Nazis, that mother has been interrupted. And in her place? A different mother. A different kind of mother. A mother and a daughter and a child all at once.

Interrupted.

Have you ever had diagnostic news where your first reaction was denial? Have you ever had a relationship interrupted abruptly due to illness or otherwise, something other than you had planned?

Room of Doom

2010-11-29T23:48:00.000-07:00

In an act that I can only blame on menopausal hormones, about two years ago I got rid of my cleaning people. Sure, I had my reasons. It was a husband/wife team and the husband used to creepily follow me around while I got ready for my exercise class in the morning. Then I'd get home after they were gone, lift up the ottoman in the family room, and find out that they'd shoved a bunch of junk under there. Was it them or was it hormones?

Either way, they were gone. I was sure I could handle it myself. I have two big strapping children and a helpful husband, right?

Now, looking back, I want to kick myself with this insane thinking. Husband was once in the mindset that a cleaning crew was necessary our existence. I mean, he had one before I met him! Before I fired them Husband had no idea that wives actually could clean houses. Now? No longer.

So that leads me to this week and the Hannukah party I'm having here on Sunday. And the absolute ruin I live in.

Since I can't really handle all the mess in all the rooms at once, I've worked out a method over these last two years of being the housecleaner. I call it Room by Room, similar to Anne LaMott's Bird by Bird. I only tackle one room at a time. I don't get sidetracked. And one caveat: once I'm done with that particular room, Bar Mitzvahzilla and Daughter aren't allowed to walk into it again until the party is over. Even if it's, like, their bathroom and there are three days till the party. Go to the neighbor's house.

Now I know I've got five days still but right now our house is basically a tear down and I need to use my time wisely. So I plan to start with the rooms no one uses at all, like the dining room, my art room (haven't used that in awhile), the den (where I can easily clean around Bar Mitzvahzilla sitting frozen staring at the TV screen with only his thumbs moving on his Xbox controller), and my office (thank goodness for my months-long writer's block!)

The rooms we really live in - the family room and kitchen - I have to treat carefully. I can't completely move the kids out, right? And once they're cleaned I don't want to be chasing the kids around and watching each cookie crumb fall to the floor with a wild-eyed look in my eye. So I'll hold off on that and use the kids wisely. Have them do their own rooms. I'll assign chores to them that will be done badly, all in a mad, crazed dash to get to whatever's been promised them in return for those chores.

Then, in one last herculean effort, I'll unclutter the rest of the house and move every last piece of remaining junk, by putting it all into my bedroom - the Room of Doom. Then I'll blockade the door so no one can get in there.

When I greet my guests on Sunday night, our house will look like a house that actual human beings live in. I'll demur when the few people who've never seen the house before ask for a tour that includes my bedroom (Sorry! It's kind of messy right now!) and then wait for the inevitable outcome of the Hannukah party: a destroyed house. Wrapping paper everywhere, food sloshed and dropped, ground into the floors, babies running and drooling.

And then I'll clean it again. Maybe in time for next Hannukah.

Do you clean just to let things get messed up again or leave them messy and clean afterwards? Do you have a method for cleaning? Do you have cleaning people or do it yourself? Ever have one "Room of Doom" where everything bad is hidden?

A Pilgrim's Potluck

2010-11-25T22:44:00.000-07:00

Being one of seven sisters means a lot of things. It means that I grew up in a crowded house and found it downright eerie to be alone. It meant never eating out, wearing hand-me-downs; it meant having relatives look at me and always needing to guess "which sister" I was and always get my name wrong. For ease they reverted to numbering us. I am still known as number six.

It also means this: I've never once made a Thanksgiving meal. I'm not happy about this because I kind of like making a big, nightmarish, complicated meal (see Passover blog entries from last spring), but I don't get to. See, I'm not the sister in charge of Thanksgiving. I'm the sister in charge of Hanukkah, so to speak, and since Hanukkah bounces around the calendar, one year at the end of December and the next at the beginning - like this year - I can't do both.

So for Thanksgiving we drive off from our house in whatever direction the party's at - this time it was at sister number seven's new house. I'm assigned a dish to bring, always something suspiciously simple because there seems to be an impression in our family that I can't cook. One small mistake - a charred, inedible brisket - in all these years and my reputation was ruined forever. So this year I was assigned a very traditional Thanksgiving dish, one everyone fantasizes whenever they think about Thanksgiving, right after they think about turkey, stuffing and pecan pie. I was assigned the veggie tray.

We have a veggie tray at our party for a couple reasons. First of all, in a family with seven sisters and many grown nieces and nephews, everyone's always dieting so vegetables are welcome. Second of all, there are so many people coming (just add up for a moment seven sisters, husbands, seventeen nieces and nephews, significant others, and five great-nieces) that we run out of food assignments. Hence, the veggie tray. Maybe it's not just my incompetence or my reputation as a bad cook; maybe it's that: there's nothing left to assign. I take solace in the idea that the pilgrims probably had a lot of vegetables at their first Thanksgiving.

Luckily I didn't screw it up. Maybe I can parlay this success into something more significant next year, like soda pop.

Do you cook Thanksgiving or go somewhere? In your family are you assigned food to bring? Ever get assigned something that didn't quite fit the holiday or something really easy?

Synagogue Shopping Season

2010-11-18T22:39:00.001-07:00

I was at my synagogue the other day with Daughter and since Daughter is now five feet one (I think she grew twelve inches in the last two years) one of the older ladies I know there asked me, "Have you booked her Bat Mitzvah date yet?"

I looked chagrined. Every good Jewish mother knows she's supposed to book the date with the synagogue at two years out and I'm at one year and nine months. What's the problem?

Is it that I'm afraid that instead of having a Bar Mitzvahzilla, like my son started morphing into around the time period of his Bar Mitzvah, I'll have quite the Bat Mitzvahzilla on my hands? Am I afraid I'll have to change the name of the blog? Or maybe that I'll have to start a new blog just to keep track of her varying demands (a kids' table shaped like an 'R'? Really? Her name in lights?)

Here's the real problem: I'm not sure my synagogue is going to exist in September of 2012.

There's this strange thing that happens in the Jewish community in Phoenix and, for all I know, in the Jewish communities all over this country: Sometime each summer the Jewish community goes synagogue shopping. Since synagogue dues are traditionally due before the high holidays which tend to fall in September and October, around August a synagogue fair is held to showcase new synagogues, old synagogues, and changed synagogues.

In a community like Phoenix, where there are now fifty-five synagogues and many people who don't affilitate at all, sometimes it feels like, well, synagogue shopping season. Like there just might be a newer, more exciting place elsewhere, a younger, more exciting Rabbi, or lower dues. And, of course, there are valid reasons to leave a place of worship, like fees, like the Rabbi, like for spiritual fulfillment.

But what happened during this past summer was that a lot of people left the place that we belong to, threatening its existence.

Husband and I are a little dull-witted about this kind of stuff. It's not that we're massively spiritually fulfilled by our congregation, it's just that we have a relationship with them that, after thirteen years, feels right. It feels like home. And when we're there - even if we don't understand a word of the Hebrew - it reminds us of the services we grew up with and the Judaism of our parents.

I still live with this one nightmare from soon after our move to Arizona, when I was fourteen. My dad died suddenly at age 48 of a massive heart attack and we were unconnected to the Jewish community. We had no community to lean on for support nor a Rabbi to help us or to eulogize our father. The rabbi who showed up at his funeral - was he on a rotation list for the unaffiliated? - came and went swiftly, almost forgetting my dad's name in the middle of the service. That will never happen to my children and what happened to my father will never happen to my mother. The child of fourteen is now fifty and has changed all of that.

So I guess I'd better just have a little faith and book the Bat Mitzvah date. And get ready for Bat Mitzvahzilla.

Do you tend to change your house of worship frequently, if you go to one? Do you have any clear motivating reason why you do or don't belong to one? In your religion do you have a choice about where you worship? Ever had a kid grow this quickly?

Crashing Through

2010-11-09T23:00:00.001-07:00

I've spent a lot of time at my mother's house over the last two-plus weeks, since she and Stepfather were involved in a car accident. I'm kind of their own personal adjuster since my old job, when I had a real job, was handling bodily injury claims for a really big insurance company for eighteen years.

There are things you discover when you putter around an old person's house with them each day. In the case of my mother I discover that, although she apparently has a inbred aversion to taking any prescription medication at all, instead taking horse-size vitamins impossible for me to sort into a pill container, she still somehow has saved every medication she's ever come across.

I open her medicine cabinet the night of her accident looking for Tylenol since one of the things I found out right away is that when you're eighty-five and eighty-years-old and involved in an accident, it might just be impossible to have someone really listen to you who's not related to you. Not the police officers and not the emergency room staff. No one. They'll take a look at your Medicare card, they'll make sure you're not dying, and then you'll be set on your way, even if you can't remember any one of your seven daughters' phone numbers. So neither of them had gotten a prescription at the emergency room.

In her medicine cabinet, however, were pill bottles dating back at least twenty-five years. There was one with my old name on it, from my ex-marriage, and I got divorced in 1989. It was like a pharmacy museum in there: old time pill bottles, typed up labels before computers were used, various treacherous caps that my mom would never be able to open now.

Then I spent some time with Stepfather. I found him outside a few days after the accident hanging up my mother's laundry on the clothes line with the radio blasting. Because we have a bantering relationship I said, "You guys must be very popular with the neighbors, what with the blasting radio and the makeshift clothesline," just a series of strings he had strung all over the patio from chair to chair. He laughed and explained the problem he was having with my mother overfilling her laundry basket and cracking the handles. He'd devised a fix, however, and took me to the garage to show me it. He'd glued the handles back together on both ends with some epoxy and was holding them in place with vise grips. Like twenty vise grips. I said, "Or you could buy a new laundry basket at the dollar store for a dollar, right?" Again, he laughed.

There have been a lot of frustrations over the last two weeks, a lot of doing something and then doing it again and again because of various problems in the process. But there are also several images that will always stay with me. There's the image of my stepfather sitting down silently next to my mother, in pain on the couch, and holding her hand. The image of them getting out of the car together when I took them to physical therapy, again walking hand in hand. And one I'd like to forget: that of my mother, whose Alzheimer's has worsened because of this, sitting beside me on the couch, but being nowhere near.

What strange things have you discovered in your parents' homes? Any strange collectibles, like prescription bottles? Witnessed any touching moments? Any heartbreaking ones?

Battle Over the Halloween Candy

2010-11-02T23:17:00.000-07:00

Halloween should be fun, right? Like since I have a son who is about to age out of Halloween - okay, he really did age out but went out anyway - and a daughter who's still young enough to enjoy it, I should be having fun, right?

But no, at our house there's the Battle of the Halloween Candy. And it starts before Halloween, quiets down to a lull on the day of Halloween (kids out hunting for more candy to fill up our coffers) and then continues after Halloween.

First problem: we buy a gigantic bag of candy from Costco ahead of time that contains only the good stuff - M&Ms (peanut and regular), Kit Kats, Baby Ruths, Reece's Peanut Butter Cups. The good stuff.

Then there's the second problem: the family wants to eat it all. I mean, they don't want to eat it all and end up pretending we're not home on Halloween, they want us to keep buying those bags over and over again for the next nine days.

The third problem: the children are distrustful of my husband, believing he'll devour all the best stuff and my husband is distrustful of the children since he, of course, both wants the best stuff and doesn't want them to eat anything. He might talk sanctimoniously about cavities but really he just doesn't want to share. Or buy another bag for fourteen bucks.

And that's only before Halloween.

Then the kids trick or treat and bring home more candy. And it turns out we don't run out of candy because I - the neurotic mother - did buy an extra bag. And then we pool it all and there's like a mountain of candy. And then they're off and fighting again.

So, each year, I get pulled into the fray. Mainly because I don't eat candy or chocolate or, really, anything fun at all, I'm as neutral as Switzerland, as placid as Lake Geneva. So both sides trust me with the candy. I'm the human form of an Armistice. I'm told to hide the candy - how does one hide a gigantic bowl of candy? -and then I have to parcel it out to each of them at three pieces per day.

Eventually they'll forget it, of course. (Except Husband. He'll remember it no matter what.) And then months will go by; I'll throw it out when it's down to Red Hots, black Licorice and Nerds. And then, suddenly, it will be September again, a little Fall in the air, gigantic bags of candy at Costco and I will buy a bag ahead of time. Again.

Do you save the treats for Halloween or indulge ahead of time? Does anyone special have to be in charge of "hiding" the candy in your house? Do you buy what you like or what you don't like? Any non-celebrators of Halloween out there?

R.I.P. BlackBerry

2010-10-26T23:10:00.002-07:00

On Sunday my BlackBerry died.

It's not like I had time to think about it right then. I had just walked in my mother's house with her and my stepfather, having gotten them from the emergency room where they'd been transported after a car accident. So right then I had time to think only about this: my injured eighty-year-old mother teetering down the hallway, making her way to her bedroom to undress and somehow climb into bed with lacerations and bruises all over her body. So, even though I'm a slave to the blinking red light of my phone, hypnotized by its allure, unable to resist its blinking call, I ignored it and took care of my mother.

You know how you always hear these phone horror stories, like about people losing all their lists of contacts and phone numbers and why didn't they just back it up before that happened, before disaster hit? Well, of course, that's what happened to me. I didn't back anything up, mostly because I didn't understand the back up technology. Like, copy it to what? Online or a memory chip in the phone? Ack. Here was my backup plan: one day I was planning to sit down with my phone and handwrite all those contacts into an actual paper phonebook. With all the time I've spent procrastinating over the last few months, you'd think at least I could have done that one thing, which would have been useful.

Instead? Dead BlackBerry flatlining in my palm. Injured mother on the couch. Tow yards, body shops and insurance companies calling nonstop, doctor appointments to be made, all of these places wanting to fax something, email something, text something. Phone needed.

Providentially this happens to be four days before our plotted defection from Verizon to AT&T and, perhaps, an iPhone 4. So what to do for a phone in the interim? My husband gives me this thing he has laying around the house. A flip phone. To text I have to go through the entire alphabet for each letter. No emails, no internet. I'm completely unwired in the daytime, like it's 1990 or something. It's like he handed me a chisel and a tablet and told me to scratch out messages.

But somewhere in my brain it's dawning on me that this thing I'm using is actually just what it's supposed to be: a phone. I now also know an incredible reason to have children, beyond the cute baby stage, beyond the make-me-proud stage. It's so when you're eighty and can't handle the small details of your life anymore and can't quite talk to strangers about how they're talking too fast and you don't understand them, it's a good thing to have your adult children standing like a fortress around you.

Do you back up your phone? Do you remember when you were really excited just to have a phone and now have to have a high tech gadget? Any preference between BlackBerrys or iPhones? Have you had to become the "parent" in any circumstances to your parent?

The On Again Off Again Romance

2010-10-18T22:10:00.000-07:00

The first hint that Husband and I might actually be able to get away together - for one whole day and a half - was when I got a memo from Daughter's school about her upcoming fifth grade trip. Daughter, who won't sleep out ever, no matter what, will also not miss a class trip, no matter how much she can't stand letting me out of her sight.

So, being a shameless opportunist, I thought, Maybe we can go out of town while she's gone! But then I thought, But what will we do with Bar Mitzvahzilla?

The next four weeks were a wild, rocky roller coaster, not knowing from one day to the next if our trip was on or off.

We couldn't go. After all, Bar Mitzvahzilla had to go to school each day. And football practice. And Hebrew High.

We could go. Bar Mitzvahzilla, it turned out, was on Fall Break the very same week as Daughter's trip. No school and we'd wiggle out of football practice and one session of Hebrew High.

We couldn't go. Who would keep him overnight?

We could go. My sister.

We couldn't go. My sister was moving and, just our luck, had moved forty miles from our house the day before we were leaving.

We could go. She'd meet us half way to get Bar Mitzvahzilla.

We couldn't go. Daughter started worrying about the trip. Her stomach started acting up.

We could go. Psychosomatic illness.

We couldn't go. Daughter, now crazed with separation anxiety, kept herself up half the night before her trip worrying about missing me. (Somehow she never worries about missing Husband.)

We could go. Planted her on a bunch of pillows on the floor next to my bed and let her watch me all night.

And we did go. We both saw her off at school, carefully, like delicate china, since by then we had non-refundable reservations at a hotel. Then Husband drove Bar Mitzvahzilla to the drop off point, dropped him off, and we took off like a flash.

The next day, rejuvenated, newly back in love, back in our halcyon days of honeymoon and romance, we drove back into town and met Daughter after her return from her trip. Within seconds our romance fled out the windows of the car. We became The Parents once again. Then we picked up Bar Mitzvahzilla so the two of them could bicker at each other. And then we were complete: one bickering couple in the front seat and another bickering in the back.

But there's still that memory. I can live on that for awhile.

Do you ever get away without kids? Do you have to plot and sneak to do it? Does getting away rejuvenate your relationship? What do you do about fighting kids? Any nervious children?

Time Management

2010-10-11T22:23:00.002-07:00

I sit down to write.

This takes a while. I wander throughout the house. I clean, I fuss, I do laundry, I make phone calls. I wander and wander, give myself imaginary tasks and then, when I absolutely can't avoid it any longer, I get in my office. Since I'm pretty good at avoidance, some days I don't make it in there at all.

Then I land in front of my computer. The blank screen. Well, I can't be expected to just jump into writing, can I? I need to relax into it. Mosey into it. Maybe flow into it, right?

So I check the news of the day on MSN, my homepage. Watch some video news, fume at the commercial spots as I watch the seconds count down. Ready to write now for sure. Oh, but I really need to check Facebook. And look, someone's posted some new photos. Then I look at a video they posted. Then I remember I'm supposed to be writing. Then I notice that there's a window I left up from another day of procrastination with some editor jobs in Phoenix. I look at those. Then I mull over whether I should I get a real job, like with pay? One is quite prestigious. What are the requirements? Wow, I'd barely have to lie to get it. Maybe this is what I'm meant to do with my life, not this interminable writing. Maybe I should put in for it. But I need my resume updated with my editor experience. So I pull up my last resume and I start sprucing it up to reflect the editor job I've been working for nearly two years.

