My Jenn-eration

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...