Book Come Lately

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?

__________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?