My Jenn-eration

I swear that I didn’t make this up. This was how the conversation started, seemingly out of nowhere, as I drove the kids to school this morning. Dylan:   “Hey Mom – do you know where all the magic in the world comes from?” Me: “No, where?” Dylan: “It comes from Heaven. All the magic in the world comes from Heaven.” Can you imagine? How brilliant, how genius, how perceptive and amazing and simple of a statement from a 5 year old thinking only about pajama day at school and pancakes for lunch and knowing nothing about the chaos and darkness that me and everyone else has been feeling and hiding from him for the past week since we first learned about Sandy Hook. I haven’t written about what happened there yet. I haven’t wanted to nor have I been able to. But if this blog is anything at all, it is to be an accurate reflection and extension of me and where I’m at. And if I’m anywhere, truthfully I’m still stuck there. I’m drowning in this juxtaposition of Christmas time and ...

5:22: Everyone is screaming. Dylan throws a plastic bug at Ruby and it bounces off her bulbous head. 5:23: Ruby screaming very loudy. 5:24: I frantically chop vegetables no one will eat in the hope that their dazzling color and the dubious Mayan predictions will somehow combine to make them try them tonight. 5:25: Timer goes off on the nuggets. Fish is almost done. Phil will not eat nuggets. Ruby will not eat fish. Dylan will eat everything. I prepare as many different meals as possible. I’d like to see Rachel Ray do that in 30 minutes or less. 5:28: Hand-washing. Ruby and Dylan fight over who will wash their hands first. I stare at them blankly for some reason forgetting to remind them that we have something like 4 sinks in the house. I set the table with our finest rainbow colored plastic cutlery. Also, for another reason I can’t quite explain, I forget the napkins. 5:29: I open the wine. 5:30: We sit down to dinner sans Phil. Though intellectually I know this d...

It is so hard to believe another year has nearly gone by and soon, Dylan and Ruby’s birthdays will be upon us. Though they technically share different birth dates, I went into labor with each of them on the same date, exactly two years apart. For that reason, December 14 th will forever by my official labor day. I know their birthdays are technically about them but now as a parent I literally feel a near uncontrollable urge to scream and shout every year at this time: “Where is my cake? My balloon? Why is no one clapping and cheering for me?! Do you know what my body accomplished on this date 5 and 3 years ago respectively?!” Reluctantly, I let the children have their days while I silently reflect on how this day literally marks the anniversary of the last day it was ever all about me. It was December 14, 2007. I had been in labor and delivery for two days while the hospital tried everything they medically could think of to start my labor. It was a Friday and I had been on an all l...

The holiday season sneaks up on me every year and this year is no exception. I thought I would try to fit in a quick haircut and stopped by to see a local hairdresser that I’ve known for awhile now. A few years ago, her best friend and the owner of the salon passed away quite suddenly and unexpectedly. Nearly three years later her good friend and colleague still weighs heavily on her mind, even more so at this time of year. “The holidays are hard,” she tells me. “It just feels more unbearable.” She knows I understand. Anyone who knows or has ever known loss and grief (which is pretty much everyone) knows that the holidays are just hard.   The reality is that on any given day, I carry my grief over the loss of my mom around with me. It doesn’t bother me like it used to. At first it felt so heavy, I could hardly lift it, hardly lift me. It felt like I couldn’t breathe. But then one day, on a particular day that I didn’t even notice or remember, it just stopped feeling that way. An...

It is early but not that early. I roll over to greet my husband and then remember he is away on a business trip. He is not there. I say good morning to my phone. It greets me with its both incredibly satisfying yet intensely irritating round of clicks and beeps as I sift through a range of mostly useless information. Top stories on CNN, weather, TMZ, FB. I’m clearly checking everything of vital national importance. At the same time not too far down the hall, Ruby is just waking up. As she does, she hears the far away sound of my AM click click clicking. “Mom, what is that sound?” And just like that I’ve thrust her into this chaotic busy technologically savvy everyone’s checking everyone’s connected world before her poor little two year old body has had a chance to fully crank open her eyelids and greet the morning sun. I feel like a jerk and a hypocrite. I always said I would never be one of those people and here I was – checking my phone before I checked on my husband or my kid...

I am officially raising Alex P. Keaton. He doesn’t own the Nixon lunchbox. Well, not yet anyway. Today is election day. The excitement of choosing a new President! The thrill of donuts being served at the polls to select the new President! The confusion of my children as their parents root eagerly (albeit respectfully – minus that one nasty blowout in September- that was a complete parenting fail) for different people. I voted for Obama. I don’t know who Phil voted for. He believes it is his right to keep this between him and his ballot. I believe that somewhere in our vows it contained something about telling your wife every single thing including who you vote for. I cannot prove this. We must agree to disagree. At any rate, regardless of who he voted for, I’m proud of him for a) voting and b) voting his conscience (even if it’s not my conscience). Anyway, this really isn’t about Phil or me. It’s about Dylan. And how he’s like Alex P. Keaton and how I’m shocked to discover that someho...

