My Jenn-eration

It is 8:49 on a Sunday morning. By all accounts I should still be in my ducky pajama pants. But I am not. I am up and showered. Already, I am so overwhelmed by the list of tasks running through my head that I am literally crying as I dry my hair. Which is completely ridiculous. Phil said he would watch the kids but instead he fell asleep in their bed and they came running into our room. In the past two hours I have already done a load of laundry, some dishes, and explained adoption (thank you Disney channel and Jessie for that important but also difficult to explain episode). All I want to do is write out my feelings but there is a Barbie, a screw driver and one Spiderman walkie talkie on top of my laptop. They are symbolic gifts from each member of my family not so subtly reminding me of who and what comes first. I know this feeling. I’ve felt it before. It comes whenever I get so overwhelmed by the tasks of my family and of life in general that I forget the loving them part. T...

I am walking Dylan to the bus stop. We are greeted with the sights and sounds of winter’s first snow. It is before we have grown jaded and bitter toward its’ punishing storms and winds and snow that turns brown and slushy and problematic. Every tree and surface is covered with a light and fluffy white powder. Not great for snowballs and snowmen. Perfect for snow angels. We are early enough in the season for it to still feel magical. Indeed this time of year almost always does feel that way for me. Everything is covered in twinkling lights and powdery-white. And people of almost any faith recall a time and plan anew for a season of hope and miracles. December has always been a most miraculous time. It marks the season in my life when I labored with both my children on the same date, in different years: December 14th. I think often of my miracles. Of the ones I am surrounded with, of the one growing inside me right now. I think about what a miracle it is that knowing how tenuous, how...

The holidays are in full swing. The Target Hanukkah clings have been mauled by tiny fingers leaving nothing but fingerprints and a set of candles that dangle in the air sans menorah. Decorations from years of preschool love and tiny turkey hands and painted menorahs adorn every knob and shelf. The menorah is splattered with waxy drippings, the floor with wrapping paper from 3 nights ago. There is Christmas music blaring in the background because I am a Jew who loves Christmas music. Don’t judge. The fridge is half full from a wonderful Thanksgiving feast that was mostly demolished by our amazing crew of family and friends who gratefully took over and pretty much prepared everything, but just cooked it within my house. Leftovers consist of things like one turkey leg, a tub of blue cheese, a half used can of pumpkin, and 8 different half used sticks of unsalted butter (for some reason we had a butter consolidation problem this year- will have to address next year). The season of grati...

Today we got a new car. We said goodbye to my sweet little hybrid sedan and ushered in a new era in our family: that of the 7 seater. In a world of SUVs, I have truly loved my little car. It was perfectly suited to me and my family as we grew from a family of 3 to 4. It was the first car that was ever truly mine: not my father’s or sister’s or husband’s or in-laws, but just mine. It made me feel grown up in a rather traditional and silly way. It felt little and warm and cozy when we were all tucked inside on cold days, and breezy and sunny with the moon roof on warm days. It shuttled me all sorts of places including back and forth between New Jersey and CT, during the many years that we’ve ping ponged back and forth. I’ve loved how quiet it is, how little gas it takes, how relatively easy it is to park it – even for a shitty parker like myself. But it’s time to let go. As our family prepares to grow from 4 to 5, we’ve decided my little sedan will just be too cozy and that we are rel...

Thanksgiving is coming which has always been my most favorite time of the year. I love the universal everyone and anyone gather around cozy feel of it. Through the years, I’ve collected a series of rituals leading up to the big day. As I complete each one, I feel further tucked into Thanksgiving. Like it is a little pouch that picks me up when I am cold and tired at the end of a long fall, and carries me around in the warmth of stuffing fresh from the oven, and my family’s love. A few weeks before, I go out and buy my Thanksgiving editions of Bon Appetit and Food and Wine. While I cannot cook 98% of what is inside the pages, I am dazzled by the pretty pictures of home and hearth and turkey. Usually I find at least one pie or cornbread recipe that contains less than 5 ingredients and seems manageable for an amateur like myself. I carefully turn down the corners of these pages as my own mother always did for her favorite recipes and articles. While I don’t imagine that one day I will ...

Halloween is done and no sooner have we finished our last Kit Kat, the holiday season is thrust upon us. This year, it’s an epic one with Thanksgiving and Hanukkah falling at the same time on the calendar to make one monstrous super holiday: Thanksgivingakkuh. It is the perfect combination of thanksgiving blessings and gratitude with Hanukkah miracles. Visions of latke stuffed turkeys dance in my head. I am thankful for the blessings of food that will surely cover our table; more humbled by the simple gift of being able to feed the hungry mouths of family and friends that will fill our hearts and homes. Yet as American Jews prepare for this once in a lifetime season of starchy gluttony, I am struggling with the sharp contrast of how much we have in the face of how many have so little. Indeed, the ability to put food on a table nowadays seems, in and of itself, something of a miracle. Who among us has a job, keeps their job, or whose partner suddenly falls ill, often seems arbitraril...

