Should I Stay or Should I Go?

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This is an excerpt from an essay published on the New York Times Motherlode Blog in September of 2010

SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO?
Judy Bolton-Fasman

I’ve spent a lot of time in front of a blank computer screen fantasizing about having more time to devote to my book. I’d heard of mother writers who act on their fantasies and take up residencies in various artists’ colonies where weeks can run into a month or two.

I long ago resigned myself to deferring my vision until my youngest went off to college. Six years. I could deal with that. I’d be old enough to belong to AARP, but young enough not to collect Social Security.

I didn’t end up waiting six years. One of my favorite authors was slated to be the writer in residence at an artist’s colony in Florida. The timing couldn’t have been more inconvenient for me. If my application was accepted, I’d be gone for half of May and the first week in June. I was deeply conflicted, but not conflicted enough to keep me from applying to spend three weeks and travel 1,260 miles away from my children.

I was accepted to the residency.

To read the rest of the article please clink on the link below:

http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/a-room-of-moms-own/

The Care and Nourishment of a Parent by Judy Bolton-Fasman

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The first thing to go was my father’s inimitable printing.

His letters—straight and precise—were self-portraits of sturdiness and discipline. I associated Dad with the single initial that grounded his name—K, as in K. Harold Bolton.

The K stood for Kenneth—a name he never used, a phantom name. Unlike its counterpart C, K is like the father of my childhood—unambiguously hard, unyielding to e or i. K— ramrod straight on one side—was like Dad’s perfect posture making it a letter to lean on, a letter from which to fly the flag that Dad revered. In Dad’s stately block printing K was declarative—shorthand for the unsolved mystery of why he preferred to be called Harold instead of Ken. And then one day K dissolved on the page as he tried to sign his tax return.

There is a Spanish saying that when a parent gives to the child, both the parent and the child laugh. But when the child gives to the parent, both the parent and the child cry. It’s strange and disorienting to watch our parents walk slower, remember less, pepper a conversation with non-sequiturs.

My Dad died ten years ago and I can hardly remember the shrunken old man to whom I fed strained carrots. Instead, in my mind’s eye he is stocky and vital and strong. Against his better judgment, he taught me to drive in the winter. “No one learns to drive in January,” he sighed as he told me to put the car in reverse to get out of a snow bank. Fifteen years later a policeman pulled him over for weaving in and out of lanes. The officer called that same night and said how sorry he was that he had to revoke Dad’s license.

I once saw a bumper sticker that said, “Be Nice To Your Children—They Choose Your Nursing Home.” I was horrified. Caring for our parents with grace and humility, without agenda, is one of the most crucial and moral lessons we impart to our children. Acquiring a new level of patience and love and fortitude is critical to helping a parent grow old in peace and security. It is also one of the most challenging aspects of trying to honor a father and a mother. Resisting the notion that one is parenting a parent—no matter how dependent a parent becomes that person is still the mother or the father—requires an iron-willed patience that insists on nothing less than dignity and respect at all times.

Over the years I have watched family and friends accompany a parent to chemotherapy sessions, stock a mother’s refrigerator each week, balance her checkbook at the end of the month or closely supervise health care aides for a father with a broken ankle. It’s the same skills they have acquired and honed as they bring up their own children. It’s the same admirable behavior that they learned from their own parents.

The day my father could no longer sign his name—the day his signature crumbled before my eyes—was the day he was trapped in his body and his existence curtailed to just a couple of rooms in his house. During the decade that he was ill my mother built a life that depended on the devotion of caregivers, the kindness of family and friends, and more often than not, favors from strangers. And when she could not keep up with Dad’s overwhelming needs the first things she set aside were her own health and sanity. During those years my mother and I had our disagreements over my father’s care, the medications he should or shouldn’t be taking. We had our difficult moments over whether he should go to a nursing home.

As my young children grew more aware of my father’s illness, they saw that I was helpless, frustrated, and angry. I was the one who was vulnerable as I tried to spoon food into my father’s mouth. It was my voice that was shaky when I read books to him. I was the one who looked clumsy as I tried to prop him up in bed. By watching me trying to care for my father, my children and I gradually realized that this kind of encompassing help included loving him anew as my father—a grown man who only appeared as a helpless child.

Neither Dad nor I imagined such a sad, drawn out ending to his life, but I buck against the idea that during that time he was anyone but my father.  And so in his memory I choose to focus on things like the precise checkbook he kept or the glitzy Valentine’s Day cards that he unfailingly sent me every year and signed in red ink—“With all my love, Daddy.”

 

 

 

 

For the Sake of Jewish Continuity by Judy Bolton-Fasman

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We are Jews. However, between Ken and me we are occasional temple going, theoretically God-fearing, skeptical, Sephardic, Ashkenazic, Ladino, Yiddish, kosher non-kosher eating Jews. And at the end of the day we transcend our internal conflicts, our spiritual doubts to do our small part for Jewish continuity.

I thought even more about the religious legacy we are handing down to Anna and Adam after I heard from a friend who is the daughter of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother. She is writing a book about bringing up her children to identify as both Jews and Christians. She was brought up in the Reform movement and remembers her Bat Mitzvah as important and affirming to her identity as a Jew. Then in college she dated a Jewish man who told her their relationship had no future because her mother was not Jewish According to halacha or traditional Jewish law she was not a Jew. She was shocked. And then she was angry. I can’t help but thinking that the Jewish establishment drove her to find another way that sacrifices Jewish continuity.