I almost finish before doubt assails me. Do I want this job? What if I actually got this job? Could I handle a full-time job with my husband working 60 hours a week at our store? How would I go to exercise and my meetings? Who would pick up my kids? And take them to their myriad appointments? How would both kids participate in sports? And why did I quit my job six years ago where I made $35,000 for 18 hours of work only to sit here applying for a job that pays $40,000 for 40 hours of work? I'd better think about this. So I think about this for awhile. And then I think, look what time it is! I'd better hurry up and write. I have to pick up Daughter in ten minutes.

Pick up Daughter.

Get home with Daughter. Feed Daughter. Read mail. Clean kitchen. Help with homework. Get back in office. Whoa, I am really behind on blogging. Should I write a blog? Maybe I should read all my friend's blogs. Maybe I need to comment on my commenters? Wait a minute. I'm supposed to be writing. I pull up my book. I am now going to write for sure. The phone rings. Bar Mitzvahzilla's football practice is done. Done writing.

Pick up Bar Mitzvahzilla. Feed him. Feed Daughter again. Drive Bar Mitzvahzilla somewhere. I walk back in the house. I look right - my bed looms with comfy pillows on it and the remote controls for the TV set nearby. I look left, towards the long stark hallway to my office and the book I've forgotten how to write.

I turn right.

And the clock just keeps ticking.

Have any problems with procrastination? Is the Internet a big distraction? Does anyone else have this problem with not knowing what to do first? How hard is it to stick to a schedule when you're in charge of it?

A Commercial Break

2010-10-03T22:27:00.001-07:00

I'm not proud of the amount of time I've spent watching TV lately. Well, not just lately. I can pinpoint exactly when it started: it was late June, when we went on our first summer vacation to Flagstaff. Our hotel room didn't have HGTV, my favorite TV narcotic at the time, and so I started watching Daughter's favorite, Food Network. And that was it. Cupcake Wars. Iron Chef. Throwdown with Bobby Flay. Chopped.

I'm not going to discuss why I suddenly became fascinated with wasting my time and wasting my life away at that exact moment in time. Let's just say that it was right then that I had gotten very depressed about my writing. Coincidence? Probably not. I'll leave that issue to professionals, or to psychogenic drugs, or to the straitjacket that I'm destined for once the masking tape I've stuck myself together with comes undone.

But here's the idea that's dawned on me in this 3-4 month time period that I've been watching television with my kids: they watch commercials and I don't. And I don't mean just that. I mean, they really watch commercials, like they are rapt with attention for the commercials, paying more attention to them than to the actual show we're watching. And I, the polar opposite, do the exact opposite. I really don't watch commercials. I'm hostile to commercials. Commercials are my break time from television. I read, I run out of the room, I change loads of laundry.

Is it because I was raised in the 60s and 70s, when commercials consisted of Mr. Clean staring at himself in a see-through floor? Or station identification breaks? Or is it a combination of that and the fact that my kids have been raised in a world of Superbowl Sunday commercials, commercials as art forms, commercials with ongoing plots?

I thought I'd beat them at their own game so one day during the commercials I muted the sound, sure that the kids would join me in talking, mulling things over, or even in getting three minutes of chores done. Instead here's what I had: two zombies staring at the soundless TV and trying to read the lips of the actors. Turns out it wasn't really a problem anyway. They'd memorized the scripts long ago.

Been avoiding anything by vegging out lately? Do you watch commercials? Do your kids? Any Food Network aficionados?

Essential Yiddish: Part II

2010-09-25T23:20:00.002-07:00

"Yiddish" in Yiddish

I've been meaning to write a follow up to my post, Essential Yiddish: Part I, for quite some time. Not that I'm some kind of Yiddish expert. It's just that, having grown up with Yiddish swirling around my suburban Skokie house, listening to my mother give colorful commentary on everyone who walked in and out of our lives, I can't imagine life without it. Yiddish, to use a Yiddish word, is poonkt - a Yiddish word for getting something just right, perfectly, even if we're talking about my house, which is never actually just right or perfect.

The Yiddish Hoarder

The other day I was watching "Hoarders: Buried Alive." When the show was over I suddenly noticed that I hadn't seen my master bathtub in quite a while because of all the chazerai [haz-er-eye] (junk) I had piled in it. This was because I had taken that chazerai out of my closet and needed somewhere to put it. It's a constantly shifting pile of drek (see Post #1) around here, basically.

Since I was watching Hoarders with Daughter, a true nudnik [nood-nick] (precocious child), she noticed the resemblance between the house on the TV set and my bathroom. She said, "Mom, you're a hoarder!"

I took a deep breath. Instead of shraying [shrie-ing] (yelling) about it, moaning about it, wailing about it, I looked around and I thought, I need all that chazerai like a loch in kopp (hole in my head). But I wasn't sure I'd have the coyach [koy-ach] (energy) to do all the cleaning myself. So I asked the kleina [klayna] (little one) nudnik to help and Bar Mitzvahzilla, who, with all his football training, has become quite the shtarker (heavy lifter, tough guy).

And soon, though I was farmisht (exhausted); though I thought I might plotz (collapse) - the tub? Gornisht [gor-neesh-ed] (nothing). Empty.

Do you have things laying around that you need like a hole in your head? Do you find yourself using one of your kids for heavy lifting and that they have to help you now instead of vice versa? Do you have a secondary language that adds some color to your speech?

Comatose Parenting - Redux

2010-09-19T22:35:00.002-07:00

Husband and I were kind of unprepared to be parents, at least to a baby like Bar Mitzvahzilla. Born a pound and a half, he came home after ten weeks in the hospital weighing almost four pounds and hauling a lot of medical equipment, like an apnea monitor, an oxygen tank, special foods and medications, and he had to go to various doctors and specialists three times a week.

Also, he was a smart little baby. The hospital was a twenty-four-hour-a-day atmosphere and all the nurses loved him so he learned to stay up and play with them, as well as a tiny little baby can play. Let me tell you, besides saving his life, the nurses in the NICU and the Continuing Care Nursery really knew how to love a baby. The problem was, he didn't really get the whole Sleep During the Night schtick, much to Husband and my chagrin.

So suddenly there was this tiny, needy, scary looking thing plugged in, really, all over the house to various machines, and he was awake all the time. Husband and I coped as best we could. We set up four-hour shifts of sleeping and caretaking and rotated them so that both of us could be sure we'd get some sleep and our share of middle of the night misery. We'd each hit a breaking point, kind of rotate a breaking point between us, if you will, and, depending on our mental state, our general bug-eyed appearance, the pallor of our skin, and how much of our hair was standing on end, we'd give each other a break.

That's kind of how life feels right now. Not because Bar Mitzvahzilla is in any kind of fragile medical state, which he's not. But because of our wild-eyed frenzy. We assess each other each day. Who's been driving since 6:45 in the morning, and it's now 9 PM? Who has poured herself in a heap on the bed and can't move (that's always me)? Who drove to the high school five separate times in one day because of various football-related pick ups and drop offs? Who can handle the moment, at 9 pm on Tuesdays and Thursdays, when five hundred Jewish parents descend on the JCC all at once to pick up their teenagers from Hebrew High and who will melt down?

So who would have thought that at this late date in parenting we'd get this strange reminder of the earliest days of parenting, and via the same kid - Bar Mitzvahzilla? And that, somehow, we'd remember how to do the same thing all over again. The last one standing, the last one not crying with fatigue - that one goes for the final pick up.

Do you remember those days of bringing home a newborn? Did you have a method to balance the exhausted partners? Any random acts of lovingkindness to those you love lately?

Don't Rush Rosh Hashana

2010-09-12T22:36:00.006-07:00

In the row behind us at Rosh Hashana services this year was a family with young children. It was like being transported in time, watching them panic over the antics of their younger child who had no idea he was in a High Holiday service or how that differed from, say, Peter Piper Pizza.

What a difference a few years makes. I remember sitting there (standing there, running there) with my kids and looking longingly at the families with older children, children the ages of mine now, Bar Mitzvahzilla fifteen and Daughter eleven. I mean, I enjoyed that whole baby thing, and what was really ever cuter than Daughter in a little dress crawling with matching pantaloon thingies on anyway? But still. Services.

Still, we never put our kids in the babysitting offered and dreaded the "children's service" since we couldn't hear ourselves think. And we felt sorry for the Rabbi who'd have to conduct the service over the din. And we - okay I - really think that kids have to learn how to stand still. Especially considering that they spend the rest of the time ripping our house to shreds, for example. I explain to them that it's not that Husband and I love being at services, but it's Rosh Hashana. It's kind of amazing that we're still Jewish thousands of years later. Not to mention the Holocaust.

Do they complain before we go? Yes. Do they ask questions about why we have to go? Yes. This year I got a double whammy from Daughter since the first day was her birthday. Wait just a minute. I have to go to services on my birthday? Lucky her, I explained, sharing a birthday with the birthday of the world! I swear, I can put a positive spin on anything.

She was born on a different Rosh Hashana, eleven years ago. Because of Bar Mitzvahzilla's preemie birth, she had to be delivered four weeks early, on 9-9-99, as a matter of fact. By Yom Kippur I was back in synagogue with my newborn in my arms and the congregation oohing and aahing over her. She's grown up there, whether she realizes it or not.

So don't rush my Rosh Hashana, kids. Some things take the time they take. Time to sit and time to stand. Time to think about the last year and the year to come. And time to both whisper and yell at the kids at the same time.

So relax and enjoy it. Because Yom Kippur is right around the corner.

How do you handle the inevitable protests of children not wanting to go to religious services? Do you have a long history at your house of worship? Can you think back to the different ages of your children on the same holiday over the years?
_______________________________________
I'm participating in the Global Day of Jewish Learning and write this post in anticipation of November 7, 2010, when Jews around the world will share a day of dialogue and exploration.

The Zen of Football

2010-09-08T23:06:00.001-07:00

Okay, so I've now gone to two of Bar Mitzvahzilla's Freshman high school football games. This hasn't been without some great effort. Being a bit football challenged, just showing up took a lot of resolve. I knew that good moms go to their kid's games. So I had to go. That was that. No matter that each of the games have been away games, and I mean away - like the first one thirty miles north and the second one thirty miles south. And no matter that I soon learned a cruel fact of being the visiting team: our stands invariably face west into the setting sun in the 100 degree Arizona heat. But it's football, right? Suffering's part of the game.

So far our team lost one game and won another. Yesterday I found myself actually enjoying myself, sitting next to Husband and jumping up and down with all the other lunatic parents. The only thing I can't stand is Husband's preachy philosophizing about the game: what plays the coach should have played, what plays he might play, all the possibilities in the world, apparently, that have to be muttered into anyone's ear nearby. Considering that and the guy yelling "'Go Birds" intermittently, I think ear plugs could make this really good.

By the end of the two games Husband was muttering about something else: Bar Mitzvahzilla hadn't played. Today after practice he told me he doesn't expect to. Husband hit the roof but I chose to look at it in a more Zen-like manner.

When I was watching the game yesterday I forgot that my son hadn't actually been on the field because it seemed to me that just being a part of a team was something too - that his team playing was him playing. There were about four injuries during the overall game, moments during which both sides got down wordlessly on one knee and they and the spectators all showed respect for the injured player by clapping as he was taken off the field. Where would Bar Mitzvahzilla have gotten that experience, exactly, if not for football? That kind of reverence, of control, of understanding that sometimes you're a part of something bigger than just yourself. These are lessons I didn't learn till I was forty - that sometimes you just have to do a whole bunch of work and never know if there will be a payoff. That the work itself has meaning.

Also, football's brought some unexpected benefits. There's the fact that he got to start high school knowing a lot of kids, and coming from private school that was a big deal. There's the fourteen pounds of pure muscle he's packed on his frame. There's the fact that on game day he gets to strut around campus in his jersey. And, not least of all, he gets to look up from his position - yes, right now his position seems to be standing and not playing - and see two parents and a sister who love him enough to schlep all over the planet to show support for his team and his endeavor. And sweat.

He can also see his mother who's learning, after nearly eighteen years of marriage to a football fanatic, to enjoy the game.

Do you ever feel like you should keep a list of all the things you did to show love to your kids that they don't appreciate? Giving out any sage advice to children lately? Football anyone?

Husband Goes Gaga

2010-08-29T23:08:00.002-07:00

I've been married nearly eighteen years so there's a bit of amused tolerance that goes on in my marriage. Husband, on the one hand, has gotten accustomed to the fact that I have more shoes in my closet than a normal human being could reasonably expect to wear in a year and that, while I have bright ambitions for the clothes I buy, later I can't quite remember what they were and end up dressing like an idiot every day.

And I have amused tolerance for his music. He's a rock and roller and a music snob. He loves classic rock, which, of course, I was raised on too, and has in turn raised our kids on the Beatles, the Stones and all sorts of other 1960s music. He also took up guitar lessons about a year and a half ago and began composing songs that seemed a little personal, odes to me, with names like, "She's Impossible" and things like that. Okay, fine. I could live with all that.

But lately he's gone gaga for Lady Gaga and this, I have to say, is unexpected.

This didn't happen overnight. It also didn't happen without some resistance on his part, and complete investigation of the Gaga oeuvre, as it were. And even though he's confident about his fan status he's still connected enough to reality to be shamefaced about it, to his credit. After all, it certainly didn't happen because she wore a bunch of funky masks to award shoes or outfits that looked like performance art, which is more something I could appreciate. It happened because of raw talent.

First he heard her song Poker Face. An acoustic version that appeared on the BBC. Then he realized that she wrote it and all her own songs. Then he started searching YouTube (note to self: should never have shown Husband that YouTube existed) and he found videos of Lady Gaga in her former life as Stefani Germanotti sitting at a grand piano playing beautifully and singing riffs of her own songs with a scope and talent not exactly born of her years.

And that was it. The next thing I'm expecting is to open the mailbox and find one of those fan club packets I used to get in the 1960s for the Partridge Family or the Monkees. You know, with a button, and ID card, and a fake autographed picture of the object of your obsession.

Yesterday - like my life has become a cartoon or something - my fifty-five-year-old husband says to me, "Did you know that Lady Gaga was here in concert on July 31st? We could have gone!" In slow motion I look at him. I lift my hand to see if maybe he's running a fever. I've spent my entire married life trying to avoid all the concerts he wants me to go to - John Fogarty, Bob Dylan over and over again, and I went, even when Dylan didn't sing at all the entire concert. One time, years ago, he made me go to The Grateful Dead. And now he wants me to go to Lady Gaga?

I try to see the bright side of it. At least it's something we can go to with the kids. Right?

What do you have to look on with amused tolerance at with your spouse or partner? Have you fallen in love with any music lately that seems younger than your age but love it anyway? What about this Lady Gaga thing?

Supermom

2010-08-25T22:21:00.001-07:00

When Bar Mitzvahzilla was younger, there was one question he loved to ask me that I never could answer to his satisfaction, yet about which he and Daughter could jabber about for hours. What superpower would I choose if I could have one?

Well, of course this stumped me. While he'd look at me expectantly - just waiting to give me his answer - I'd draw a blank. Invariably I thought of Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie. What superpowers were those? Since I had to come up with something I'd say the only one I could think of, immortality, and be subjected to my son's scorn. Why in the world would I want to live forever when none of the people I loved would be able to? That was apparently the worst superpower. The best ones? Mutability, Invisibility, Superhuman Strength.

If he asked me today I wouldn't have any problem picking one. Easy. All I'd have to do is think back to the last three weeks since he started high school, since I've looked at my planner each day and found that each one of them contained unresolvable conflicts - two places I actually had to be each day at the same time. Both things invariably for my kids. And important stuff.

So I know which superpower I'd pick: cloning.

Was I living in a cocoon all these years, being the mother of two kids who attended the same private school? The ease and comfort of driving both kids to the same school, having one school calendar, of only having to beg with Husband each morning to take my assigned driving days because, invariably, I had stayed up till two in the morning blogging.

But not anymore. Now Bar Mitzvahzilla has to be off in one direction to arrive at 7:30; Daughter in another to arrive at 7:55. There are the things that we planned that sounded really good during the summer, but in practice? Not so good. Like football everyday after school. Then various Jewish or school-related activities that keep the boy and me hoofing it till 9:00 each night. High school, then home; JCC, then home; tutoring, then home. And back. This, I believe, might just be why people actually buy their teenagers cars.

But here I am, finally. Able to blog after a week and a half. Three whole posts this month.

Now I'll go disappear into my genie bottle until tomorrow.

And what would you pick for your superpower? Ever felt like you've spent the whole day driving, and you weren't on vacation?

How-To Guide for Parents of High Schoolers

2010-08-14T23:45:00.002-07:00

You can reminisce all you want about the good old days of Spiderman pajamas. About the days when your little boy got a pair of Spiderman gloves and really, truly thought he'd be able to climb the walls of his room. And fell down a few times trying. You can forget about all the Camouflage clothing you bought him too. That was so middle school, after all, him being dressed head to toe in camo, his backpack matching camo, to the point where some days I wasn't even sure I could find him, he was camouflaged so well.

He's in high school now and there are a whole new set of rules.

First of all, no camo. Second of all, he's only allowed to wear one type of shorts: basketball shorts. And those must hang down to his knees. He can wear them in any ridiculous color under the sun (except girly colors or camo, of course) and with t-shirts. But the t-shirts have to pass inspection. While the mom inspects for inoffensive language and no gang symbols (like I'd recognize them), the high school kid inspects according to a different standard: cool. I'm clearly out of my league on this one.

