My Jenn-eration

Everyone has been sick here. It feels like it has been weeks since any of us has had a good night’s sleep and it feels like that way probably because it’s true. And this morning I woke up and everyone was all plugged in with the shades drawn, marinating in their own germs and I just snapped. I could not stay inside even one more day: especially not a stunningly gorgeous and unusually warm December one. So I started screaming at everyone that we all needed to get dressed in the next ten minutes because we were going ice skating. Like, immediately. It was a completely random ice skating emergency. I have no idea why this break with normal life happened. It’s just that I was so tired of being tired, of laundry and Tylenol and screens and I needed LIFE. Real life with capital letters and the kind that you can fill your lungs with. And everyone was running around looking for pants and Phil was asking if there was time for a shower and I was like, “… a shower?! Are you mad?! We have to...

Phil and I have one of those coffee makers that uses the little pods and you just push a button and it produces coffee. They are terrible for the environment and I’m sure there are all sorts of other reasons why we shouldn’t be using them. But we can’t decide on what other kind of coffee maker to get and so, as a default, we stick with this one. We are literally too tired to decide and so we keep pushing the button each morning, grateful for the opportunity to drink coffee and decide one less thing. This tiredness played out in real time the other morning as I tried to make a cup of coffee using this coffee maker. All I had to do was literally push a button. Monkeys would actually be able to do this. Monkeys would remember to put the cup of coffee underneath the thing where the coffee comes out, not next to it. Clearly, I am not a monkey. And as I watched the coffee spill all over the counter and swirl all around the bottom and outside of my cup and nowhere near the inside ...

Sometimes I write things that do not make sense. I usually do not share this stuff. Unfortunately for you, that is not the case today. Life feels very busy right now. Busy isn’t always bad. But this feels like the noisy, transactional kind of busy that leaves you tired and unsatisfied with life. It isn’t the good, productive, and fulfilling kind of busy that shouldn’t be discounted as an equally valuable undercurrent in our lives. It’s the bad kind of busy. Right now I’ve got 5,062 unread emails. Now in fairness, I’m bad at staying on top of this stuff but that truly seems like a lot. This holiday season it just feels like more than ever before all we are giving each other is the gift of email, of this non-stop banter and back and forth. A perpetual volleying of words and tasks that literally never ends. Have any of your emails ever actually ended? Like with a, okay, thanks, this is done now, goodbye? No! They never end. They just live on and morph into new mindless tasks that a...

On the Friday after Thanksgiving, my sisters and I packed up our children and headed over, along with my father, to the cemetery. Black Friday indeed. In what is remarkably now our seventh thanksgiving without her, visiting my mother’s grave over the holiday weekend has become its own tradition in and of itself. We go, we say the Mourners Kaddish, we leave sea shells (instead of traditional stones which Jews leave) because my mother loved looking for seashells at the beach. When we are finished, we usually visit my aunt, my uncles, a great aunt and uncle, and some distant cousins, all laid to rest within reach of my mother’s stone. We almost always bring the kids. In the beginning, during those first few years after she passed, things seemed to sting more than they do now. And the pain of loss and the sharpness of the wind and the way it hits you on top of that hill on cold November mornings would often leave us breathless. But time has a way of morphing grief. It doesn’t go ...

Recently, I read an article in The Atlantic about the role of analytics in finding and crafting the next palatable pop song. It talked in particular about the role of “fluency,” or the concept of people finding comfort in familiar hooks and themes as directly correlated to the relative success of a song. If we were ranking holidays in terms of fluency, Thanksgiving would be number one on the pop chart. It is the ultimate in comfort and familiarity. Everyone has their own particular traditions of who, what, when, and where. We don’t even know why we do it anymore. All we know is that it must involve that favorite football game, those pearled onions, your mother’s apple pie. Thanksgiving is only loosely modeled after that first meal between the pilgrims and the Native Americans in 1621. The national holiday we observe today came only after many states began to adopt a day of thanks in the mid nineteenth century. It was often observed in late November after the fury and stri...

In the end, sometimes all we have left are bread crumbs. When the people we love are gone, these bread crumbs are the tiny little glimpses into the lives they led when they were here. And we follow them as they lead a trail back to our heart. They lead back to a place in time, in our mind’s eye when we were together and healthy and happy. I’m quite certain this is that space they’re referring to, when folks so often long for simpler times. Sometimes when I am in the pharmacy by myself waiting for a prescription, I find them. As I wait, I wander over to the skincare aisle and there on the shelf is a tiny crumb disguised as a jar of Ponds Cold Cream. I pick it up and carefully unscrew the top and inhale. Instantly, I am in my childhood bathroom. It is nighttime and my mother is getting herself ready for bed. In one whiff, I am there and she is here. I call them crumbs because they aren’t much really. And who and what the people we love leave behind are so much bigger than this. Bu...

