My Jenn-eration

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 ...