My Jenn-eration

As I’m wiping down the table from dinner, I casually listen in on the lively game of superheroes being played out in the next room. Phil had promised the older two he’d play with them before bed and now it’s a mighty showdown: My Little Pony versus toy soldiers versus the Riddler. It’s a fantastical scene that could only be concocted in the minds of seven and five year olds. I hear Dylan excitedly play out one of the scenes: “And then Daddy….the Penguin is going to use his rays to stop the soldiers and then he’ll take over the Bat cave!” I wait and listen for Phil’s response. It sounds like this: “umm hmmm…” Every part of my body tenses up. Without moving, without looking, I know exactly what is happening right now. His phone went off – more work emails. He responded to the notification. He is looking down and checking email. I do not in any way blame him for this. He is caught in a constant tug between his personal and professional life. And that phone is the rope that keeps...

Recently I attended a baby shower for an old friend. She is about to set off on a whole new path in her life: that of mothering and parenthood. In her honor, we piled into another old friend’s home and packed it with mismatched chairs and relatives and love and good wishes and baby clothes and our most important tips for the soon to be new mother. People had lots of really wonderful (and useful) pieces of advice – things like trust your gut, and if you’re really stuck, call your mother. But the one funny thing about all of it was that I couldn’t help but feel like so much of the way we paint new motherhood and parenthood for that matter for those about to jump into the deep, is one of extremes. We say things like, “get your rest now because you’ll never sleep again!” or, “you’ll never know a love like this,” or imply that you will instinctively know what to do, or automatically feel overwhelmed, or feel complete, or feel everything or feel nothing. It’s ironic really, this p...

It’s a pretty typical Sunday morning. The house is a disaster. I survey the damage. There are boots and coats and toys and books and dishes and rapidly aging holiday cards as far as the eye can see. And socks. My god there are socks everywhere. For a reason I can’t quite explain, my children go through 3-4 pairs of socks each day. They take them off immediately whenever they come inside the house and replace them with a fresh pair. And they leave their old socks just about anywhere. It is a horrifying and disgusting habit and I can always tell just how much we’ve let things slide on cleaning by how many stray socks are in my line of sight. I review the list in my head of what’s on tap, of what needs to get done. Sunday will be busy indeed. I’ve done two loads of laundry already and the laundry hamper is still completely full. I have no idea how this is even possible. We’ve got two different birthday parties and three different cards to make, the grocery shopping is a high priorit...

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 ...