The weather is gathering that bite that always comes by late October. Truly, fall can just take your breath away. It creeps up on you, leaves slowly changing. And then one day you open your eyes to the most beautiful picture you’ve ever seen. And before you can wrap your arms around all that intense beauty, it just up and blows away on you. Fall is tricky and fickle like that. Just when you fall for it, it’s gone. And everything is bare and white and stripped and cold. I know that’s coming, but I’m still stuck squarely in a world of bright reds and harvest yellows, carved pumpkins, and apple ciders and that amazing rustling and crunching sound that seems to just pop under your feet. Somewhat ironically in the midst of all of this color and warmth, I have been feeling a bit more bare and stripped these past few days. To see something you write go “viral” as has happened with Distracted Living, is a strange and disjointed feeling. It is both amazing and terrifying. I feel much the...

Last week, I almost killed my daughter. It started off as really any other week ever does. My husband had been travelling pretty much non-stop for nearly the entire month. Whether we wanted to or not, we were all falling into a fairly regular rhythm without him, at least Monday-Friday. With school and activities and for better or worse, the days seemed to move rather quickly but by evening all three of us were stretched thin. Collectively, we all seemed to peek at maximum crabbiness somewhere around 6pm. It was shortly after this time last Wednesday night that I brought the kids upstairs to help them get washed up for bed. My daughter had an upset stomach for most of the day but I hadn’t thought much of it. She was otherwise happy and playing and generally herself. I did know that she was very tired. Still, we were a good hour and a half from her usual bedtime of around 8pm. I put her in the bath and let it start to fill and left the room to go start the shower for my...

Thirty-six is quickly creeping up on me. I am nearly more than half way through my 30s: a whole chapter of my life that my mother has missed. It feels hard. I had spent most of my 20s doing what I assume most twenty-year olds do. I was self-absorbed. I lived entirely for myself. I worked, I studied. I wandered the streets of NYC looking for myself and for someone who was going to help me make sense of it all. Amazingly, this completely inefficient process yielded success. By the end of my 20s I had found such a partner. Through it all, my mother was always just a phone call away. Whether my schedule varied or not, she would always know exactly when to call. It was as if she had lojacked me. The moment I stepped into my apartment she was there, on the other end. Tell me about your day, tell me about you. But her picture of me ended there. She knew me only as that person: as the young woman, newly married. She left in the first couple of months that I became a mother. She saw me lite...

My-Jenneration makes its debut on Kveller.com today. You’ll find me there speaking candidly about my struggles with the Jewish New Year, and making promises with God and myself that I’m not sure I can keep. Check it out here: http://www.kveller.com/blog/parenting/a-new-year-im-already-screwing-up/

Hi Everyone. We’re up on Scary Mommy this evening. So pleased to share with you all some thoughts on Dylan’s first few days of school. http://www.scarymommy.com/kindergarten-in-2013/

Recently I read this little gem on the Internet. It was an article reviewing a study that had been conducted by a German social science group on a sampling of approximately 1,400 children in Western Australia over a number of years, asking for parent-directed feedback on their behavior at ages 5,8, and 10. Of this sampling, there was a significant correlation between increased negative and/or aggressive behavior among boys who have fathers working on average more than 55 hours per week. Similar statistical patterns did not follow among fathers who on average worked less hours, and among the girls in the same statistical group. [1] This of course made me think of that tasty little Pew study that came out not too many months ago equally skewering female breadwinners. In Pew’s survey on the increasing role of female breadwinners, they offered up an awesome little public opinion component where they sampled approximately 1,000 people who indicated that women’s increased presence in the ...

My father always used to say the amazing thing about the change in seasons in New England is that it always feels as if someone has flipped a switch. Seemingly overnight, summer fades and the first peek at fall begins. This past weekend, we went to our favorite little breakfast spot. There, we literally had our first bite of fall. They were serving up Apple Cider Donuts which, if you’ve never had one, might just be the greatest thing on earth. It was cake-y and left our fingers and lips sugary. With every bite I could feel summer getting farther away. On the drive home, we started to notice trees that had inexplicably already started to turn colors and leaves that had started to drop. At night we lit our last three sparklers, left over from July, and spent a few extra minutes on the swing set. When we put the kids to bed, it was already dark. When had that earlier sunset crept up on us? The momentum was gathering, a long lazy summer of PJs and hours in the backyard and swimming pool...