Then there are the accessories. First of all, the wheelie backpack got wheeled away before 8th grade. Apparently it doesn't matter how heavy his backpack is, how many textbooks have to come home with him, how damaged his vertebrae, he must carry the load on his back like a mule. Secondly, no more lunch box. Lunch boxes are only for middle school. Even paper sacks show a little too much effort. Any lunch preparation from home has to look haphazard, not like we tried too hard. Hopefully, I guess, it should look like we didn't try at all. We need to throw everything in a plastic grocery store bag.

No juice bags or juice boxes. Obviously. He now can only bring cans of soda or bottled water. You guessed it - anything else looks nerdy. I'm afraid to ask about the bags of chips. Do I need to open them up and randomly throw them in a baggie, maybe step on them so they're a little crushed?

And, last thing, I'm afraid to ask, is it now nerdy to be Bar Mitzvahzilla? Is it now nerdy to be locked by your mother in your thirteen-year-old persona on a blog when you're fifteen now and in high school?

I don't ask the question. I don't want to hear the answer.

Have you ever navigated these cool/uncool waters with your kid? Had a kid at one of the transitional ages - middle school, high school? Ever been flabbergasted by all the rules they're obeying that have nothing to do with your own?

The Snitch

2010-08-07T23:37:00.002-07:00

Invariably as a parent I'm caught between two opposing desires: I want my kids to have each other's backs, and I want them to tell me if the other one is doing something that puts the other kid in danger. I want them to be on the same team and to be on my team, even though half the time I'm the enemy.

The only problem with the scenario is that Daughter is a natural-born snitch. She loves catching Bar Mitzvahzilla doing something he's not supposed to be doing. She'll sneak around rooms, lurk out of sight, just about shimmy on her belly down a hallway, anything to catch him in some unauthorized activity, which, around here, could be something pretty innocuous, like playing on the Xbox when he's not supposed to.

This doesn't exactly build a healthy relationship between the kids. It also doesn't help that Bar Mitzvahzilla, a nice, mellow kid, doesn't really see this coming each time it happens. He'll be doing his favorite activity in the world, which apparently is killing the bad guys who have pretend-invaded the United States, and won't have made any attempt to disguise his activity - like there are the sounds of bombs and missiles coming from the den where he's supposed to be watching TV. Then Daughter will just happen to cruise through the kitchen and tell me that her brother's on the Xbox.

It's extremely tempting to use a snitchy child like this as my eyes and ears, to be my spycam on the teenager. But, I know. I have to avoid that. First of all, and even if she can't see it, I need them to be friends. I need them on the same team. I'm willing to have her rat him out if it was a safety issue or risky behavior. But Xbox? I think I can take it from here.

So I tell the snitch that she has to stop telling on her brother, that she has to try harder to consider herself on his "team." The kid team, not the parent team. She gives me a stormy look and goes to tell Husband instead.

Do you have any snitches in the house? Do you find it hard not to want the information but wanting the behavior to stop? Any teenagers (or significant others) with gaming addictions?

Memory Blank

2010-07-31T23:11:00.000-07:00

Here I am from my second vacation spot of the summer - Oceanside, California, where we go every year.

Here's what's occurred to me during this summer of two vacations, both to places we've been multiple times, places I would say we've established a family tradition of traveling to: my kids don't remember anything. Well, Bar Mitzvahzilla remembers some stuff, but Daughter? Nothing. All this painstaking building of memories, all the carefully planned birthday parties, all the awful, expensive amusement parks we've gone to. Blank.

When we were in Flagstaff earlier in the summer she said, "Have I ever been here before, Mom?" and I said, "Of course you were!" and then I rattled off a bunch of things we'd done there before while she looked at me blankly. Then here, in the San Diego area, she mentions that we always stay in Oceanside, which means, of course, that she doesn't remember all the other trips.

This could never have happened to me as a kid. First of all, we never took a trip until I was ten-years-old so when it finally happened it was very memorable. And interminable. My parents planned our vacations around all their fellow Holocaust Survivors they could find in various locales and then decided that we'd travel to those places. I spent our vacations stuck to plastic-covered couches listening to lamentations in Yiddish. I could definitely use a few light memories.

But Daughter's lack of memories makes me wonder about this raising kid thing, that I've worked so hard for so much that's disappeared into this big amorphous blob, later to be designated "happy childhood" or "unhappy childhood," or to have her whole life summarized by something I wasn't so good at, like cleaning, instead of something that I was good at, like letting her know she's safe.

But we'll continue. After all, we've still got four days left on this vacation. That's four days left to make memories. Right?

Have you ever noticed that your kids don't remember things that you kind of hoped they would? That maybe you worked hard at? How has vacation gone for you this summer? Do you tend to remember a lot from your childhood?

Miss Yakity Yak

2010-07-22T22:07:00.003-07:00

The minute she walked in the house from camp today, Daughter picked up the phone to call her best friend. The best friend wasn't at camp today and Daughter needed to know if she was okay. Also, because Daughter's almost eleven she suddenly wants to be this thing - this Girl Who Talks On The Phone (is she copying me?) and so she's trying her best to monopolize it.

So she calls unsuccessfully but later the best friend calls back. Over the course of the next half hour this is what I see: I see her laying on my bed, talking to the phone laying next to her on speaker; I see her laying upside down on her bed the same way; I see her sitting on the computer reading her best friend her emails; I see her wheeling around the house on the office chair, talking; and, finally, I see Daughter marching around the house, following me, her finger on the mute button, asking me for some ideas of what they should talk about. Apparently there now was dead silence on the phone call.

I say, "If you're done talking, why don't you just get off?" But, of course, that just proves how old I've gotten and the fact that I forgot how important it is to monopolize the telephone.

She gives me a look like I'm nuts and keeps holding the mute button down. "Mom! I want to keep talking! We just don't have anything to talk about!"

Okay. That makes sense.

In my house growing up there were seven daughters and our one mother all vying for not only one phone line, but for one actual telephone. It sat on the wall of our kitchen with a cord that had probably been about six feet originally but had been pulled and tugged by us all over the house until it was actually flattened and stretched to about thirty feet.

There was just this one phone, then, for all the boys in the world to call and ask out all my sisters on dates and then, afterwards, for all my sisters' girlfriends to call to discuss those same boys. Being one of the younger sisters, I had low priority with the phone. If I wanted to sit on the phone with no purpose at all, like Daughter was doing, the phone would have been hung up for me and confiscated.

But I'm helpful if nothing else. I glance quickly at the newspaper. "How about Justin Bieber?"

"Mom," she shakes her head, "We're so over him."

The phone calls ends unexpectedly. The line goes dead suddenly. When Daughter calls her friend to see what happened the friend says during one of the silences she just fell asleep. On top of the phone.

And with that I finally hear the words, "Okay, bye."

Have your kids become obsessed with talking on the phone or did they ever do this? Do they sit in dead silence for hours just to stay on? Do you remember any "phone battles" from your childhood?
Do you think that kids get their phone behavior from their parents?

Heat By Any Other Name

2010-07-17T23:06:00.003-07:00

I've really tried not to write about the heat this summer. Really, what could be more boring than a blogger who lives in Arizona writing about the heat? Also, I kind of feel like I need to have a more macho attitude about it. I've lived here since 1973, folks. If I've put up with it for thirty-seven years I can take this one too.

This week, when the temperature hit one hundred fifteen degrees, the word "hot" seemed a little inadequate. Like we were saying it was hot when it was ninety - twenty-five degrees ago. For one hundred fifteen degrees there really should be a new word. Cooking terms seem strangely well suited: broiling, cooked, boiled, burned, searing. Hot isn't going to cut it anymore.

So, since my brain is literally boiling inside my head, my skin is seared when I walk aboutside, the sun is overhead in the sky burning down at me, and, as a result, my goose is cooked, I haven't exactly wanted to do much. Well, I'll admit I DO want to drop Daughter off at theater camp every day so I manage to get her there. I DO walk in my exercise class by 9:15 everyday because I'm some kind of robot-woman. But by the time the class is over it's already 104 degrees. That's it for the day.

In Arizona if you're interested in using your air conditioning at all in the summer and not paying eight hundred dollar monthly bills you end up having to do a lot of time of day calculations to determine if you can actually turn the unit on. We're on the free use between 7 PM and 12 Noon plan. So the house is lovely, even wintery, many of those hours. Husband chills the house down to 68 degrees because he knows what's coming after noon.

Between noon and seven all that 68-degree air has flown out of our paper-thin walls to the outside. Since ~~Cheap~~ economical-minded Husband only allows us to turn on the a/c on one side of the house or the other during this time period, I have to decide where I'll be, where the plants are wilting, the produce rotting, where the children are melting. And that's where I turn it on. I plop down on my bed and decide what I'll do. My main question: does it require thinking?

Some positives about this weather? Well, just in case I thought I bought too much clothes at one time or another, I'm actually going through at least three complete outfits everyday. That's good, right? Also, I'd been thinking about doing Bikram Yoga but I was worried about the 105 degree room. Now I don't have to worry. It will feel cooler than what I'm used to.

Right now? Weekend rates. Ah.

How hot is your summer turning out? Am I the only one whose brain appears to have melted away? Does anyone else live with these strange power bill calculations like we do or should I blame that on Husband?

Counting Sheep

2010-07-11T23:30:00.001-07:00

Here's what happens on a routine night when Husband and I go to sleep. He's ready for bed. I'm ready for bed. But I have something important to do first. I have to handle my pills.

I used to just have asthma. That was really easy. I had a pill a day to take and a couple of nebulizers: one for emergencies and one for maintenance.

Then I got my brain tumor in 2001 and things got a little punchy. There's just something about having a hole in your head filled with titanium mesh and screws. Some permanent pain and some tuning in of Radio Indonesia if I tilt my head just so.

Turns out that when you've had a brain tumor and been left with some problems a pill organizer is your best friend. A really big one.

So I have a twenty-eight-day organizer. Each month I fill up all the little boxes, which have individual doors. The asthma stuff (now two pills), the post-brain tumor stuff (five pills), the osteopenia/porosis stuff (two), aspirin, multi-vitamins - who knows what? Let's just say that the gigantic organizer my mother uses with shoebox-sized compartments is starting to look attractive.

So I shake out that night's and the morning's pills and stare at them for a minute. It takes some brain power to figure out exactly which ones I take when. This is not work meant for a sleepy woman. If I take the wrong ones, I could end up staying up all night and sleeping all day. So I pick, pick, pick through them, swallow enough to choke a horse, use the inhaler, and turn off the light.

Husband and I say goodnight. On the count of five he's sleeping. I am stunned. How dare he fall asleep so fast? I'm wide awake, staring in the darkness, waiting for one of the pills to make my eyes shut.

Despite your best efforts, do you find your body falling to pieces as you age? Any insomnia issues? Do you find you ever have to be an amateur pharmacist? Do you have a husband/partner who sleeps like a hibernating bear?

Mom vs. The Remote

2010-07-07T23:37:00.001-07:00

I discovered something alarming on our recent vacation. My kids' idea of fun TV shows to watch are basically all on the Food Network.

Seriously. Checking the TV guide, setting up our lives around the next episode of Chopped, of Ace of Cakes, of Iron Chef, of Cupcake Wars. When forced by Husband to watch something educational, they'll turn on Discovery's Man vs. Wild. On that one the guy roasts bugs for dinner. Do I detect a common theme of eating?

Now I readily admit that I've spent about five years watching HGTV drone on and on with Househunters and Design on a Dime, Curb Appeal and Spice Up Your Kitchen, and I know those shows don't exactly have any suspense, but why are my kids so fascinated with food preparation?

Since we were spending a lot of time together and since it was vacation, I had to watch some of these shows myself. At first I was concerned. After all, I used to weigh considerably more than I do now. In the circles in which I run, the Food Network is routinely referred to as "Food Porn." Was this a good idea?

Turns out there was no problem at all. The stuff that the chefs prepare on most of those shows is totally unrecognizable to me as food. One day on Chopped the chefs had to use some fish called Aho in every dish, and they used it - as fish ribs, dried and grinded, and in other torturous preparations. And then they threw in some other stuff, like pork rinds, shaved this or that and then, I swear, jellied blech. Because of these unrecognizable ingredients, I've actually never wanted to eat anything on these shows (okay, except the cupcakes). Most of the time I wonder how the judges can stand it.

I wonder at my poor, hungry children, watching Food Network to just see something being cooked, instead of their own mother who stands in the kitchen blankly, never able to actually think of What's For Dinner? I think of Bar Mitzvahzilla, happily reading the food ads that Husband places before him as he reads the paper, Bar Mitzvahzilla's eyes growing luminous at the glossy photographs of the grocery store ads.

But the kids and I had to reach a compromise somehow. Somewhere in the vast space between HGTV and the Food Network. Finally I found it, my new favorite show: Say Yes to the Dress on TLC. Oy.

What do you get stuck watching on TV in your house? Does anyone else have kids who watch Food Network, like mine do? Are you a fan or is some of this stuff just way too complex? HGTV?

Putting the A in Awkward

2010-07-02T11:12:00.001-07:00

The other day we were all walking down one of the quaint downtown streets of Flagstaff on our vacation - me, Husband, Daughter and Bar Mitzvahzilla. We were all pretty normal looking. That is, with the exception of Bar Mitzvahzilla. We'd made the mistake of buying him some sunglasses earlier that day and were paying the price right then. He loped along, supercool. Shades blocking his baby blues. His body built up from a summer of football training. A swagger in his step. My boy, somehow a tough cool guy. The kind of guy I would have hated in high school.

Yet one day earlier - same vacation - we were at the hotel swimming pool and he was ready to go swimming with Daughter. He sat there next to me wracked with indecision. Should he take off his shirt? Swim with his chest showing? What about those teenage girls who were frolicking in the hot tub? Was anybody watching him? I glared at him. Aren't girls supposed to be the ones who drive you nuts? My boy, somehow as insecure as a, well, teenage girl. The kind of guy I would have liked in high school.

Then another night we all went down for an evening dip in the Jacuzzi and there I ran into my third Bar Mitzvahzilla of the vacation.

First he frolicked with Daughter in the Jacuzzi and then in the swimming pool, playing like a seal or a porpoise, I don't know. I swear he would've balanced a ball on his nose if we'd had one. He was doing acrobatics, swim racing, and then, when we got back to the room, they staged a "death by arrow" video using the arrow Daughter had bought on the reservation nearby. The kind of boy I would have liked - in grade school.

My three sons, all contained in one fourteen-year-old boy, for one last fleeting moment before they all disappear or coalesce into one. Into the man he'll turn out to be.

Did you ever catch your kids just on the cusp between one age and another? Kid to tween, adolescent to teen? Teen to adult? Where there are flashes of the kid he or she was and the person he or she will be at the same time?
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This post is part of the Bigger Picture series hosted this week by Corinne at Trains, Tutus and Teatime, where bloggers write about events which tie into the bigger themes of our lives. Please visit Corinne's blog to participate and to link up your blog!

Lazy Family on Vacation

2010-06-29T21:10:00.002-07:00

Okay, I'll admit it: we've been on vacation. I hesitate to call it that, though, because not only have we stayed in Arizona (I've previously whined about ending up in Flagstaff for this vacation) but, of course, the kids are with us. Ever feel like you need a vacation from your vacation? Ever feel like the vacation isn't that different from the rest of the summer?

Well, it hasn't been that bad. We decided to act like tourists and so went to Lowell Observatory one day, took the ski lift to the top of Mt. Humphrey another, and today we went to the Grand Canyon. For our family, this is a jaw-dropping level of activity while on vacation. Normally we're more the sleep-till-noon, too late to get our hotel room cleaned type of vacationers. And then we get to listen to our kids nag us about how we never do anything exciting on vacation. Well, we showed them.

Right after we were married, after my first miscarriage, Husband and I came up to Flagstaff, right when I thought I'd really never have children. We stayed at my mom's cabin and I moped around feeling the inadequacy of a family made up of just us two. At one point we took that same ski lift up to the top of Mt. Humphrey. It was quiet. I could hear the wind rustling in the Aspens. I remember thinking that I wasn't prepared to deal with these things that were bigger than me, or bigger than my ability. Husband comforted me, telling me that it would all work out.

And there we were on Monday, going up that same mountain in those same ski lift cars, me and Daughter in one, Husband and Bar Mitzvahzilla in another - and then going down the mountain, switching kids - me and Bar Mitzvahzilla in one car and Husband and Daughter in another. It was an experience of the differences in my kids. My daughter waiting for the lift to break into a million pieces, nearly laying down on top of me, and then my son sitting there, the stoic teen, making me think of the little boy who once pointed at all the sights he saw - "Look, Mom! The clouds!" None of that this time.

And Husband and I, in separate cars because of the rules of the ski lift, and temporarily divided by the same children we longed for.

Do you have a history of going to a particular place, over and over again, so that your history's played out there? Are you a lazy vacationer or an active one? Ever vacation in your home state?

Midlife, Bad Wife

2010-06-24T00:48:00.000-07:00

As Husband and I have aged, I've been waiting for him to have a midlife crisis. Fully expecting it, really. I've been on red alert for convertibles, for blondes, for suspicious behavior, for coming home with a gigantic toupee. Anything.

What I didn't expect - what completely caught me off guard - is that the only one in this family having a midlife crisis is me.

He turned fifty. Then he turned fifty-five. Not a blip on the radar screen. He's steady, he's loving, he's home every night. No convertibles, no blondes. Devoted to his family. Gets up everyday like a robot to work at our store. Impulsive purchase of the year? A spiffy new box truck for the store. Not really a midlife crisis vehicle.

But I am a different story. Through a combination of hormones draining out of my body and, apparently, pooling on the ground, and having a recent disappointment with my book, I found myself falling into a gloom of midlife despair. What was the answer? Maybe I needed to disappear to a deserted island for six months to work on my book. After all, all marriages involve compromise and maybe I'd been compromising my writing too much. Did I need to put my writing before my marriage?