I remember on a cold December morning back in 2007, sitting at my kitchen table and crying. It happened to be the day of my son’s bris (a ritual Jewish circumcision and naming ceremony). My father assumed that I was understandably emotional about everything that I and my newborn son would face that day. But instead I remember I looked at him and said that I was crying because I couldn’t believe how old he was. 7 whole days! Can you believe it? I had waited so many months for him, counted down every second and then he was finally here! And now a whole week had gone by in what seemed like the blink of an eye and I was humbled by the idea that the moments that would follow would be equally fleeting; that we would be on a perpetual fast forward button. I didn’t have a newborn! I had a week old baby, a real old timer. I remember quite clearly what my father did next. He yelled, “Ronni! [my mother] Get in here! You won’t believe this one!” And then the two of them laughed at me. Not with me,...

I turned 35 this week. As it happened, my birthday coincided with Yom Kippur. If you aren’t familiar with Judaism, Yom Kippur is a fun little holiday where you go to synagogue and atone for all of your sins, literally beating your chest as you beg G-d for forgiveness. You also get to fast. It’s really one of those feel good holidays. So, after racing to get everyone up and dressed for synagogue and there on time to sit through some portion of a service that they didn’t really understand, I slogged home where I pored through my excessive apple stash from last week’s apple picking so that I could make homemade applesauce and apple kugel to break the fast later. By the time the family showed up, everyone had a migraine. We ate a large meal to signify the end of our fast and promptly felt sick after. There was a birthday cake which was sweet although strangely, we were unable to find any birthday candles. This is particularly odd because I seem to hoard this product, but am only able to un...

Today wasn’t the morning I thought I was going to have. With both children safely off to school for the next three hours, it was a race against time to see how much I could accomplish. So when my father called just a minute after I walked back into the house, I was surprised and truthfully a little annoyed when he asked if I wanted to go take a ride over to the Tower Avenue cemetery and visit Bubby and Grandpa. I hadn’t been to the cemetery where my grandparents were buried in far too long and hearing his voice asking on the other end, it was clear laundry was going to take a backseat to the request. The cemetery, in a section of Hartford that was once heavily Jewish and immigrant, is tucked away behind the old Weaver High. It is a mishmash of tiny congregations that have long since dissolved and come together on a small section of land in Hartford. There are a few more recent burials, but not many. In Judaism, when you visit the dead, you are asked to bring a stone with you and p...

I received an email tonight from a fellow mom. Really, it was more of a detailed confession of all of the things she’d done wrong today as a mother. It ended with two simple words: “Parent fail.” Her email both broke my heart and made me super angry because you see, she’s really a terrific mom. But today, she must have used someone else’s measuring stick to make that call. It troubled me in particular because motherhood and parenthood for that matter, is definitely not measured or won or lost on a battle by battle or day to day basis. We’re in this for the long haul people. Did your child watch six hours of TV today or eat pizza for dinner every night this week? What really matters at the end of the day? Let’s just admit my own bias here. If we are measuring this stuff on a day to day basis, I’m assuming I would have done a pretty sub-par job by most people’s standards. I brought my son to the grocery store in a rainbow colored clown wig and pajamas because it was the only way ...

And more importantly, why do we all keep spelling chicken that way? Are we all in on the joke or the conspiracy? Seriously – what’s up with that? But I digress. This post isn’t about chikn or chicken. It’s about two very important things I strongly believe:   1) all Americans deserve the same equal rights, and 2) without question liberals have absolutely zero political savvy and are the stupidest people on the planet. And I say that as a liberal. Let’s start with the second point here, for no other reason than the consistent misspelling of the word chicken is making me feel more stupid so I’ve decided to do things in the wrong order. Why are we so bad at this? Why didn’t we see a cheap publicity stunt trap being set for us a by a chicken warlord? Why did we all fall for it?! What the cluck! Here’s a shocker people: the proud patriarch papa of a southern based bible belt fried chicken joint gives lots of his private profits to support the Defense of Marriage act and other effort...