I spent this past weekend doing something that has literally been I think 8 or 9 years in the making: I went away with two of my very good friends. How completely unremarkable is that? Ever since we became mothers, we spoke and started to plan but amazingly never actually pulled together one single kid-free, husband-free moment in that entire time. We held our friendship together through playdates and birthday parties, holidays, and whispered phone calls in the middle of nap time, and work time. We had laughed and shared in each others’ lives, but I don’t think we’d legitimately finished a complete and honest thought with each other in years. That is until this weekend. We went somewhere relatively unremarkable that was within 1-2 hours of all of us. And it didn’t really matter where we were, because when we got there we followed a simple formula that we could’ve used in just about any spot in the country: we walked and talked. Truly, that was it. We were completely agenda-less with...

In the Talmud, a set of ancient rabbinical teachings, Jewish parents are instructed to teach their children 3 core things: the Torah, a trade, and how to swim. I’m not sure how well we are doing on the first two, but we’ve taken that last piece to heart. I found myself reflecting on this as I watched them in the pool this morning. It was their second to last swim lesson before the new school year started. The progress they’ve made in the pool over the past few months is remarkable. They are confident, eager to try new strokes, eager to learn. They soak up knowledge and readily apply it in the pool. And their hard work is showing. Dylan confidently jumps in and can swim multiple strokes with a fairly high degree of skill nearly the whole length of an Olympic sized pool. At just 3 years old, Ruby is confidently jumping in as well. She shows no fear in nearly 5 feet of water, carefully keeping herself afloat as she watches her brother and begins to move her arms, the primitive begi...

One of my favorite things to do whenever I visit my father’s home is to pore through old family albums. I love looking at all the old pictures. There are multiple albums dedicated to the arrival of my oldest sister. Endless black and white shot after shot of a very new set of parents looking adoringly at their baby. There are many more of my next oldest sister, this time in color, of a set of slightly worn but still very excited and sort of new parents greeting their second child, their first baby toddling off in the distance. And then there is me. There are a few of pictures of me as a baby. Mostly these are group shots with my sisters and me plugged in right before someone snapped the photo. There are almost no shots with that adoring fresh faced couple grinning at their new baby. I presume they were either too busy or too tired to pose. More than ever, this makes sense to me. When most of the photos of me do begin, it is around the time that my sisters became teenagers and I ...

Recently, one of my oldest and dearest friends celebrated her daughter’s 8 th birthday. It seemed nearly impossible both to her and to me that 8 years had gone by since that adorable little chubby blonde bundle joined us. She found herself remarking on how this grown-up girl before her is the same baby from all those years ago. It seems so incomprehensible. In many ways, I know how she feels. Yes, about her daughter but also about myself. For a reason I can’t quite articulate, in my head there is a certain age that I perpetually feel that I am. And regardless of how much time passes and how much father I get from that actual age, I still feel like that girl. I look in the mirror and I see some wrinkles and creases and lumps and bumps – the battle scars of motherhood and aging that I can, on occasion, wear with pride.   But in my head I am still that same girl from long ago: I am 24. It is 2001. I have lived in New York City for just a few weeks. I moved there exactly 3 da...

This morning as the summer brightness peeked in beneath the shades earlier than it should, Phil and I lay very still in our bed listening to the quiet hum of our house and our family. Soon, as always, the bed started getting crowded. Dylan’s head popped up first. Before not too long, some curls bopped along looking for a spot in the bed, Ruby wedging herself into the mix as well. And just like that we’d gone from two to four. In some ways, that feels like so much of what the last 7 years have been like. There were first dates and excitement and laughter and indulgence. And then an engagement! And then a wedding! And suddenly… there were more of us. But that girl from 7 years ago – she just couldn’t have known what was to come. How hard it would be, how hard it is. In truth, I believe I legitimately thought that my marriage would largely play out like a sitcom. We’d occasionally bicker, but resolve the issue within a 30 minute timeframe, each admitting we were wrong, laughing and sea...

Tonight, I did something I almost never do. For about 90 seconds, I turned on the national evening news. I watched. I took it in. I took a deep breath and let out the world’s heaviest sigh. And then I turned it off. I just can’t look anymore. I can’t watch. I feel horrible and useless that I’ve become so disheartened with the current trajectory or lack thereof by our leaders, that I just shut the whole damn thing off. I shut me off. I almost can’t stand to think and feel about how really screwed up its all becoming. Just in case you were smarter than me and decided not to watch the news tonight or read any news today online or otherwise, you might have missed the Supreme Court’s decision. They effectively decided to do away with key pieces of the now landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act. It’s all very complicated and murky to dissect but effectively, there was an old formula that determined that certain local municipalities and cities had to receive “preclearance” from the federal govern...