When I was a kid in Chicago I had a lot of aunts, but there was one in particular who was a handful. If something popped in her head, she said it, no matter what, even if she thought one of us was fat or ugly or stupid, she'd say it. She was mean and scary. With my midlife menopause upon me, that's how I felt. Mean and scary. If I thought it, I said it. I suddenly understood what it must have been like to be this aunt of mine; to have almost no control over what was coming out of her mouth. Was it just reflecting the negativity that was playing in her brain?

Just in the nick of time my new bio-identical hormone pellets started working. I don't feel like I'm twenty again but I do feel a little more human. And I did some thinking about that agent and the fact that it's not really her fault that I imbued her with so much magic. She's no more magical than a hundred other agents. The success or failure of my writing still depends on me.

Now hopefully I can get back to normal. Watching out for blondes and convertibles.

Hormones acting up lately? Midlife, early life or late-in-life crisis? Do you ever find yourself blaming every thing you've never done on someone else?

Escaping From Our Kids

2010-06-20T23:17:00.003-07:00

Last weekend something amazing happened to Husband and me. I had kind of thought we were going on a date on Saturday night but it didn't look like it was going to work out. The confluence of the stars and the planets didn't align, or something like that. Actually, our dates for the last few years have been something I never can plan. It's like Bar Mitzvahzilla suddenly disappears on a sleepover somewhere and Daughter gets picked up by her best friend's mom and, whoosh, we're out the door, amazed at our good fortune.

But when the plans fell through this time, Husband and I looked at each other and said, "Let's go out anyway." Here's the deal: Bar Mitzvahzilla is turning fifteen in six weeks. That's older than any babysitter we ever had for both of them. Our most wonderful, regular babysitter, whom we had for years when they were little, started with us when she was twelve and Daughter was in diapers.

Of course, that babysitter was a female. Mature. She lived behind us and so her family could hop over our fence to help should something go awry, not to mention the fact that Husband and I could swoop back home. Bar Mitzvahzilla, of course, is a different creature altogether. So his twelfth year passed by and we couldn't leave the kids alone. Thirteenth and no tomato. Fourteenth and finally I could start going to my exercise class or meetings as the sun was setting knowing that Husband would be home soon.

But fifteen? Duh. We're outta here.

It's like we're waking up after a long sleep, rubbing our eyes and shaking cobwebs out of our hair, like we're Rip Van Winkles, asleep for the last fifteen years. What's happened in the world since we've been trapped in that house with those tiny tyrants? What news is there of the outside world?

We head off to our three hour date, home at ten, holding hands.

How hard is it to put yourself back on the priority list? How tempting is it to bring the kids everywhere, even when they're old enough to stay home? Have you ever had this sweet moment of freedom, or noticed its lack?

The Better Version of Me

2010-06-17T23:28:00.068-07:00

Bar Mitzvahzilla is in the summer football strength training program for the high school he'll be attending in the fall. We're carpooling with a neighbor whose son is also in the training and this neighbor and I have marvelled in the past at all the things we have in common. We drive the same car. We live in the same neighborhood. We're both from Chicago. Both of our sons were preemies but are fine now. There are other little things.

So the other day was my first time to drive her son home from training. He got in the car, pushed over some of the garbage Daughter had scattered all over the backseat and I say, jovially, I think, "This car is just like your mom's. Just dirtier."

Then Bar Mitzvahzilla looks over at me with a smug look on his face. He says, "Yeah mom, except for her GPS and DVD player."

I look at my empty dash, where the GPS should be and the roof where the DVD player should be and say, "Oh."

"And her car is spotlessly clean." The absolute joy of having a teenager! First he destroys the car by spilling every known object and food in it, and then he insults me for having a messy car. And the joy of needling me!

I look at him.

The neighbor kid, a polite person, unlike my son, pipes up from the back, "My dad can't stand for either of our cars to have a speck of dirt on them so he gets my mom's car cleaned every week."

It's then that I realize that my neighbor is actually living the better version of my life. Her car, while the same model, is highly upgraded and clean. Her husband, a neatnik, keeps it clean. She has a high-powered executive job and I am, um, whatever this is. She has a weekly cleaning lady. I have to trade Bar Mitzvahzilla time on his Xbox to get the toilets cleaned. Final proof: during the break between summer sessions, their family is going to Vancouver, which is in Canada; we're going to Flagstaff. If you don't know where that is, look at a map of the State of Arizona. It's where I-40 and I-17 intersect. Not quite as glamorous.

I drive back into our neighborhood, dejected. As we turn the corners to swing around to their house - a basement model of my one-story with about 500 more square feet - all the garbage in the back of my car shifts and crunches with each turn. There's dead silence except for the movement of the garbage.

I drop him off, make a U-turn and my kids and I make our filthy way home.

Did you ever feel that your life might be mirroring someone else's, but not necessarily in a good way? Do you ever feel like certain components of your life are evidence that your whole life is a wreck - like me and my wreck of a backseat? Ever raised a snotty teenager?

By Any Other Name

2010-06-14T23:31:00.000-07:00

Because I won the Oh My Blog Award (thank you Robin!) I am going to tell you about my most humiliating moment. In a lifetime of humiliating moments, it was hard to pick one, but I've tried my best. I tried to balance great moment of happiness and triumph with crushing embarassment. That should do it, right?

In late 1992 I was ordering the wedding invitations for my marriage to Husband and was having some trouble with the wording. I had been married before, see, and I had not gone back to my maiden name after my divorce, mostly because I hated it like poison. My dad, an immigrant, had come to this country as Harry Burstein but had changed our last name to Burt. My twenty-six onerous years as Linda Burt (just say that ten times fast and you'll see what I mean) weighed heavily on me when I was getting divorced at twenty-nine. There was no way I was going back to that name. So I kept my ex-husband's name, Maric*.

So how to word the invitations? Linda Jayne Maric? Linda Burt Maric? I did the latter and everything moved forward.

The day of the wedding dawned. I got to the venue. Big sign outside: The Maric/Pressman wedding. I cringed. I could now see that when I kept my ex-husband's name I hadn't quite thought this thing through completely. Like to the next marriage day.

Then we got married. The chuppah. The Rabbi. The rings. Whew. I was officially Linda Pressman. That should be the end of that torment, right?

But then the Best Man stood up to make a toast. To the Marics, whom he thought were my family. Who, of course, were not there since they were my ex-husband's family. Would any woman want the ghost of Husbands Past brought up at the wedding of Husbands Present?

The Best Man's wife gave his coat a hard yank and said in a loud whisper, "Burt! Her family's name is Burt!" and he continued with the toast.

But still.

Have any humiliating moments you'd like to share? Excruciating moments at your wedding? Toast difficulties? Or would you just like to join in the chorus and laugh at me?

*ex-husband's name changed.

I'd like to pass the Oh My Blog award to the following bloggers, all of whom I think may have some fun with this one:

Maria at Mom of Three Seeks Sanity
Amber at Making the Moments Count
mommymommymommy at KISS - Keep It Simple Sister

The rules of the Award are:

1. Get really excited that you got the coolest award EVER!
2. Choose ONE of the following options of accepting the OMB award:
   (a) Get really drunk and blog for 15 minutes straight, or for as long as you can focus.
   (b) Write about your most embarrassing moment.
   (c) Write a “Soundtrack of your childhood” post.
   (d) Make your next blog a ‘vlog’/video blog. Basically, you’re talking to the camera about whatever.
   (e) Take a picture of yourself first thing in the morning, before you do anything else (hair, make up,
        etc) and post it.
3. Pass the award on to at least three, but preferably more, awesome bloggers as yourself.
    Don’t forget to tell them.

Falling Down, Getting Back Up

2010-06-11T23:38:00.000-07:00

My kids and I went to see the Karate Kid today. I liked it a lot, even better than the original. Now that I've spent so much of my life writing, however, I can normally notice the writing that goes into the movie I'm watching, see the complications pile on complications, watch the climax being stretched out by the writers so the audience gets the maximum anxiety and the maximum heave of relief at the ending. Knowing all this, of course, ruins it a bit. But guess who doesn't know all this? Daughter. So she was totally affected by the movie.

She walked out floating on air, talking about the life lesson of the movie, that when you fall down you can get up again - changing your life and the outcomes - and did I feel the same way? I thought about my life and how much I've fought back from, how much I have certainly applied that principle to my life. Then I thought about my writing.

My book, in manuscript form, just got turned down by an agent. I've had a long history with my book, including time during which it was represented previously but which representation I severed. I recently did a pretty big rewrite. I thought that it might be a good time to journey again into the publishing world, to send it out to one special agent. Not a whole bunch of agents; I didn't want to paper the world with queries. I thought, I'll just try it and see what happens.

She asked for the manuscript to read. And then a month went by. And then I got the turn down, a very lovely, personal note explaining exactly why she wasn't in love with the project enough to represent it.

And so what was I thinking while I was watching the Karate Kid?

I was looking at the scenes of China and I was thinking that I am fifty damn years old and I haven't been to China. Not that I ever wanted to go, but still, that's what I was thinking.

I was thinking that maybe it's time for me to give up writing and go teach at a community college again.

I was thinking that when I least expect it, a new rock bottom shows up to teach me some kind of lesson but I'm not always smart enough to figure out what the lesson is. Does this mean "try harder" or does it mean "work on something else?" Or does it mean "patience?"

And finally - totally ruining my enjoyment of the movie - I was thinking that I'm going to have to pack my book away - the book I have loved, the book that is like my heart beating in my chest - and work on something else. Or not work on something else.

But that's not what I said to my daughter. I said, "I totally believe you can do that."

Have you seen the new Karate Kid? Did you like this message about picking yourself back up again? Do you believe it? Do you believe that sometimes you just have to give up and move on to something else?

Tween Sophisticate

2010-06-07T23:55:00.000-07:00

There are some differences between my children, not just the obvious ones like one's a boy and one's a girl; one's fourteen and one's ten. There are the communication differences.

Daughter is complexly sophisticated. It started off small, like with the telephone. Like in that she could actually get on the telephone and talk. Unlike Bar Mitzvahzilla who could only get on the phone and say a series of linked together "Uhs." One time one of Husband's sisters called from out of town and asked to speak to Daughter. I handed the phone to her, and, half a bubbly, anecdote-laden hour later, she handed the phone back. She was five.

Lately, though, she's getting into technology. It started with Skype. All the kids at school were going on Skype so that the minute they'd get home from seeing each other all day then they could sit there watching each other all night, typing at their keyboards. Turns out we don't have a webcam, though, so we watched her little friend talking. I saw the parents in the background cleaning the kitchen, the whole house in a panoramic view, and I thought, no way is my house, or the people in it, ready for a viewing audience, like the bickering parents, the food police husband, the surly teenager, dirty dishes. Even if we had a webcam I'd hide it.

So she types her Skyped responses to her friends, but sometimes they all want to pretend that they're all really good typers so they type like this: yiourejhdhiutaryenbj.nm,zhjkjdyfilerhjhjlda. She's having a great time, laughing with headphones on, monopolizing our phone line, and typing gibberish.

Her newest thing? What could it be? What's she seen her mother doing day and night, night and day and scorned every single time I did it? A blog. Of course, it was never interesting if I was doing it. But now that one of her good friends is doing it, it's very, very interesting. So now they're all doing it. A gang of 10-year-old nearly fifth graders out loose in the blogosphere. And I'm following her. And, even worse, she's following me.

And I do want to say that suddenly I'm very, very useful. Make a blogroll? Sure. Change your fonts and colors? I'm your gal. Add a link, a picture, a video? Once scorned, now the recipient of grudging respect.

Am I worried about addiction? Remember, I already have one computer addict in the family. Bar Mitzvahzilla's already had all of his stuff surgically removed for summer and is unhappy about it. The reason I'm not worried? Daughter uses technology to increase her communication with the outside world; Bar Mitzvahzilla uses his to isolate. Big difference.

At this point, I think she'll have taken over the world by age fifteen.

Are you ever amazed at your kids just leaping ahead on technology? Or adopting technology that you're on and suddenly finding a use for you? How about when they go from being just kids to being part of this larger world?

The Plastic Oy Award

2010-06-04T23:46:00.001-07:00

Because I'm so behind on my blog, I can't even remember how long ago Maria at Mom of Three Seeks Sanity gave me this blog award. But the Momalom Five for Ten challenge came along and then Bar Mitzvahzilla's eighth grade graduation and suddenly it was summer. So here I am catching up. Today, per the terms of this award, I need to tell you who I'd like to get horizontal with, but since the picture shows Barbie attacking Ken -who appears to be calling for help - and that reminds me of my childhood, I'm going to reveal that maddening crushes of my youth. The Plastic Oy Award, if you will.

1) It would have been normal to have a crush on David Cassidy of The Partridge Family; after all, he was the cutest in the family. But he was a little too old for me. I was looking for a Partridge closer to my own age, a somewhat odder Partridge, quirkier, not the same one that every fourth grader had a crush on.

So somehow I ended up having a crush on Danny Bonaduce. What can I say? I have a thing for redheads.

2) Along the same line - unlikely fictional characters upon whom I had a crush - came another redhead:

Archie Andrews. Yes, from the comic strip. It's not that I really liked him, or thought he was real for that matter, but, hey, if he was good enough for the gorgeous Betty and Veronica (and no one was fooling me, I knew they had the exact same face with different colored hair) then he was good enough for a little brunette Jewish girl from Skokie.

3) And, of course, because I had such eclectic musical taste as a seven-year-old in the Chicago suburbs, how could I not fall in love with Davy Jones of the Monkees?

All the seven-year-olds were in love with him. I would play his song "I Wanna Be Free" over and over again on our HiFi while laying on our living room carpet, dreaming of marrying him when I was eighteen and he was, like, forty. (Surprisingly, however, as I've gotten older, somehow Davy Jones has gotten younger, until now we're only fifteen years apart.)

4) And then there were the two John Travolta characters of my teen years. The first, Vinnie Barbarino of Welcome Back, Kotter and the second, Danny Zuko from Grease, which I saw about seven times. Are these really the same character? My seventeen-year-old heart said, "Yes."

5) Nowadays, my bad-boy, rock star, illiterate-loving character crushes are long over. When I have a crush on a character now it's more along the lines of Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy from the 1995 BBC production of Pride and Prejudice:

Be still my heart. Seriously.

Who were your childhood crushes, on characters or famous people? Anybody unusual? Do you still get them?

I'm passing this award onto my buddies:

Robin at Your Daily Dose

Karen at Waisting Time

Jane at Aging Mommy

BLW at Big Little Wolf

Jennifer at Chaos Wrapped in Chocolate Covered Grins

Spitting Image

2010-05-30T23:31:00.000-07:00

One day recently during the Momalom 5 for 10 challenge, I was sitting on my bed looking through old pictures of my dad. Daughter was sitting beside me.

I knew what I was looking for: one of the iconic images of my dad. The one in a trench coat and a hat, so unusual for a man who never wore a hat in Chicago, even on twenty below zero temperature days.

It had already been an emotional week of writing. What is it about being given writing triggers and then reading so many entries from so many people and connecting your thoughts to theirs? And I had come fresh from reading an entry from Momalom's Mom who had written about the glory of being a grandmother, about what it feels like to look at a grandchild's features and see the features of your own beloved parents there.

But then it hit me as I was looking at this picture of my father from postwar Germany, from the time period when he lived for six years in a Displaced Persons camp; it hit me that I had seen him much more recently than 1975. I felt confused for a moment, like I was seeing him for the first time. I looked at the young picture of him again, kind of looking at it from every angle.

Then I realized. Of course I had seen that face very recently. As a matter of fact, that face was sitting there beside me on the bed at that exact moment. My daughter. How could I not have noticed it?

I felt a little breathless. Stunned at both my blindness and my lack of vision, at the idea that I couldn't see something right in front of me, so close to me. My daughter's been here for ten years with my own father's features and I never noticed it.

I know it's just genetics, but to me it feels like something bigger, a lot bigger. Something eternal. My daughter, born in 1999, my dad, dead in 1975, and yet, completely connected.

So even though in some way I'll always be standing distressed and disbelieving in the foyer of our Scottsdale home on a miserable day in March 1975 hearing the news that my dad had died, here was proof that not all of him had. Here was proof that there was something so much bigger going on that the fifteen-year-old me could safely leave the foyer now.

Have you ever been surprised by whom your kids resemble, like I was? Do your kids look like anyone unexpected? Do you only look to yourself and your mate for lookalikes, not farther back?

Planted

2010-05-25T23:33:00.000-07:00

When I was in high school, I discovered houseplants. This was right about the time we were learning how to macrame pot hangers in our art class, which I guess is a tell-tale sign that I went to high school in the 1970s. Macrame as a course of study. 1970s.

I took art all four years not because that's what hippies did, and, yes, I was a hippie. There were only three choices at my high school: Cowgirl (no Jewish girl was a Cowgirl, trust me on that); Cheerleader (fat, cellulitey Jewish girls weren't Cheerleaders, trust me on that too); or Hippie. So even though there was nothing very hip about me, that's what I was.

I wasn't an artist either, yet I kept taking art, looking for a type of art I'd excell at. Turns out I was really good at macrame, though it had limited use. How many pot hangers did my mom need? A hundred? A thousand? Was she willing to mount row after row of those hook thingies in the ceiling so I could hang up lines of them in our family room? I made so many macrame pot hangers that I figured I needed something to go in them - like plants. So I got some plants. Big ones.

This soon proved to be dissatisfying for me. Big plants, I figured, were near the end of their life cycle. Someone else had grown them. There was no challenge in that! I wanted something I could grow myself. A puppy of a houseplant. Maybe a fetus of a houseplant. A four-inch pot perhaps. Or maybe a clipping from someone else's plant. Or maybe, just maybe, a seed?