When I woke up this morning and first heard the news about the mass shooting in the Colorado theatre, my heart sank. Not just because it was a tragedy for the people who lost their lives or their families, but because as a nation, as a mother, it was officially no longer an innocent activity to go the movies. It just reinforced every instinct I have ever felt as a parent that I think should be to broaden my children’s horizons, to show them the world. But it’s not. It’s to wrap them up in this tiny little town in a bubble and keep them as sheltered for as long as I possibly can, which isn’t nearly as long as it used to be. I had this conversation the other day with my friend as we watched our children run through the sprinklers with relatively few cares in the world. She spoke of how, at 8, she was already seemingly losing influence or control over her son’s choices in this world. Before you know it, maybe they are 18 and they want to go see Batman play at the local theatre. And t...

I hate it when my kids turn out to be smarter than me. I mean seriously, I really hate it. So tonight was particularly troubling and illuminating when after ripping into my son for the thirtieth time that day about something he was doing that I didn’t like, he said this to me: “You know Mommy, back when there was nobody in this town and just me, G-d handed me a magazine and said pick one. And I picked Daddy and I picked you Mommy, not for any other reason but because of who you are.” I looked at him, and promptly bawled my eyes out. I guess this is really my Bridget Jones post – right? You know the infamous line from Mark Darcy to a downhearted Bridget after a disastrous dinner party: “I like you very much. Just as you are.” My son loves me for who I am. And at the tender age of four he is smart enough to know that there is pretty much nothing better for anyone at any time or age to hear. In that moment I realized the single biggest thing I needed to do and wasn’t doing for my kid: ...

Lately, what seems to be “trending” online, re-tweeted or shared on FB seems to be a fair litmus test for what’s on people’s minds. So when a seemingly innocuous piece from a publication I’m willing to bet almost none of you read on a daily basis got a shocking amount of recirculation and sharing at least within my circle of friends, it got me thinking. The article was from The Atlantic (read it lately? exactly –didn’t think so) but I bet you read the article: “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” It’s a smartly written and illuminating piece by Anne-Marie Slaughter documenting her experience reaching the pinnacle of her professional experience and saying explicitly that the trade-offs between work and family are real. She goes on to discuss how the younger generation seems more keenly aware of these pitfalls and is consequently less likely to as aggressively pursue the very highest rung of their respective professional ladders, as they suffer no disillusion about their ability to “have...

So it’s that time of year again. Somehow we seem to be getting ready to move – AGAIN! And while I am excited to bring my family back to CT where we feel most at home, it is hard to say goodbye to some of the really lovely new friends we’ve made during our rather tumultuous year in NJ. I’ve never been good at goodbyes. I feel like there are approximately three types of goodbye-rs. There is type a), the completely unemotional, unattached goodbye-r who says au revoir without a single tear or tug of sentimentality; b) the no goodbye-r who never actually says it or closes the loop because they just can’t bring themselves to do so. I equate this one to feeling like someone clicks over to take another call and they just never click back to your conversation and everything feels just kind of weird and unfinished. And of course there is type c), the overly emotional person who is crying before they can say anything goodbye-r, so caught up in a flood of memories and nostalgia that the poor pe...

I bet you and I hit the same 3-5 websites everyday to get our quick fix of news and cultural references. Maybe you’re a CNN and Huffington Post lady. Or maybe your cup of tea is Fox News or The Stir. I’d even bet that among your FB friends and twitter feeds, you’ve found yourself reading and/or engaged in one of the three following topics over the past few weeks: 50 Shades of Grey, the now infamous Time Magazine article on attachment parenting, and/or perhaps some sort of related discussion about a supposed “war” between working moms and stay at home moms. And it is starting to make me anxious to think that we, my fellow sisters, wives and mothers, are co-conspirators in a media-driven effort to make us more stupid, divided, and generally less focused on legitimate issues that matter to us and our families. First – let’s call a spade a spade. I fell for it all. I monitored all the chats following the hype on 50 Shades of Grey while I furtively discussed among my female friends if I ...

The other morning I officially hit a new parenting low when I literally promised my daughter gold at 5AM if she would just be quiet. Whatever. It didn't even work. And in this moment I was particularly struck by two universal truths about parenting: 1) anything you say at crazy hours of the night and early morning can never be held against you by your spouse or children during regular human hours, and 2), you must accept that which you cannot control. On this particular morning, Ruby woke up for THE DAY at 4:55AM (anything before 6AM in my book is completely unacceptable) and did so by singing the ABC’s at the top of her lungs. Which would have been annoying but manageable had she not put the fear of G-d in me that she would also wake her brother before 6AM, a completely unmanageable situation requiring a 4:30pm bedtime for the entire family. I was literally pleading with her 2 year old mind for silence as she stared at me with her large and completely blank eyeballs and began to...