Good evening friends! We’re up on The Washington Post’s On Parenting section this evening sharing our reflections on one year after Distracted Living . I hope you’ll hop on over and join us J  

The other day I was doing laundry and literally picking hunks of regurgitated food off the dirty clothes: gifts from the previous night’s puke fest. As I collected the curdled scrambled egg bits before they hit the washer, I found myself thinking: what the hell? No, seriously. What the hell? No one mentions this stuff about parenthood. And even if they did, there is no way you would believe them, that you would let your mind go to a place where it doesn’t even seem that insane that you would be holding in your hand food that no so long ago lived in your child’s stomach. And that after vomiting it up uneaten, it would make total sense to collect this food off of her soiled clothes before washing them. This would make total sense if you are in the shit storm that occurs when a highly contagious illness strikes your house. It could be anything really: lice, a nasty virus. But when it hits, you’ll find yourself in a dark dark place and you’ll remember me and this moment. It will look so...

From the moment Hope was born, I began photographing me and me with her. It was never completely clear to me at the time as to why I was doing this. I only knew that I wanted a record of something, but I wasn’t sure of what. The other day I took a few moments to look back on these nine months in pictures. For perhaps the first time, I see them for what they were. My smile tells the story: it was a true season of healing and gratitude. I don't see myself standing in the mirror pinching my stretched and soft stomach. I am wearing my smile. Indeed as is often the case, the pictures tell a story I did not realize was unfolding or fully appreciate when I was taking them, and living them. For this gift of perspective and hindsight, I am so grateful for each of these shots, in each of their blurry imperfectness. This first photo was taken 24 hours after my c-section. There were complications during my surgery and what is usually a routine procedure lasted more than 3 hours. I am stan...

One year later, I want to tell you that I’ve got it all figured out. It’s been exactly one year since I wrote Distracted Living . I had no idea that my story of that night, of that feeling of losing the ability to single task, of feeling that slip away from me like water through the drain, would resonate with so many. What was it that we were responding to? How it is that so many men and women across the country saw themselves in that moment? They know this feeling. What was it that was taking over us? I have revisited this question many times over a long, wonderful, hard, and exhausting year. I believe there were two parts to my story that night. The first, was a desire that I believe resonates with many of us to feel frustration or boredom in the day to day minutiae of parenting and to use our phones as an escape from these hard feelings. The other piece of it was a desire to operate much like our phones, to try to do multiple things at once with increasing efficiency. Perhaps ...

I serve Dylan his dinner and he gives me his signature glare: “Mom! It’s touching!” Dylan hates when his food touches on his plate. Everything needs its own neat and tidy space, as if life and all of its gastronomic pleasures should forever be served in a Bento-esque container so that the ketchup never EVER touches the salad. Never. But that’s not life and sometimes the ketchup is going to touch the salad. Just sometimes. “Deal with it,” I perhaps too hastily snap. “Sometimes you just can’t separate it all neatly.” Which is entirely true about dinner and sometimes true about life. Over the past week or so, everything has seemed to collide and touch: the messy, the uncomfortable, and the wonderful. Life’s ketchup made its way all over that salad. It was Rosh Hoshana and the whole family came together from near and far to celebrate a sweet new year. Ruby lost her first tooth. We celebrated my 37 th birthday. We finally got around to giving Hope her Hebrew name just a few days sh...

Friends, we’re up on The Washington Post tonight. Let me just pause and say that again because I really can’t believe it myself. My Jenn-eration is up on The Washington Post! I am filled with gratitude this evening for the opportunity to share our story about the power of broken roads with their audience. You can read more here .

The other day I went for one of those really great walks. It wasn’t one with purpose or the sweaty, blood pumping to the heart kind of walks. It was just one of those rolling about the neighborhood with the iPod in my ears and my mind on shuffle. As I walked, one of my favorite songs came on: Rascal Flatts “Bless the Broken Road.” I’m not usually a country person but this song just breaks me open in all the best possible ways every time I hear it. Ruby calls it the sad song because the piano intro sounds slightly melancholy to four year old, relatively happy go-lucky untarnished ears. But I always explain that in fact it is a beautiful, if not joyous song about finding and treasuring love because it was earned on a hard path. I was walking a pretty hard path when I arrived in New York City on September 8, 2001. My parents dropped me off at an illegal sublet with approximately six weeks’ worth of my own savings to live on and no job. If I didn’t find one before the cash ran out, I ha...