So here I am, thirty plus years later, and, still fascinated with this idea of starting from scratch, I've started what I'd loosely term a "vegetable garden" in my kitchen. Right now there are tiny seedlings growing in teensy pots. I can't really tell one from the other, but so far it's looking like we're going to have bumper crops of cucumbers, tomatoes, bell peppers and strawberries. In about five years.

And in my own way, I've finally moved on from that early Hippie label, moved on past all the labels of high school. I'm a farmer now. And off to the store to buy some jute. Macrame anyone?

Am I the only one who learned how to do macrame in school? Fond memories of art classes? Do you have a green thumb? Have you ever planted a vegetable garden?

Piloting the Pilot

2010-05-23T23:15:00.001-07:00

Last Sunday we picked up Bar Mitzvahzilla from the airport after his week long eighth grade trip to Washington DC with his class.

Everything went well, or just as expected. We got to the airport and found all the other parents milling around waiting for the kids. We spotted our boy, who seemed to have grown five inches in the one week he was gone. I got tearful, of course. Daughter was in quite an awkward spot. They normally live in a constant battlezone but she had actually missed him like crazy and spoken with him on the phone like a normal human sister, so what would their new relationship be like? Humans or opposing armies? Awkward or back to normal?

I warned her, "One day you and your brother are going to be grown ups and you're going to have to speak to each other like real people, not like fighting siblings all the time. Start now."

Then we got back in the car, drove out of the parking structure. Suddenly my husband starts fumbling with something. I see it's a walkie talkie. From like 1972. It's gigantic and has an antenna and he has to almost hang it out of the car window in order to get some reception. This is as modern as he gets in the day and age of iPhone and iPads. A Vietnam-Era walkie talkie so that he can listen to the pilots talking to the control tower.

The kids and I all look at him like he sprouted horns. Then we look at each other, all of us thinking what a geek Husband is because, of course, a trip to the airport means one thing only to him: listening to the gigantic walkie talkies and being at one with all the pilot lingo. Husband was a licensed pilot before he was a licensed driver, though he hasn't flown in all the years I've known him. Right now, unfortunately, the closest he's getting to a pilot is that we're actually driving his Honda Pilot.

I think of his other hobbies. The weather maps always pulled up on our computer at home so he can predict what the day will be like. The collection of albums that he's absolutely, positively going to transfer onto CDs, except that now CDs are out of date.
I sigh and think of my advice to my daughter. One day the kids will be out of the house and Husband and I will be alone so I'd better start treating him like a real person right now, not just a geek.

I say, "Cool, honey. Watch the road."

Does your spouse or partner have any hobbies that border on the geeky? Anything that makes you want to roll your eyes?

The Second Summer of Yes

2010-05-19T20:39:00.003-07:00

I'm anticipating a difficult summer, a repeat of last summer, which I optimistically called The Summer of Yes, though that was before I lived it.

What a brilliant idea, after all! A summer in which my kids would have to say "Yes" to all my goofball ideas of great activities! Let's go to Taliesin West, kids! Let's go to the Jewish Museum! Let's go to the library, let's go to Arcosanti, let's go antiquing and to romantic comedies with mom! Yes, yes and yes!

This is not exactly what happened. Daughter was onboard if ice skating and Peter Piper Pizza were included. Bar Mitzvahzilla? Apparently he thought it was the Summer of No.

He told me he only wanted to play on his PlayStation. All summer, nonstop. As in, "Mom, can you just drop me off at home?" And then, "Can I go on the PlayStation when we get there?" Well, from time to time we could run out to the gaming store and buy another game for sixty dollars. Wow, that was nice of him, to let us spend time together.

About three years ago, I decided to override my husband's wise counsel and bought Bar Mitzvahzilla a PlayStation 2 game system. He was already twelve and was apparently the last child anywhere in the Western Hemisphere who didn't have a gaming system. He was already a social outcast - there were legions of boys who weren't interested in coming over to our house to hang out because there wasn't anything to do there - despite our basketball hoop and air hockey table. One time a boy came over and expressed astonishment that we had a nice house; the kids at school had all assumed that we were poor because Bar Mitzvahzilla didn't have a gaming system.

So I gave in, buckled. I said yes. I told Husband that we could keep this thing under control. It'd be used when friends were over only. And anyway, seeing my son stick out like such a sore thumb reminded me of myself as a kid, when friends came over with their perfect Barbies with store-bought Barbie clothes, and then I'd pull out what passed for a Barbie in our house: a Barbie body with a freckled Skipper head and one leg. And it was naked. I felt my boy's misery.

After two years had passed, I had to shovel past criss-crossed mounds of wires just to find my son somewhere tangled in the middle, the computer addict needing more, more, more. And just like they say happens with drugs, the purchases didn't stop with the Playstation. Soon there it was yes to the Wii, yes to the XBox, and yes to the iTouch, which I actually thought he'd use for music. Little did I know he could download games.

Sometimes things I don't want to look at closely kind of dance around the edges of my brain and then, when I finally notice them, my brain kicks back on and I can act swiftly. So when Bar Mitzvahzilla tried to opt out of every activity last summer in favor of staying home with his favorite friend in the world, the PlayStation, well, that was it. It became the "Summer of No" all right, but with me saying No.

So I took it all away. He put up a good fight, asking me hundreds of times after the ban if he could use it anyway, waiting to tire me out, insisting he had nothing to do. And of course he had nothing to do. He had become the most boring child in the world, with no interests except gaming. With it all gone, we just had to wait and find out who existed under there.

But by the middle of the first week he was playing basketball in the driveway and then he put on his Rollerblades and zoomed around the neighborhood. By that Friday he became aware of the existence of other people in the world again, and actually had a conversation with his sister.

Who would have thought that it took saying "no" to get my kid to say "yes?"

Have any gaming troubles in your household? Budding addicts like mine? Have you ever taken it all away? Planning any amazing outings for your kids this summer? Doing any Mommy Day Camp like me?

***

Yesterday was the release day for Aidan Donnelley Rowley's book, Life After Yes. Aidan blogs over at Ivy League Insecurities and has written her debut novel which is getting great reviews! Go to Amazon and buy it now and after you're done reading it participate in the book club discussion on Motherese about it!

***

Learning How to Lust

2010-05-16T23:25:00.004-07:00

At Bar Mitzvahzilla's Bar Mitzvah

When my ex-husband and I walked into our marriage counselor's office in early 1988, the counselor quickly figured out our problem. Was it that we were sitting apart from each other? That there were no random touches or fleeting glances of intimacy? That we fought repeatedly and with unalleviated hatred?

She guessed our problem quickly. She asked us about sex.

We looked at each other like we were ten-year-olds. Sex?

Yes, sex, she said. How much sex do you have?

We hemmed and hawed our way into a lie - maybe once every two weeks or so. Yes, that was it. We nodded. Our first and only agreement in what would end up being ten months of marriage counseling.

In 1988 we actually had sex once the entire year.

I knew I was supposed to have sex. I was 28, for goodness sakes. And married. Married people were supposed to have sex. And I was raised in the seventies, a time period when virginity wasn't a prized asset, it was more like a barrier between myself and my full life as a woman.

The only problem was that before I met my ex-husband every time I tried to experience life as a "full woman" I erred. Used and dumped. Waiting by the phone. Dating guys who wanted me but whom I didn't want. Choosing guys for all the wrong reasons all the time.

Finally I met my ex-husband and he became my refuge. Not much in the sex department, but still. He called. He didn't use me. He would be there - like a Gila Monster, he'd be there clamped onto me.

How hard is it to leave a marriage when you've run from the sexual side of life, when you're afraid that you don't stack up, that maybe something about you just isn't good enough to have someone call and be there? Someone normal?

I wasn't trampy after my divorce. I'd already been through my trampy phase. I was all tramped out. But I knew I needed a guy with a little oomph, some drive, some lust. I wasn't planning on laying alone and untouched on my side of the bed for the rest of my life as I had been during my first marriage.

So lust? Got it. Troublesome husband in the middle of the night? Got it. Passionate kisses out of sight of the kids but getting caught anyway? Got it. A husband who never let himself come second to crying babies, babies parked in our room, children coming to sleep in our room? Got all that.

A relationship that's strong enough, romantic enough, and, yes, lustful enough, that one day when the kids dash off to college, hopefully we'll remember why we're married.

This post is part of Momalom's Five for Ten series and the fourth topic - Lust. Click on over and join the community!

Departure

2010-05-14T23:18:00.003-07:00

My dad, postwar Germany 1947

I'm not a poet, but when I first started taking writing classes some of my memories came out in prose and some came out in poetry, probably because my first professor was a poet and just being around her turned everyone in the class into a poet. So since Momalom's Five for Ten writing topic for today is memory, I offer up a poem I wrote about my father, about a moment in time, and about my thirteen-year-old self.

Departure

The theater’s dark.
Dad’s breathing next to me,
alive still for two more years.
Mom’s settling in next to him,
fluffing up her hair,
smoothing her dress,
and turning all her rings pointy side up.
My little sister,
her face flickering in and out with the movie,
sits on my other side laughing.

We’re just visiting Arizona.
My parents are shopping
for a flat, rectangular brick of a house,
no upstairs,
no downstairs,
sideways garages and pebble front yards,
all the houses strewn across the desert.
While my sister and I spend each day
floating in the sunshiny pool at the Holiday Inn
and plan what we’ll order that night
from the kids menu at Coco’s.

Dad coughs suddenly in the quiet theater
and a few rows up someone yells out,
“I hope it’s not catching!”
And suddenly I don’t want to move here at all.
I want to pack my two-piece bathing suit,
my nose plugs and my swim cap,
climb in the back of the station wagon
and head east, home to Chicago,
where the fathers all cough like they’ll be dead in two years
and everyone politely ignores it.

Do you alternate writing poetry and prose? Do you have any memories of insignificant moments that take on significance only in light of what happened later? Ever stood at a crossroads?

Happy Anyway

2010-05-12T23:21:00.002-07:00

In April 2001 I went to see a neurologist about some headaches I'd been having, some with visual distortions. He didn't think much of the headaches. Headaches, apparently, were a dime a dozen and not truly indicative of a more serious condition. But the facial numbness I had? That was important. As a matter of fact, though he didn't tell me this then, the numbness ran right across my third facial nerve. He ordered an MRI.

One moment I was standing in my kitchen trying to get my five-year-old son to eat his breakfast while dodging the cereal my one-year-old daughter was throwing from her highchair tray, and the next moment I answered the phone call from my neurologist. Calling on a Saturday. He told me I had a brain tumor and that it was pressing on the third facial nerve. And then I sat down.

Even though I don't mind talking about this at all, I try not to bring it up. The problem is that it's impossible to mention casually; it stops every conversation dead in its tracks. And how would the topic come up, anyway? When people are talking about back pain, neck pain, am I supposed to mention my brain tumor? Who wants to be this big of an expert in anything?

Here's the deal: when you say you've had a brain tumor, even cancer patients feel sorry for you.

But this is what I realized right after my diagnosis: nothing had really changed. Yes, I had this really scary diagnosis, but not a bad prognosis: the tumor was benign and operable and would be removed in June. So the question was, what was my life supposed to look like between now and then? Was I supposed to moan and wail and be tragically afflicted every day of that two months? Or should I just live my life?

Since Momalom's Five for Ten writing topic for today is "Happiness" I thought I'd write about something inexplicable: I was happy anyway.

For the first time in my life, a life of secrets and privacy, of hugging pain and shame and medical problems close to me, I let people know what was wrong and, by doing so, an amazing thing happened to me. I let people care. Me, the person who had suffered through miscarriages in silence, not even telling my sisters or mother. At forty-one I finally understood that I had to allow myself to be both weak and strong, to be both sick and well, in order to be human.

Yes, there was quite the curiosity factor when I showed up at work again, everyone wondering why I was there when I had a brain tumor, but after the initial shock of seeing me look fine, seeing me laugh, seeing me work, seeing me okay - and sometimes seeing me not quite okay - things got back to normal. They could ask me when the surgery was, how long I'd be off, was I nervous? What could they do to help me and my family?

There was so much to be happy about, after all. I'd finally broken down the wall between me and the world and let people come in. And after the surgery and the, yes, grueling recovery, I went back to work and resumed my life with one addition: I started taking writing classes. Still alive.

Happier.

Do you isolate or accept help and care? Have you ever suffered through something in silence, afraid to reach out? Have you ever been able to see that the situation is temporary but the happiness is permanent?

The Courage (or Stupidity) to Try Again

2010-05-10T14:03:00.000-07:00

Bar Mitzvahzilla at six months

After I had Bar Mitzvahzilla - all one and a half pounds of him - things were a little crazy around here for a couple years. There were the ten weeks he stayed in the hospital, the whole coming home with an apnea monitor and oxygen tubing thing, there was my postpartum depression that was so psychotic and so delayed, only hitting after he came home, that in some ways I still feel like if I write about it, it may come roaring back. There was the fact that, trained to sleep, or not sleep, on a hospital schedule, he didn't sleep through the night for a year and a half.

Bar Mitzvahzilla at one month

(actually lying down)

Yet, a year after he was born, when he finally looked like other babies and weighed what other year-old babies weighed, Husband and I started trying for number two. One of my sisters-in-law said to me, "Why would you want to go through that again? Why can't you just be happy with one? What if it happens again?" She was talking about the preemie thing. She had no idea that the only thing that terrified me about trying again was actually the postpartum depression.

I ignored her of course, because what if none of it happened?

Maybe I'm just stupid. Or maybe I'm courageous. Or maybe I just didn't believe that it could happen to me again, but all I knew at the time was that I felt like there was one more baby out there for me. There was a certain feeling of incompleteness right then and then there was completeness when she was born. I was prepared to try my best. And my best was pretty darn hard. And then - only then - if it wasn't meant to be I would happily raise my one child.

I gave birth to a little, old-fashioned Yiddishy looking baby. Anytime I was out among Jewish ladies, they'd rave over her and remark upon her Yiddishe punim (little Jewish face). For fun I used to put a babushka (scarf) on her head and she always looked just like a Russian peasant baby from the 1800s, ready to be swaddled and put in a wooden cradle by a fireplace in a log cabin.

How did I get this little antique-looking child, one straight out of a medieval book of fairy tales? A plump, happy child, ready to eat the house? How did I get a child who slept so long and hard that I used to put my hand on her chest to make sure she was still breathing? She was my bonus, of course, after Bar Mitzvahzilla almost killed us.

A tranquil baby. A moony, dreamy baby. A little girl baby, the perfect companion for her brother, the courageous preemie who beat his way out of the Newborn Intensive Care Unit and taught his parents a little something about determination.

Do you have any baby pictures that you love above all others? Do you ever think your kids are throwbacks to some long-ago relatives? Were your kids different kinds of babies - difficult and easy?

This post is part of Momalom's Five for Ten series. Go to their site, meet Sarah and Jen, and link your blog up!

Human Garbage Can

2010-05-07T23:44:00.000-07:00

Bar Mitzvahzilla is leaving for his eighth grade trip on Monday - a week in Washington, D.C. with his classmates. Gosh, a week without a teenager in the household. No talking back intended to wound our very souls. No slammed doors. No hovering, sullen teen, now taller than me, arguing with me in a voice that sounds like Barry White. What will husband and I do?

Um, celebrate?

So, to celebrate, we let Bar Mitzvahzilla pick a restaurant for dinner tonight. He picks Mexican food. We sit down at the table, the busser brings a basket of chips and, almost before anyone else can get one, Bar Mitzvahzilla has eaten all of them. Same with the second basket.

Because he's spent years coveting anything I eat and I've the fajita salad at this place, Bar Mitzvahzilla next orders this salad, though I've already given him a dire warning that he's probably ruined his appetite with so many chips. He scoffs at me. (Note: I also will not miss scoffing for one week.) Of course, he's right. There is actually no such thing as "ruining his appetite." He just continually stuffs food down his mullet before his brain has a chance to register that his stomach is full, then suddenly a distress signal is sent up from the stomach to the brain - while his mouth is still full - and he'll just stop chewing. He's done. That's it.

So he makes his way through the salad. Then he starts trolling for excess food around the table. Is Husband going to finish his burrito? Am I going to finish my taco? My Pico de Gallo? My garnish? Is there any refuse on the table he can perhaps lick up? It's like sitting at a table with a vulture. We hover protectively over our plates so he can't swoop in and grab our food.

While Husband and I are sitting across from Bar Mitzvahzilla tonight we both realize with rising horror that we're about to set our son loose on his unsuspecting classmates and they'll all soon be witnessing his table manners. The clutching of the fork like it's a spade. The overloading of the fork with too much food. The mouth opened wide like a bird, his braces glinting in there. The general multi-napkin mess that is his face after all this has transpired.

We begin some belated instruction: Smaller bites! Cut your food! Don't eat like you're starving! Slow down! Then we give up, exasperated. It's Washington, D.C.'s problem for one week, not ours.

Any ravenous children over at your place? How is the table manner-training going? Have you ever sent a kid off on one of these really big "field trips?"

The Inedible: Five Jewish Foods To Avoid

2010-05-02T23:26:00.000-07:00

I'm not a wimpy eater. I grew up with all the traditional foods; after all, my parents were Eastern European. Everything on our kitchen table was unidentifiable. What was identifiable was somehow referred to only by its Yiddish name so that I could feel as foreign as possible in the neighborhood. For example, I only knew the Yiddish names for chicken leg (polka) and chicken wing (fleagle). This is how I ventured out of our house (which was actually part of Poland) into America (outside the door): unable to communicate with the neighbors.

I wasn't that picky. I liked herring, I liked smelly fishes, I probably could've eaten an onion like an apple as a kid, that's how foreign we were. But when certain foods showed up on our table, there was no way my mother was fooling me - I knew inedible when I saw it. Mysterious foods, nefarious foods, foods that we'd stir to take a look-see and there'd be a globule of some primevil creature bobbing to the surface and then a leaf. With all of them, my mother was exceedingly evasive about the ingredients which led to one response only: my mouth clamped shut.