Tomorrow will be a very important day. It is the birthday of the first man who I ever gave and received unconditional love from: my dad. My dad is, I suppose, a walking contradiction of sorts. He is an intellectual but has relied on his street smarts and uncanny ability to read people to guide him through life. He is artistic and thoughtful, but cannot resist a Mel Brooks joke about knockers. He has had every reason to bury himself in a series of tragedies and sorrows that have seemed to follow him somewhat relentlessly in life, but instead pursues happiness with a near fervor. He grew up a first generation American living in one of the roughest immigrant neighborhoods of Hartford. He shared a room with his older sister, met his soul mate at a dance when he was 13, put himself through college, worked nights as a pharmacist while he got his law degree, rose up through the ranks of a major corporation, built a life with his wife and lived the American dream. There was a house in the...

So it’s almost Mother’s Day. This is always a time of year that fills me with so many jumbled up emotions. I am struck by this complete humbling and deep well of gratitude for the two amazing children I’ve been blessed to be a mom to, and a silent selfish longing to get the chance, even one more time to be a kid and celebrate the day with my own mom. But it’s not to be – at least not the last part. She passed away about four years ago now. That seems so hard to believe. In the time she’s been gone I’ve become a mother and had to put into practice every lesson she ever tried to teach me and strive to do it, if I’m lucky, maybe half as good as she did it. Mom was like the Ginger Rogers of Motherhood, doing it all backwards and in high heels with an unmatched grace and elegance. I miss her a lot but still want to stay focused on the positives of the day – the wonderful mom I had, the kids I’ve got, and the other mothers I’ve been blessed to have in my life. I’m sad to say that for year...

My children have watched television for most of this day. Based on current pediatric literature and thinking, I'm assuming they will now grow up to be mute serial killers. The whole day I obsessively calculated the total amount of hours watched and by how much it exceeded the American Academy of Pediatrics recommendation of two hours or less. I stopped counting somewhere around four hours. It wasn’t continuous and was broken up over what felt like a very long and busy morning but still—it was a lot. I think and obsess a lot about this particular guideline issued to parents—about how or whether or not the more I let them watch, the less likely they’ll be able to communicate, grow fat, violent—and ultimately become all around horrible people. Honestly, in fairness that Ruby from Max and Ruby really is a bitch. They’re not learning anything from her. I know I’m using it as an “electronic babysitter.” I know that’s wrong and that frankly nothing about Yo Gabba G...

I am a Democrat, a die-hard liberal. If you cut me, do I not need bleed blue? So no one was more surprised than me when I married Phil, a Republican. Now, he claims he is not affiliated and is an Independent but I’ve caught him furtively watching Fox News just enough times now to guess which way he swings. While most married couples often fight about the dishes or late night feedings, our worst disagreements have been about social security, national security, or global warming.   Were I not so heatedly discussing why Ronald Reagan is in fact not the greatest president ever, I might even be able to laugh at how ridiculous we must seem. I met Phil about a month before George W. Bush was re-elected to his second term. At the time, I told him that if he won he probably wouldn’t hear from me again because I was intending to take a row boat to Canada. Our first date was just days after he won re-election. When he attempted to broach the subject over drinks I told him: “Not yet, the ...

Sometimes I feel that Special Agent Oso provides enough care for my children that he could qualify as a sister wife.   I feel ridiculous even writing it, but as I watched Oso gently soothe my exhausted children on a Friday afternoon while I made dinner, I couldn’t shake the feeling. This must be what it’s like to have a sister wife, a partner to pitch in during those relatively innocuous but super tricky times of day when everyone, most of all you, is super tired and is just without the patience or wherewithal to work out how to make it all better. I'm Jewish. And, as far as I know, there is little evidence of plural marriage and Judaism having any connection in history. That said, I can’t help but wonder sometimes – could there be something real here that I’m missing out on? Just imagine: another woman or women as the case may be who serves as a partner in all ways to help you grow, protect, and nurture your children. I mean – I guess in theory that’s what a spouse or par...

On any almost any given day, I read or hear something that makes me question my choice to be a stay-at-home mom. I never for a second regret the decision. I love getting a chance to have this fleeting time with my kids when they are little. It’s never the choice I regret. It’s the way I feel—my reflection of other people’s judgment about this choice, which I struggle with on an almost daily basis.   It’s usually a relatively innocuous statement or an article either hinting or overtly stating that by staying home with my kids, I’ve turned my back on the feminist movement, that I’ve lost my own identity, and that I’m some sort of throwback to a time and place that doesn’t exist anymore. And it usually makes me feel uncomfortable and not more than a little angry.   The one that set me off today was a throwaway piece written by a woman and posted by a female friend on how marketers today no longer market to the traditional stay-at-home mom because she no longer exists. In...