Here, then, to supplement my recent list of Essential Yiddish words, are five Jewish foods to avoid. Don't be lulled by exotic-sounding Yiddish names and don't think you'll offend the hosts by turning these foods down. These foods are always being turned down.

1) Borscht - This beet soup. It's red and chunky. Do I need to say more than that?

2) Schav - This is cold sorrel soup. It's green and comes in a glass jar. It's the evil half-twin of Borscht.

3) The Glop from the Gefilte Fish jar - Each Passover I buy several jars of Gefilte Fish which come packed in something called "jellied broth," a gloppy, gunky, clear slime that I wash off each piece of fish before serving. My mother loves this stuff. She begs me to save her all the extra glop in one jar and bring it to her after Passover. She doesn't want the fish; she wants the glop.

4) Poopik - Here's a newflash: when I was a little girl grown ups would play with me pretending they were going to eat my "poopik" - my belly button. And guess what, it means the exact same thing when, a few hours later, I'd sit down at the kitchen table and my mom would say, "Who wants the poopik?" Today - yes, forty-five years later - I asked her what animal, exactly, she had stolen this belly button from. She said, "A chicken." It's actually part of the Yiddish food psychology to drive you a little crazy thinking about whether chickens actually have belly buttons.

5) Kishke - This is fat mixed with sugar and flour and then stuffed in a casing, which I believe it means it's stuffed in an intestine. This is something I grew up with and loved but, as an adult, how does one make this exactly? How am I supposed to go to the butcher and request fat or casings? How am I supposed to tell my family that tonight we're going to eat, um, fat? How many calories, exactly, is this fat plus sugar plus flour going to have? So onto the inedible list it goes.

What foods were on your table as a kid that you considered inedible? Did you ever try them? Are there any foods you eat now that your own kids consider inedible?

A Pintele Yid

2010-04-27T22:35:00.001-07:00

My parents weren't very into Judaism while I was growing up. Because of the Holocaust, because of seeing things during the war that they felt were incompatible with the existence of any God, none of that was part of the Jewishness I grew up with. Food was, Yiddish was, and, of course, the Holocaust was. As a matter of fact, instead of my parents picking between Reform Judaism, Conservative Judaism and Orthodox Judaism, they simply made up their own denomination: Holocaust Judaism. Our worship consisted mainly of repeating over and over again all of the horrors our parents lived through during the war, until we all ran shrieking from the house into the arms of non-Jewish spouses.

But I had a longing for more. I had a pintele yid - a little Jewish spark inside me.

In 1989, I got divorced from my first husband. There were a lot of reasons for this but they can be boiled down to the most important one: I was dying inside my marriage. That's all. My pintele yid reared its head hopefully. Could the little Jew come out again? I didn't know anyone in the Jewish community, I hadn't been to a synagogue in years - I'd been hiding in fact, believing I didn't belong. But I also believed one thing absolutely: if I had to start all over again I was going to get exactly the life I wanted.

This past Sunday was the Israel Independence Day Fair in Phoenix. Husband and I went and walked among all the tables and booths and I saw what my pintele yid and I had built in the twenty-one years since my divorce, and in the seventeen years since my second marriage.

I wasn't alone anymore; that little Jew inside of me has nothing to hanker for. My synagogue, my Rabbi, my kids' Preschool teachers, their Jewish Day School teachers and staff, their camp, my chavurah friends, the moms and dads I've met, the charities with which we've been involved, and so much more. A rich life. A life that at one time eluded me. From Holocaust Judaism back to Judaism, one step at a time.

The life I dreamed of the day I watched my ex-husband drive away, his car loaded with his belongings.

Did you ever have to start over? After a move, in college, as an adult? Did you ever have to start with nothing but your belief in a different life?

Scaled Down

2010-04-25T22:12:00.001-07:00

I had to go to a few doctor appointments lately. Besides the time involved, the eye-crossing impossibility of fitting something in a schedule already stretched tight, there was one other problem: the weigh in.

How can I express how very much I hate to be weighed at a doctor's office? Or, let's be plain about this, how much I hate to be weighed at all?

Scales and I go way back, to when I first got my weight problem at age fifteen. That's when I first began perfecting my scale shenanigans. The first thing I did was I always adjusted the scale at home to be a few pounds under zero. I don't remember exactly why I started doing this but I do remember that there was some complicated math involved which took into account the times that scale had been wrong before and the difference between a hard surface weigh-in or a carpet weigh-in. In other words, just like forty is the new thirty, in my house, negative three was the new zero.

Then there was the weigh-in itself. Naked from my shower, and on twinkle toes, I approached the scale with extreme caution, like maybe it was a grenade. Near-sighted, I would get close to it to inspect for the proper negative three setting. Then, all being in order, I would flutter up onto it, first one foot and then the other, looking down - nearly blind - and ready to make a quick getaway once I saw even a glimmering of an acceptable number, even if the scale was on its way to a different one. Then I fluttered off.

I didn't have a love/hate relationship with the scale, it was pure hate/hate.

Finally, my husband put an end to my agony. One time, during a garage sale, he snuck our scale outside and sold it. Now I only get weighed at doctors' offices, whether it's once every six months or twice in one week.

So how do I prepare for a doctor appointment? Do I carefully gather all my questions about my illness? Do I gather all my available medical records and x-rays?

No, I stand in my closet and I carefully examine my wardrobe to see what I can wear that is the lightest weight. I mull over whether it would look weird to wear cotton shorts in the winter? Do I own any gauze? Can I wear a negligee? I consider it quite a milestone that I'm willing to wear clothes at all. In the elevator going up to the doctor's office I surreptitiously slip off my watch and wedding rings. My poor doctor thinks I've been divorced for years.

At the scale, the same thing always happens. The heartless nurse marches me over to the thing like a prisoner. She seems surprised by the delay as I slip off my shoes. Does she actually expect me to accept a hit of a pound or two for shoes? Then, while I literally stop breathing, she starts playing with the weights, a little up, a little down, sliding here and there. Finally it stops. I look. It's okay. Still, next time I'm closing my eyes.

What kind of games do you play with your scale? Are you the type who hops on and off ten times a day or not at all? Do you hate being weighed at a doctor's office? Do you ever try to wear lightweight clothing?

The 'F' Word: Football

2010-04-22T22:45:00.003-07:00

Today was the NFL Draft. I mention this not because I care, or for some reason I actually watched it, but because it means that football is coming. It's unavoidable, marching inexorably closer and closer to me with each passing day. The first sign? The NFL Draft. Then sometime in the middle of innocently enjoying the one hundred fifteen degree days of my Arizona summer, a TV set will suddenly flick on and that'll be it. Pre-season looping into the regular season and the endless fascination around here with All Things Football.

Husband has something else to be especially gleeful about this year: high school football. Bar Mitzvahzilla is already training to be a punter for the high school team.

Since somehow, even though he's still in eighth grade, Bar Mitzvahzilla is already in a "kicking clinic," I had to take him shopping to buy some football cleats. Of course, I wanted him to just use his soccer cleats and call it a day, but it turns out that's unthinkable. There are actually very specific, different, cleats for Baseball, Soccer, and Football, and they're differentiated by something elusive in the pointiness and spacing of the spikes. What do I know? I was a hippie in high school.

Here's something else I learned: when the male Sales Associates at Sports Authority found out that Bar Mitzvahzilla would be playing high school football, they all got starry-eyed. You would've thought Bar Mitzvahzilla was Joe Montana. Here's my son, the computer game addict, the ten-year-old in a teenager's body, being fawned over by these grown men. My son as an object of adoration, and for something he hasn't even done yet. And for something that has a bit more to do with brawn than brains. The hippie inside me cringed.

So there will be no peace for me. Football on TV day and night and actual live football games requiring the attendance of a real flesh and blood mother - an enthusiastic mother - on the other days.

How's your sports enthusiasm? Do you watch the NFL Draft? Have you ever watched your child get admired for something and realized how completely separate he/she is from you as they're growing up? What was your "label" in high school?

Roommates of Doom

2010-04-18T01:37:00.001-07:00

Did you ever have a roommate who drove you nuts?

When I went to college, I went through seven roommates my freshman year. This wasn't all my fault. In the prison block of my first college dormitory, we were assigned to four-person, two-bunkbedded rooms, one bunkbed on each side of the room, a bank of four closets in the middle, and a strip of four built-in desks on the opposite wall. With that many people in a room the minute I switched rooms once I automatically had six roommates. Then the minute one those subsequent roommates switched I was at seven. It was hard not to take this personally.

After all, I had roommates who bordered on evil, some who were criminal, and some who were just plain loony. There was one who switched bunks with me while I was away for the weekend, though just to creep me out she placed my artwork upside down next to my new bunk. Eventually, when I went away again, she moved me out into another room. I had a roommate who used to wake up our entire room with blasting Gospel exhortations to accept Jesus or burn. Every night for dinner she ate dry ramen, crunching it silently at her desk. I tried to explain to her that you were supposed to cook it, and offered her the use of my hot pot, but she just looked at me silently and kept crunching. I had a spoiled roommate who was so rich that hundred-dollar bills used to fall out of the Calvin Klein jeans she left strewn all over the floor of the room, all while I was subsisting on knock-off cans of corn. I had trampy roommates, virginal roommates, and, later, I had some roommates who were fascinated by my houseplants and plant light, so much so that they then bought their own plant light and started a pot farm in their room.

So I had some bad roommates. But I'm starting to wonder if these roommates, my children, are the worst roommates I've ever had.

My husband and I walk in the kitchen one evening. The cabinets are flung open, measuring spoons out, microwave door wide, wrappers on the counter. I think, Where are the kids? Are they okay? Because, of course, based on the condition of the house, I think there's been a burglar in there.

But no. They both simply made some fudgy thing that had to be microwaved and needed a measuring spoon to do it, and they had to unwrap some packaging. And they're just that bad of roommates that they grab what they need and simply drop the rest of the stuff where ever they are. Lift a finger to throw the wrapper in the garbage can? No, of course not. Swing an arm to shut the cabinet door? Lift a hand to put away the measuring spoons? C'mon.

When I look at these roommates of mine - the fourteen-year-old and the ten-year-old - I feel a little hopeless. The fact that they can make a mess and then sit in it - what does this say for their future? The fact that somehow, unlike my other roommates, all their actions not only reflect on me but have to be fixed by me, this is bad.

But so far one thing to be grateful for: no pot farm.

Did you ever have a bad roommate? Did you ever have a really great one? Did you live in a prison cell dorm at college like I did? What kind of "roommates" are your kids?

Past Tense, Present Tense

2010-04-14T22:45:00.004-07:00

My mother and father, wedding day 1951

Once upon a time I was a fifteen-year-old with no father. This had happened very suddenly. Like as suddenly as a heart attack, mainly because it was a heart attack. My father was alive one second and dead the next.

When I was a kid and I first realized that there was such a thing called death, the first thing I thought was that I couldn't bear to lose my parents. I knew my grandparents would die one day because they seemed very old to my young eyes, but not my parents. It was absolutely beyond my imagination that my parents would someday not be there. It was something best not thought of. So even though my father had had a minor heart attack before we moved to Arizona from Chicago, I never dwelled on his mortality. He was strong like an ox, he was stubborn like an ox. The word "ox" came up a lot when discussing my father. And yet, he was gone.

At fifteen I looked around and I saw that I was pretty much alone in this strange new world of half-orphans. Everyone else my age had fathers. No one else had to redo the way they spoke, to eliminate the word "parents" from their vocabulary and replace it with the word "mother." No one else had to start using past tense when speaking of their dad.

And now it's just the opposite. The years have passed. The language has changed. When you're fifty, everyone speaks of their parents in past tense because almost no one has a parent. If we meet up at a reunion it's never, "How are your parents?" There's more gingerly touching upon the subject, a more careful question: "Do you still have your parents?"

And suddenly, the exact opposite of myself at fifteen, at fifty I'm overcome by my abundance. Somehow, I still have a mother. I'm one of the few who doesn't have to mark her life by the days she lost one parent and then the other. Beyond all reason, all my doubts, all my fears, there she is, alive at nearly eighty.

So even though there's something a little quieter about her now, and something slowing down, and something that's definitely leaving, I think of that fifteen-year-old who thought she was so unlucky, and I think of this fifty-year-old who is so lucky, really. Because eighty is good. If she almost got killed at age twelve while running from Nazis in the forest of Belarus and instead of dying she's almost eighty, that's good.

Do you remember realizing your parents were mortal when you were a kid? How distressing was that? Was there ever a time when you had to change the way you spoke about your family, due to divorce or death, at an awkward time?

Purse of Shame

2010-04-11T23:45:00.001-07:00

Well, I've really been dragging my feet ever since Maria of Mother of Three Seeks Sanity tagged me on What's In Your Bag. I guess I didn't want to admit that I'm stupid enough to carry a purse that costs as much as a small Caribbean island. Nor did I want to admit that I'm stupid enough to carry a purse that one of my children could actually hop inside if they need to, but that by itself can easily dislocate my shoulder. But here I am, finally, shame-faced, with my purse, the Louis Vuitton Galleria Bag, which I love.

I think I've written before about my little teensy, weensy shopaholic problem, right? Also, about how, being raised by the Holocaust Survivor immigrants, who wouldn't pay for anything but food or shelter, I then ended up, after my dad's death, a member of probably the only Jewish family in Scottsdale receiving food stamps? These things have quite an impact on the heart of a girl. Once I had a little bit of money, I always had a decent purse, and a matching wallet and planner. And eyeglass case. And key chain. And then another purse when I got sick of the first purse. (About this time, people start feeling really sorry for Husband. I know.)

Now for the inside. Here's what came out when I dumped it:

Really. This is the purse you don't go into without a flashlight. The purse you venture near in fear of coming out alive. Will your hand get bitten off by an animal that crawled in by mistake and has now built a nest in its interior? Could there be a family of vagrants in there? Can it double as a flotation device? Or is it like Mary Poppins' purse - will I one day pull out a lamp from there?

Anyway, that's the accumulated paper from several weeks of lists I lost (there they are!) and receipts for restaurants or returns or whatever shopaholics do when they're avoiding writing.

Then I cleaned up all the garbage and came up with this:

1) Yes, not only am I big enough idiot to spend top dollar for a Louis Vuitton purse, but I've also spent top dollar for the matching accessories - wallet, checkbook, eyeglass case and keychain (and agenda - not shown)- but, hey, I only had to buy them once. You should have seen me when I carried Dooney & Bourke back in the duck days - I had to buy everything in each color.

2) Two Jazzercise membership cards for my two locations.

3) My little pal, the BlackBerry, which has enslaved me to its blinking light.

4) My mini Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous because I'm a twelve-stepper for my weight. Obviously not a twelve-stepper for my shopping yet! One addiction at a time, right?

5) Weight Watchers Point Calculator because even in my program you have to have a food plan and mine is WW points and has been for 10 years.

6) Lactase for lactose intolerance in clear containeer, inhaler for asthma, some headache pills in blue container for husband. (I know, he should carry his own purse.)

7) Floss sticks, lipstick, mirror, hair ties, tissues and manicure kit. None of which I can ever find.

8) Husband's reading glasses (should I get him his own Louis Vuitton eyeglass case?)

9) Back up house and car keys because I'm stupid enough to have locked myself out of my house before but neurotic enough to immediately be able to whip out the backup keys and get back in.

10) Missing: my notebook. I wrote down a great idea for a story, brought it into my office and forgot to put it back.

Also missing: all of our money.

I'll pass the fun (and humiliation) along to these friends:

TKW from The Kitchen Witch,

Terry from The First Day of the Rest of My Life,

Amber of Making the Moments Count,

BLW from Big Little Wolf's Daily Plate of Crazy (tell me your bag's French, Wolfie!), and to

Ellen at Weighting Around.

Are you a "purse person?" Do you need everything to match? Do you spend too much on one particular item in your wardrobe and then nearly nothing on the rest? What's hiding in your bag?

Essential Yiddish: Part One

2010-04-08T23:13:00.003-07:00

I grew up with Yiddish-speaking parents. Of course, both of them were born in Eastern Europe so that makes sense. While they each spoke about five languages, Yiddish was the language they spoke to each other and, although the oldest sisters were fluent in Yiddish, they lost it when they started school. By the time sister number seven was born, my parents were forced to speak to their Yiddish-illiterate children in one language only: English.

They tried to speak Yiddish to me but, as the number six child, you can bet I wasn't listening. As a American child of the 1960s, Yiddish was somewhat of an embarassment to me. I looked on it with some hostility since it was always used to keep secrets from me and because it was used for the incessant chattering of a billion uninteresting grown up conversations.

Of course, I changed my mind later. Too late. Long after my brain had frozen onto English and I only knew Yiddish adjectives and exclamations. But those Yiddish adjectives and exclamations color my world. I can't live without them. I teach them to my children and to my Amerikanish Jewish husband (his family? No Yiddish). And today, I teach it to you. Well, a first lesson, anyway.

Five Yiddish words you can't live without.

1) Drek - Crap or substandard junk. You can eat something and pronounce it "drek," or you can buy something shoddily made and declare it "drek." Needless to say, this one comes in handy.

2) Goniff - The jerk who sold you the drek - literally, a thief. A person who steals you blind. A pronouncement on his soul for being a thieving liar.

3) Schlmozel - You for being a hopeless dupe who got swindled by the goniff who sold you drek.
[Shl-mah-zle]

4) Schpilkes - How you feel inside now with your guts churning after you were such a schlmozel for buying such drek from that goniff. [Shpill-kiss]

5) Meshuganah - Crazy, insane. How you feel when you think about the goniff who gave you such schpilkes when he sold you the drek and made you into such a schlmozel. [Mesh-u-gah-nah]

Feel free to use these words however they fit into your life. You can pepper your speech with them for a little color. You can throw them around when you're angry so no one will know what you're talking about. Or you can do what my mom did: you can teach your children these words and then mutter commentary on the people around you under your breath so that only your children know that you have a steady stream of Yiddish criticisms rolling off your tongue while you're beaming at the synagogue ladies.

Does your family have any vestiges of an Old Country language it still uses? Any secret language? Will any of these words come in handy? Did your parents try to give you something you cast off but later appreciated?

Spring Break, Spring Broken

2010-04-05T22:35:00.002-07:00

It's kind of blurry, all the images are running together now, but I believe my kids last went to school on March 26th, a Friday. Then there was a weekend during which I cooked and cooked and then cooked some more, a Monday during which I cooked even more and then set our table, and then there were two Passover Seders. I remember a lot of matzoh. That was a long time ago already - a week. Why are the kids still off from school?

Every school on the planet started back up today after Spring Break. Except mine. My kids are off till Wednesday because their Spring Break is geared towards something different than Spring and more indistinct than Easter: it's geared towards Passover, which apparently will never end.

After our seders there was a three-day trip to Tucson, then another weekend. Now it's Monday again. They don't return to school till Wednesday, April 7th. That's like a different month than when this thing started.

We haven't eaten bread this entire time, we've been eating matza, which, in my opinion, takes a bit of doctoring up to taste good. We've also had a couple close calls, like where Daughter had some food, let's say a crouton, on its way to her mouth, then halfway in her mouth, and I said, "Stop! It's bread!" and she pulled it out at the last second. Also, we have a loose definition of what bread is. It has to look like bread to be bread. Let's put it this way: we eat tortillas.

Today my kids announced that instead of my idea for explaining why they were the only kids off from school today at the places we went - that they were 4th and 8th grade drop outs - they decided to say that I was homeschooling them. I looked at them and two thoughts flashed through my mind: gratitude for all the wonderful teachers they've had and how very lucky Husband and I have been, and horror at the thought of me homeschooling them. Because that would be just my style, to homeschool my kids and take them shopping all day for a lesson in, um, "economics."

Here's one thing I've learned because of this Spring Break that won't end: because of spending so much quality, unstructured time with Bar Mitzvahzilla in this strange loop of time we're calling Spring Break, a harbinger of the summer to come, I've decided that what we need in the summer is a lot LESS time together. He really needs to go to summer school and football camp. It turns out that what will make Bar Mitzvahzilla unhappy is what will make Mommy happy - me minus one lurking ominous bad-tempered teenager.

Just one more day left. And then Spring Break will be broken.

Did you ever give up a food only to find it in your mouth by accident? Is spending too much time around the kids solidifying your summer camp plans? How was your Spring Break?

Graying at the Edges

2010-04-03T00:14:00.001-07:00

I was sitting at my makeup mirror recently, the scene of all of my greatest torments, and I was just finishing up my hair, which is a very involved process. Right after I had blow-dried, straightened and then curled it into submission, I noticed some gray hair. I had to move my stylist appointment because of my kids' Spring Break this week and now, what do you know? Gray hair.

Do old habits die hard? I reached up my hand and was about to pull one that was making my eyes cross it was so long and scraggly and coming straight at me in the magnifying portion of the mirror, when I looked a little closer. I noticed that about 40% of my roots are gray. I recoiled like I had just missed getting hit by a train. I let my hand flutter back down to my side.

What was I thinking? Was I going to pull every single one of those gray hairs out of my head? Was I going to pluck myself bald?

For goodness sakes, these are not the good old days of finding one gray hair, pulling it out and then, five years later, finding another. That was fun. I know that, at my age, not to look like Albert Einstein with a crazy, electrified shock of white hair means I'm doing pretty well, but that doesn't mean I get to go on a rampage and pull them all out. Right?

I'm already in deep trouble with my hair stylist because right after I had my last cut I was unhappy with one little area on my head and decided to cut it myself. So I hacked a big piece off and left myself with a mullet on top. There's no way she's not going to notice this since it's uneven and about eight inches shorter than the rest of my hair. So I'm already in enough trouble with her without yanking grays and ending up with tiny, scraggly gray hairs popping out of my scalp just in time for my next appointment - the second the kids get back to school.

So, I ignore it. I take a deep breath. I ignore the silvery flash in a line straight down the center of my head, like a skunk. And I walk away from the mirror.

Ever tempted to yank out all your gray hairs? Do you pull them or dye them? Or are you going gray naturally? Ever spontaneously cut your hair - badly? If you have a hair stylist do you get along or are you constantly switching stylists?

Miss Greasy Head

2010-03-31T00:54:00.001-07:00

My Daughter's entered a new phase in her development. I don't know if it can be found in any of the developmental psychology courses at the universities, but it can be found in my house: around here we call it Miss Greasy Head.

For some reason, she no longer wants to take a shower. Or a bath. Cleanliness is no longer a priority of hers. It's a priority of anyone who stands near her, however, but not to her anymore.

She used to be my good little clean child. It was Bar Mitzvahzilla who was the problem around here with cleanliness. But Daughter? She'd march right into the shower several times a week with no cajoling and no reminding. Now, if we forget, she amazingly forgets as well. And this is not a child who ever forgets anything. Then we only remember when we look at her hair.

You know how hair normally is made up of a gazillion single strands that swing and sway together in a beautiful fall from the head? Especially when you're ten and it's your own hair color and all? Well, that's not what hers looks like anymore. It looks like maybe you could fry an omelet up there. Her hair self-parts into sections. It flomps around on her head in greasy segments. It slaps down on her face and leaves a streak of oil and then she breaks out in pimples the next day wherever that flomping hair hit her.

Husband is bewildered. I'm bewildered. At first. But then my memory starts kicking up. I remember, suddenly, being ten and deciding that I'd wear a ponytail for the entire fourth grade - and I mean the same exact ponytail, no grooming and no showering. Above the hair tie was my greasy dirty hair, with like moss and weeds stuck in it and dandruff raining down out of it, and below it was my horrible secret: a huge knot that could not be unknotted. I was sure that at its miserable center there was a wad of gum or something but I thought that if I masqueraded it in a ponytail no one would notice that it was one gigantic ball of frizzed up tangled hair.

So, of course, a filthy fourth-grade year runs in the family. And since Daughter's quicker than me and sneakier, she's knows it's only a matter of time before her addled parents forget about her greasy hair and move onto other topics which we then discuss with the sound of her flomping hair in the background.

Is there any shower resistance going on in your household? Any pre-adolescent grease build-up? Did you go through this phase? Do you think your kids wait for you to forget you asked them to do something so they can get out of doing it?

Shopping Like an Eastern European

2010-03-29T01:39:00.000-07:00

Most of the year I'm a pretty normal American woman. I look normal. I dress in a fairly normal manner. I walk in grocery stores and have a vaguely normal shopping list.

Then Passover comes along and any normalcy is ripped away to reveal my true nature: I'm an Eastern European Jew with a penchant for fatty food.

How did I become my mother, or, rather, my grandmother? How did I get so fascinated with the butchers at all the grocery stores in town, interrogating the staff about their briskets, the weights, when they're expected, and, by the way, they wouldn't happen to have a shank bone just laying around, would they?

Shopping for Passover is like being on the worst scavenger hunt you will ever be on in your whole life. I have a shopping list that looks like it was compiled in medieval Poland: fatty beef, liver, gefilte fish, eggs, potatoes, matzah, Kosher-for-Passover wine, horseradish, and, yes, shank bones. Then I take that list and try to find those items so I can spend days peering into large cauldrons skimming fat globules off the food I'll be excited to eat the night of our seder.

While I'm out on this quest, I run into the rest of the world. They're having somewhat more fun than I am. They are playing. I mean, I know they'll go to church on Easter Sunday, but before that happens, there's a good time to be had. They're dyeing Easter eggs, buying Easter baskets, eating chocolate bunnies, having Easter egg hunts, and buying their daughters lovely, pastel Easter dresses.

I find the last thing on my list, horseradish root - a gnarled mess in my medieval grip- and head for home.

Do you ever have to shop for things that seem a little, um, medieval? Scavenger Hunts at grocery stores? How are your Passover or Easter preparations going?

Truth and Creative Lies

2010-03-25T00:51:00.000-07:00

A big thank you to Robin of Your Daily Dose and Ellen of Weighting Around for awarding me the Creative Blogger Award. So here are my creative statements - true or false?

1) Despite being one of seven sisters, our home life was pretty tranquil, with little fighting.

2) My first husband was also one of seven children.

3) I'm famous at my kids' school for my cupcakes but they're just made from the Pillsbury white cake mix out of the box.

4) It took me five and one-half years to get my bachelor's degree due to switching universities, bad grades and changing majors.

5) When my two sisters-in-law come to town, we spend all of our time shopping at Barney's.

6) My ex-husband and I remain good friends to this day.

7) Math comes easily to me, that's why my undergraduate degree is in Applied Mathematics.

And, because who likes to wait?, here are the anwers:

1) False. If only there had been Wrestling Mania back then, we could have gone in the ring.

2) False. Ex-husband was an only child. You know, a coveted only child, not one of a litter of children, overlooked, like me.

3) True. I don't know why the hell everyone loves those stupid cupcakes so much. I keep telling them, "THEY'RE JUST MADE OUT OF WHITE CAKE MIX!" but it's like people have to believe it's something exotic. If it's me + cooking it cannot equal exotic.

4) True. (Does it help that I got my master's in two years with distinction?) Started in one major at one university, and couldn't stand it when I got out of the 101 courses. Then I transferred to another university (am I beginning to sound like Sarah Palin?) at which time I found out, much to my shock, that Ds don't transfer. Then chose another major and received my BA five and a half years after I started.

5) False. More like they go to Kohl's and I stay home and watch the kids.

6) False. Last time ex-husband seen by me (I don't rule out that he's been stalking me over the years): 1992, I was meeting some girlfriends for lunch at a restaurant right after I got engaged to Husband when who walks in? Ex-husband. He was a little surprised to see an engagement ring on my finger, especially in light of his dire predictions for my future love life if I went through with the divorce.

7) False. I was once offered a C by my Algebra teacher in high school if I would just come to class and sit in a chair like an amoeba. He understood that when I expected numbers but instead saw Xs and Ys, part of my brain shut down.

And I, in turn, am passing this award on to:
The Kitchen Witch
Jennifer at Chaos Wrapped in Chocolate-Covered Grins
Maureen at Island Roar
Karen at Waisting Time
The Absence of Alternatives

Was I the only one on a five-and-a-half-year plan for college? Anyone been stalked by an ex-husband/boyfriend in a benign kind of way? Fought much as kids growing up? Are you famous for cooking/baking something that you get out of a box?

Head Laundress

2010-03-22T21:32:00.000-07:00

I've gotten the kids pretty well trained on one task lately: they do their own clothes wash.

I know - this is big. I think when I went away to college at eighteen I had never done my own, but in a household in which I've never done Husband's laundry, it was only a matter of time.

I was going to do Husband's laundry once we got married. Not really because of some dutiful housewife thing, but more because he was so optimistic that since he'd finally married (he was thirty-six) he finally wouldn't have to do it. But, really, hadn't he noticed what he'd been dating for the last year and a half? He couldn't have failed to notice that I had no prowess around the house.

So we went in the laundry room together because he planned to give me something called "instructions." Apparently, there were instructions - the first death knell for him getting his wash done. One of the instructions was that when his clothes went in the dryer they were only allowed to be tumbled for a few seconds before the shirts would need to be yanked out hung up wet, making sure the collars lay flat. To quote, he didn't want his wash "cooked."

So, long story short, I've never done his laundry. Unless he was interested in the Linda "Stuff-As-Much-Into-A-Washer-As-Can-Fit" and "Dry-Until-It-Burns" methodology, then he obviously wasn't interested in me being his laundress.

But since I have such low standards, the kids and I have been getting along very well in the laundry department. Of course, sometimes they forget to put in soap and have to wash their load again. And then sometimes they forget to transfer the wash to the dryer, leaving everything in there to rot, and, yes, have to wash their load again. But overall, a good deal.

But the other day, Bar Mitzvahzilla left a load in the dryer and I needed it so, huffing and puffing like a martyr, I unloaded it. The minute I opened the door, however, there it was. The most dreaded thing you can ever find in a dryer: the skinny string of tissue. My heart sunk. Of course, I knew what had happened. Bar Mitzvahzilla had left one Kleenex in one pair of jeans and, somehow, somewhere in the mysterious world inside the washer and dryer, that one tissue had multiplied and divided and stringified into thousands and thousands of skinny pieces of one-ply tissues.

Could this have been avoided? I don't know. Would you want to put your hands in the pockets of a fourteen-year-old's clothes to pull used tissues out? Would you even want to get involved if he was doing his own wash? Anyway, the damage was done. I unloaded his laundry, consisting of more tissue than clothes, and left it for him to sort later.

Then I started transferring my wash over and what did I find? Wet tissues.

Do you do your husband/partner's laundry? Does someone do yours? What have you found in the washer or dryer that doesn't belong there?

A Different Kind of Ish

2010-03-18T23:50:00.000-07:00

Okay, I'm not Irish, I'll admit it. Each year when I wake up on St. Patrick's Day, I don't bounce out of bed thinking about it or about fields of four-leafed clovers. Of course, then I arrive at my exercise class and, duh, everyone is always wearing green and all of our routines for the day are Irish jigs.

The problem, of course, is that I'm a different kind of Ish - Jewish. There are several differences between being Irish and Jewish. Here's a short list of the Irish terms on the left with their Jewish equivalents on the right.

Tiny Leprechauns = Shrunken Elderly relatives

Green Beer = Mogen David Wine

Green cookies = Matzah

Corned Beef and Cabbage = Corned Beef on Rye

Gaelic = Yiddish

Jaunty caps = Yarmulke

Red Hair = No Hair

Dancing a Jig = Dancing the Hora

Pot 'O Gold at the End of the Rainbow = Pot 'O Gold in the Bank

Not surprisingly, there's no Jewish equivalent for "The Luck of the Irish."

It's just a different kind of Ish.

Got any Irish equivalents from your culture or religion? Does your life sometimes feel like it runs on a different calendar than the rest of the world? Do you do a big celebration for St. Patrick's Day or not?

Fork Over the Forks

2010-03-15T23:21:00.002-07:00

I unloaded the dishwasher yesterday and, just to aggravate myself, I counted the forks. Why would I do this, you ask? Well, when you know you had a complete set of twelve place settings of an expensive Oneida set, painstakingly purchased one place setting a month over an entire year, and then notice that the silverware drawer is becoming increasingly empty over time, it makes a mother suspicious.

So I counted. I'm missing nine forks.

And what does this mean? It means that my careless, spoiled children have thrown away the forks as they've cleaned off their dishes, or thrown out the paper plates they've used.

I had this dream of having really nice silverware - probably some Jewish genetic thing, hand in hand with my desire for good china, a gigantic house, and a really big diamond. So far, all I had was the silverware. And the silverware had to be of some heft, not the tinny stuff you find in cafeterias, not the haphazard stuff we had at my house growing up, whatever my mother got from S&H Green Stamps along with whatever people left at our house on the holidays and she purloined. My mother, after all, was coming at this from a different perspective. Any time she wasn't starving in the forest like she did during World War II was good, eating with anything that wasn't her hands was good. Obviously, she didn't have my utensil needs.

So about ten years ago I made a plan. Each month I took $42.00 and bought one place setting and put it away until the end of the year when I had the entire set and we began using them. Of course, what I failed to consider was that by then we also had children. Children who would've been better off eating with their hands. Hence, nine forks gone a missing.

I know I should be a little more optimistic. I mean, knowing our house and the general disorganization and what the kids' bedrooms look like, the missing forks could be anywhere. They might just be stuck under a piece of furniture, maybe welded to the carpeting along with a mass of sticky food or something. They could be lying forgotten inside an old lunchbox, or nine old lunchboxes.

But I don't think so. I think that in my kids' constant juggling of the dual demands of parents wanting washed off plates and cleaned off spots at the kitchen table and their own desire to frantically return to whatever they were doing (TV, gaming, playing outside) they simply dumped the whole thing in the garbage. I'm probably lucky I have any dishes left.

Wait a minute. Should I count the dishes?

How bad is the missing item situation in your household? How about the broken item situation? Are you missing an inordinate amount of one thing that the kids use mostly?

Tsunami-Bound Cruising

2010-03-13T01:31:00.001-07:00

When my kids were away at camp last summer we couldn't call them, but there were a few other ways that we knew they were okay. There were about one hundred photos of the campers put up on the camp website each day for parents to search through who were desperate to look for their kids. I'd find them and, unfortunately, I'd usually get more alarmed from the pictures. Daughter, in her second week, was still hanging out with the only girl she knew when she left, and Bar Mitzvahzilla always seemed to be alone and flat up against a wall. There were my cheery letters to them, their desperate letters to me, and there were emails we could send, for a fee.

But when my mother and stepfather disappeared for four weeks onto a cruise ship setting off for South America, there was none of this. No contact at all. A big ship full of elderly passengers carting suitcases full of medications and not a peep.

And why, instead, shouldn't this be just like my kids' camp website? A security photo of my mother and stepfather leaving their room each day, my mother haranguing my stepfather as he locked the door of their room, would have given me plenty of assurance that they, indeed, were well. On the deck there could be live video feeds of shuffle board games, of bingo parties, of beret-wearing World War II vets all jauntily out for a stroll around the deck. Or simpler still, video of them rushing the dining room for the early dinner, day after day after day. Or of the sleepy ship come 8:00 PM.

Three weeks into her cruise, the earthquake hit Chile and tsunamis headed out over the Pacific ocean, and then I had to start worrying even more. Where was the ship exactly? Was it sitting at anchor in the middle of the Pacific, waiting for one of those tsunami waves to hit and crack it in half? Was this about to turn into the Poseiden Adventure, or the Titanic, the passengers clawing their way to air pockets, or making their way to tiny lifeboats?

Unfortunately, the cruise line website provided no help. Its only purpose was to sell cruises. You can click on entertainment, you can click on food, or you can click on accomodations, but, even if your loved ones are right now being plummetted by forty foot waves or sinking off the coast of Panama, the website would never mention this. The website is going to stay upbeat, the tone Pollyanna-ish. Nothing is ever going wrong in the their world! And anyway, didn't you see that the Day 22 shipboard activity on the itinerary is "sinking?"

It turns out you can get a message to your elderly parents on the ship but you have to be creative. You have to send them a gift, like a forty-nine dollar manicure, and as part of the gift there's a little gift card on which you have one sentence to speak your piece. One of my sisters did just this. Her card, instead of saying Enjoy or Have Fun, said, "CALL HOME AND TELL US IF YOU'RE OKAY! Love, Sandy."

We got the call, and eventually, we got my mother and my stepfather back. And now? They're not allowed to leave.

Am I right or just neurotic about needing some updates on my parents? Have you ever had a loved one in the middle of a disaster zone? Ever had your kids away at camp? Is there one person in your family who is just more persistent than the others, who will not take no for an answer?

Husband in a Box

2010-03-10T00:42:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago Husband was very excited. He had bought a new truck.

Maybe you'd think this might be some wild and crazy impetuous action on Husband's part? Maybe some spiffy sport truck, or a special truck for weekend jaunts, or in some way connected to leisure, or a macho image? Like maybe it was a truck with ten-foot-high tires and a lift kit?

But no. This is my husband we're talking about. It was a box truck, for our store. A big, ugly, white cargo truck intended to carry flooring around town and store products while it's parked.

Our store is not located in the best part of town, mostly because we couldn't afford the rent if it was. So Husband immediately became paranoid about parking the truck down there. What if someone stole the box truck? What if someone stole the box truck's battery? What about the myriad other risks, like sprayed on gang symbols, vandalism, etc?

So what did Husband decide to do? He decided that the box truck would be his vehicle now. He'd just drive it to and from work each day and he'd park this monstrosity outside of our house each night so that in the morning it would block out the sun and cast our entire house into darkness.

And this is what I have to say about that: if the biggest fantasy of your husband's life is to drive a box truck to and from work, you can pretty much rest assured that he's not cheating on you. There just aren't that many men picking up their mistresses in gigantic box trucks and going to motels. Nor are there very many men driving enormous box trucks in the red light districts of any cities trying to pick up hookers. The box truck, it turns out, is a huge, and I mean huge, symbol of fidelity.

As with all new things, the newness wore off. Husband finally calmed down. He figured out how to take out the battery so he could park it overnight at our store. Though he'd really had his heart set on the novelty and panache of driving it to and from work each day, he finally understood that he just couldn't. Box trucks belong at stores.

So he drove it on its final journey. The engine rumbled to life, the gears screeched into place, down our street and all the way back to the store. And there it sits now, casting its shadow.

Any mid-life crisis car purchasing going on in your family? Any anti-mid-life crisis car purchasing going on in your family? Does your spouse/partner ever get excited about buying something really dorky? Something that necessitates you having to stand there and say, "Nice box truck, honey. Really."

The Hormone House

2010-03-07T23:01:00.001-07:00

Yes, it's true. After months of anticipating it, of being horrified over it, of moving forward day by day by day with extreme trepidation, today was my birthday. I'm now officially fifty and I want to say that the stupidest thing I did to prepare myself for this birthday was that I ruined my last couple of months of being forty-nine preparing myself for it. I spent so much time saying I was turning fifty that I wasted my last chance ever to say I was forty-nine.

All I can think is that it must be some kind of cruel joke, a mom heading into menopause, her hormones going nuts, with a son who's busted through adolescence, also a hormonal mess, and a daughter who's starting to develop, a pre-teen, and yes, also a mass of raging hormones. All in the same household, all at the same time. Everyday we wake up and there's an assessment: who's the biggest nut today?

My behavior comes out in a kind of heat-motivated panic about the state of the household. One more dropped toy of Daughter's; Bar Mitzvahzilla's whole wardrobe, somehow, stashed behind the bathroom door where he changes each morning; the idea that they ran out of soap in their shower apparently months ago and just kept on taking showers with no soap instead of asking for a new bar. This drives menopausal mom crazy. Actually, I think this would drive any mom crazy.

Then there's Bar Mitzvahzilla. He's taking a lot of showers lately. Either he's discovered that, yes, he has body odor or I don't want to know why. When he's outside of the shower he's now spotless. He alternates between being untalkative, mainly because he's got earbuds in his ears, or too talkative, presenting a pressing case for why he needs to get Xbox Live - because all of his friends have it - and how unbelievable it is that he doesn't have it. He has limitless, inexhaustible energy for this conversation, but I am a ticking time bomb.

Then there's Daughter. Her exhibit of hormones shows mainly in her great exits. Just like a movie star in the 1950s, she loves to make a final dramatic remark and storm out of a room. She thrives on this. I should've known something like this would happen, after all, I had her when I was thirty-nine. That meant she started Kindergarten when I was forty-five. Yes. So now - Menopause and Puberty at the same time.

I try to think back to what I remember of this when I was a kid but all I come up with is when my mother went through menopause. For ten years.

The final member of our household is mild-mannered and poor beleaguered Husband, not a hormonal mess and not in a midlife crisis. Despite a blameless life, he's stuck living with the three of us in the Hormone House.

Are there any hormonal problems in your house? Do you remember having one growing up? Any evidence of midlife crisis? Did you like your birthday post-childhood?

Weight of the World

2010-03-05T00:26:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was my father's Yahrzeit, which is the anniversary of his death. It's been thirty-five years since he died. And since I'm a very good Jewish girl, I know this. I get a letter from my synagogue. Heck, I belong to a synagogue. I buy Yahrzeit candles, I know how to spell "yahrzeit." I've been the daughter of a father who died, after all, thirty-five years ago.

But one of the great ironies of my life is that since I was raised by atheist/agnostic Holocaust Survivors, I was given no Jewish education. I did a pretty good job of raising myself Jewish, but I have to say that, not having come to my Hebrew education or my synagogue familiarity early, I always stand there like an idiot during certain rituals in Judaism.

So there I was at the tiny morning service at my synagogue at 7:30 AM, an idiot. Anything I know, I only know by memorization, so if a melody of a prayer is changed during the service, that's it, I don't know it anymore. Yesterday morning they changed a lot of melodies. It's crazy because I know Judaism backwards and forwards, philosophically, and the history, and in my heart. But stand me in a tiny synagogue with a bunch of seventy and eighty year old men and women and, guess what, I'm just an unnaturally tall brunette Jewess with a good purse. And by tall I mean I'm over five feet tall.

So I stood there, alone. Husband was driving the kids to work, though they had come with me the night before. Tears came to my eyes, and not exactly because of my dad dying. After thirty-five years, I'm used to that thought. It was the idea that, though one of seven, I'm alone.

I used to have a recurrent nightmare when I was a kid, distressing enough that I'd wake up terrified night after night in a cold sweat and run crying into my parents' room. It was always the same thing: I was alone somehow, and the weight of the world was on my back.

At the service this morning I realized that the nightmare had come true: the weight of the world was on my back. Or at least the memorializing of my father, the carrying on of Judaism, and writing as a child of Survivors. That's all. There was no one there who would help me shoulder the responsibility of remembering my dad, to come stand beside me in this tiny, uncomfortable service in the morning one day in early March each year.

But unlike that nightmare I used to have, the weight doesn't feel scary anymore, or unmanageable or burdensome. It feels like responsibility and, somehow, it feels just right.

Has your family split in religious observance? Do you have a special day each year to remember loved ones who have passed away? Do you feel at home in your faith's service or do you go even while feeling ignorant? Did you ever have recurrent nightmares as a child?

Talk Radio

2010-03-02T23:23:00.000-07:00

I was driving with Daughter and her best friend this weekend when the request I've come to dread came from the backseat: "Mom, can you turn on the radio?"

Okay, I really have just got to put a stop to this already. The answer from now on has to be, "No. Really I can't turn on the radio." First of all, I'm so old now that I have almost all the channels preset to NPR. And the ones that aren't on NPR were hijacked by Husband and set to classic rock or rhythm and blues stations. Either way, it's not exactly what two ten-year-olds had in mind.

They persist, telling me that they want a certain specific station, then watch as I try to use my limited brain cells to drive the car and figure out how to find a radio station. After all, I've only owned my car three years, not long enough to have mastered the scan button on the stereo. I'm lucky I know how to turn it on.

I find the station and it turns out it's Rap. This is when you know your daughter's not a little girl anymore. What, no Radio Disney? What about those nice High School Musical CDs we got a few years ago? How about Selena Gomez? Stony silence. I feel myself aging.

In that exact moment I turn into my grandfather. I say, "Is this music?" I even get a little Old Country accent. My voice gets a lilt. My hand waves in the air dismissively. How did I turn into my grandfather?

Here's what I remember. It was the late 1960s. Neither he nor my grandmother knew how to drive but my mother would careen over to their West Rogers Park apartment in Chicago in her tiny red Chevy Nova to get them each Saturday. Then my grandfather, with his diabetic legs that were all walked out, would sit in our house all day and into the night watching the kaleidescope of his granddaughters as we flew in and out of one door or another, running in and out of rooms, and as we played music on our HiFi system.

My grandfather would shake his head wonderingly at the noise coming out of the stereo. He'd say, "This is music?" And I'd say, "Yes, Zayda. It's the Beatles and the Monkees!" And he'd say, "Is it music or animals?" And I'd have to think.

The girls don't know that I just turned into my own grandfather in the front seat of my car. They're singing along - or talking along - with the rapper. Then Daughter's friend says, "You know, I'm not sure if this is music because he's just talking." And right then, with just the tiniest bit of wavering in the backseat, I click the radio off.

Is it startling when music you loved is suddenly referred to as classics? Do you remember relatives questioning whether the music you liked was music at all? Have you had a "generation gap" with your kids yet with music?

The Merchant of Phoenix

2010-02-28T23:32:00.000-07:00

I come from a long line of merchant Jews. We're kind of the middle class type Jews, not the rich ones and not the Torah scholars. We're the ones who own stores and laundries. As a matter of fact, my father owned a laundry in Chicago. My grandfather? A shoemaker. My great-uncle? A tailor. My great-grandfather? A woodcutter. Like in Little Red Riding Hood.

Once my relatives came to the United States, they were a little pushy about their occupations. They knew that the riches of America were theirs for the taking, but first they had to take them. That meant that they had to let people know what they did for a living, how their product or services could change the customers' lives, how things could be so much better with clean laundry, a well-made pair of shoes, or a finely tailored suit.

Of course, I was mortified by my relatives. I felt if they had just been American-born, they would not have been so pushy. They'd have been more polished, more reticent, maybe less embarassing. To me.

Since I'm a little slow, I want to tell you what I figured out today that made me think that maybe I have to be a little pushy today on my blog. On Poetica Magazine's website where I'm the Blog Editor, I'm hosting a writer this week who writes quite movingly about interviewing children of Holocaust Survivors and how she's spent some time reading the literature they've been producing. So all day long I've thought, "Oh, that's me, right? Children of Survivors and the literature they're producing. Me." Gulp.

And since I realize that Holocaust Survivors like my mother are becoming rare and soon all the world will have are the children of survivors and the stories we have of growing up with our parents, I wanted to do something I would normally shy away from doing: direct you to two venues where my writing is appearing in March. Even though that's, um, pushy.

I haven't written too much on this blog about how crazy it was growing up one of seven sisters in Skokie, where it was assumed that my mother was deranged for not stopping at two children. After all, what was she trying to do? Repopulate the world after the Holocaust? One of my stories, called "Seven Sisters," an excerpt from my (unpublished) book Seven Sisters is appearing on my friend, Sandra Hurtes', website for the month of March. Spend some time while you're there looking at Sandra's work. She's a brilliant essayist and child of Holocaust Survivors whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post and is forthcoming in Poets and Writers. I highly recommend her collection of essays, On My Way to Someplace Else, which can be purchased on her website.

If you can imagine what it was like having parents whose greatest thrill was going on vacations to visit other Holocaust Survivors all across the country so they could sit and cry for hours over all the misery in the world while their children stuck to plastic-covered sofas, then you can imagine what my childhood was like. A story of mine about vacations with my parents, called "Holocaust Vacation," is being published in an anthology of the work of Children of Holocaust Survivors coming out in March, called Mizmor L'David (Psalms of David). Even ignoring my own work, the Anthology is filled with some fascinating cutting edge work from writers who are children of survivors.

There, I did it. Now we'll get back to our regular programming.

Do you come from a long line of merchants, like me? What are you doing with your writing life? Any ambitions? Does anyone know a great literary agent?

What's Cooking?

2010-02-26T12:46:00.000-07:00

After years of proving over and over again that I can't be trusted in the kitchen, of proving that I can't actually formulate a balanced meal for my family, or calculate getting that meal to the table at precisely the time the family might reasonably be hungry, an amazing thing has happened: Daughter has started cooking.

This happened slowly. The first hint was when she'd be watching TV and, instead of watching Nickelodeon or the Disney Channel, she'd turn on The Food Network. At first I thought this was because I was so pathetic in the kitchen that she just wanted to see food - even on TV. But that wasn't it, because she was always eating while watching these shows.

Then she eagerly started watching the competition shows, the cake bake-offs, the meal in a box shows, the outdoor kitchen shows.

Finally came her demand: she wanted to cook dinner for us. Of course this involved me doing all the chopping, Husband doing all the cooking, and her supervising from on high, the recipe/menu/idea person. She wasn't actually going to get her hands dirty or anything. Anyway, would you trust a ten-year-old with a big knife?

I don't know why I never took to cooking. I definitely took to eating. I guess I was just more of the instant gratification type of eater. When I wanted it, I had it, like with a spoon and one jar of peanut butter and one jar of jelly. No simmering over a hot stove for this appetite.

So Daughter made up a menu with an appetizer, a main dish, a side dish and a dessert and then she put me to work preparing, put herself to work making a secret sauce for the fish, and put Husband to work grilling. Her secret ingredient for her secret sauce? Soy sauce. She only uses soy sauce and she only makes her sauce for fish.

You know how normally when your kids give you something to eat, especially something pretend - like when they hand you a plastic burger - you have to pretend everything is really delicious? Well, weirdly enough, when Daughter's made something, each time it's really been delicious. We were wary, we were skeptical, we were reticent, but each time we've tried her recipes it's been great. Now we're eager. We sit down at the table, which must be fully set each time, and all of us are appreciative of the ten-year-old chef in our midst who's wrestled the cooking duties from mom.

Of course, we're almost out of soy sauce and our blood pressures are sky rocketing, but still.

Are there any tasks you'll willingly hand over to your kids, or that your kids are showing an affinity for already? Do you mind being pushed aside as an incompetent nincompoop? Have you tried our "secret?" Soy sauce on fish?

Ten Things That Lead Me to Believe That I'm Jewish

2010-02-24T00:10:00.004-07:00

Since I got the Sugar Doll Award from Big Little Wolf's Daily Plate of Crazy, I need to tell you ten things about myself that you may not know. So I thought I'd tell you ten things about me that have led me to believe, conclusively, that I just may be Jewish.

1) I'm married to a guy named Howard. Not only this, but when I was in Jewish Singles, all the guys were named Howard. I could only differentiate them by the adjectives I attached to their names - like Fat Howard, Thin Howard, Boring Howard, and Cheap Howard. Which one do you think I married? (Okay, all joking aside, I married Thin Howard.)

2) I have a Jewish wedding contract (a ketubah) that says that if we ever get divorced my husband has to give me a divorce settlement of eighteen cows. I'll have to check with my HOA, but I'm thinking we're not allowed to have livestock here.

3) I clean the house from top to bottom before a party, let everyone destroy the house at the party, and then I clean it again.

4) My eating disorder? Fat. My twelve years in Weight Watchers showed a net gain of twenty-five pounds rather than a loss.

5) My grandmothers' names? Goldie and Sosha. My grandfathers? Yaacov and Gershon.

6) My choice of my childrens' names was not based on what I or my husband liked, but by checking out the names of our dead relatives.

7) I crave smoked fish.

8) I will actually move from my house to a different house to make sure my son gets into the right high school.

9) I grew up not knowing exactly what I was eating - in English. I only knew the words in Yiddish. The base ingredient of every dish? Rendered fat.

10) When it rains, my face disappears inside the exploding Jewfro that used to be my hair.

What is an undeniable fact that you are who you are, whether you're Catholic, Mormon or Baptist? What gives you away and is so apparent you can just forget about hiding it?

Thank you to Big Little Wolf for awarding me the Sugar Doll! Although she's way too smart for me, I try to make my my limited brain cells concentrate once a day and go visit her wonderful blog where she always makes me think and I always find a lively discussion.

The Sugar Doll is passed along to one or more terrific writers who connect, contribute, entertain, enlighten, and otherwise make our day. Each person who receives it may then choose one to ten others to whom it is given. The recipient is required to post “Ten things you don’t know about me.” I'm passing my Sugar Doll along to Chris at A Deliberate Life, whose honesty and determination have taught me a lot since I began reading her blog, and to Kristen at Motherese, whose finely-tuned mind and fascinating conversations remind me that this motherhood journey is not for the faint-hearted.

Be My Neighbor - Motherese

2010-02-22T14:49:00.000-07:00

Today I'm guest blogging on Motherese, an amazing blog written by Kristen, an amazing woman, with a post about being stuck in the middle with Bar Mitzvahzilla - he's not a boy and he's not a man.

If you want to be a part of lively, fascinating discussions and if you'd like to remember in the middle of your parenting years that, yes, indeed, you still have a brain, go visit Kristen at Motherese.