Through the years I have  respected my friend’s intelligence and insights even as they moved further away from mine. A couple of years ago I sent her my column about The Conservative movement’s decision to accept gay and lesbian Jews as clergy and married couples. She wrote back urging me to read my essay through the eyes of a “’halachically non-Jewish’ Jew. We always find it quite amazing that many Jews will accept homosexual marriage (which of course they should) but not a marriage between a Jew and non-Jew, or an interfaith child.”

Her words moved me to seek a thoughtful, principled answer to her quandary. After culling the wisdom of rabbis, teachers and community leaders, I have concluded that the two issues—accepting gay and lesbian unions between two Jews and the marriage of a Jew and non-Jew—are completely unrelated. The first is in line with Jewish continuity; the other is not. The chances are greater that the children of two Jewish parents—gay or straight—will be raised as Jews. According to the National Jewish Population Survey “nearly all children (96%) in households with two Jewish spouses are being raised Jewish, compared to a third (33%) of the children in households with one non-Jewish spouse.”

The question of determining Jewish identity through matrilineal or patrilineal descent is a separate issue that is uniquely addressed within Judaism’s movements. Reform and Reconstructionist Jews recognize the child of either Jewish parent as Jews. Conservative and Orthodox Jews are unwavering in their conviction that only the mother determines the religious identity of a child. I am a Conservative Jew who is thrilled to see the child of one Jewish parent—mother or father—identify as a Jew.

Still, it is crucial for me to walk step by step through the reasoning that has shaped Conservative Judaism’s views on interfaith marriage in order to understand and ultimately support a tenet that at first glance seemed unsympathetic to me. I remember feeling uneasy when we filled out Anna’s application to Solomon Schechter Day School. There in the fine print was the caveat that applicants must be the children of Jewish mothers or be converted in keeping with the standards of the Conservative movement. I was used to reading fine print proclaiming that an applicant would not be denied admission or employment on the basis of religion, gender or sexual orientation. I was at a loss. Was this prejudice or faith?

It all boils down to answering that familiar and uncomfortable question—Is it good for the Jews? The Leadership Council on Conservative Judaism, an umbrella organization that includes the Jewish Theological Seminary and the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, bluntly asserts “the marriage between a Jew and non-Jew is not a celebration for the Jewish community. We therefore reach out to the couple with the hope that the non- Jewish partner will move closer to Judaism and ultimately choose to convert. …We want to encourage the Jewish partner to maintain his/her Jewish identity, and raise their children as Jews.”

Jewish outreach or keruv to interfaith families—whether it is through Web sites like Interfaithfamily.com or synagogue programs—unequivocally advocates for interfaith families to raise their children as Jews. My friend’s children are not being strictly raised as Jews. Her ecumenical approach works for her family, but sadly I have to acknowledge that raising them in two religions is not in the interest of klal yisrael—the Jewish community. Our diverging views on interfaith issues have created a divide between us that I pray will someday be bridged.

College Tripper

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On the eve of Anna’s departure for college, I’m running the piece on last year’s ubiquitous college tour.

Six days. Seven schools. Three colds and one case of bronchitis later (hello bronchitis, my old friend), we are through with college touring. Okay, maybe not through, but finished with the grand sweep. In keeping with a promise I made to my children to guard their privacy when I started writing this column, I’ll just say we drove a total of 1200 miles in Anywhere, USA. And yes, we schlepped Adam along in the hope that he won’t want to embark on a similarly exhausting itinerary.

If you take away only one piece of advice from this column let it be the following: do NOT, no matter how tempting it is, immediately ask your college applicant what she thought of the school. I made the egregious mistake of pointing out that early decision candidates fared statistically better in the admissions process. Trust me, your child heard the same thing at the same information session. She doesn’t want to hear it again, especially from you

Unfortunately, a tour guide—usually a current student—can color your perception of a school. You and I know that that’s not a fair assessment of a college. But hey, we’re only human. On our college tours, I developed a twitch if a well-meaning guide used the word “schpiel” more than once, For example, one student guide at a very fine small liberal arts school kept reminding our group that the admissions office told him he had to be sure to give us the “schpiel” on—you fill in the blank. Pointing out that you are giving a “schpiel” is the irritating equivalent of overacting.

Another word I never again want to hear from a tour guide’s mouth is that the school is “awesome.” Awesome covers a large vague, area of accomplishment and fun. Which brings me to another pet peeve. You’re given the impression that kids on these campuses are conducting Nobel Prize-worthy research. Everyone’s racing to find the cure for cancer or write the semiotics textbook of our generation. If this is case, how come I haven’t noticed? I read the papers.

A lot of schools try to claim a piece of the Ivy League cachet. We have public ivies, little ivies, ivy equivalents and actual Ivy League schools. There are over 4,000 colleges and universities in the United States. Among them are plenty of wonderful, scholarly and yes, prestigious schools, that are not one of the “official” eight Ivy League schools. Claiming ersatz ivy status is a red flag that the school is desperate to sell itself.

Various colleges had impressive amenities. For example, Starbucks on campus was very attractive to Anna. My girl expects to go off to college with a fully loaded Starbucks card and she doesn’t want to have to go on an expedition to satisfy her caffeine fix. To be fair, she also carefully inspected science buildings and noted the variety of majors each school offered. Interesting fact: every college campus we visited has an observatory.

At this ridiculously early juncture in his college search, Adam rated schools by how boring the tour guide or the information session could become. But things balanced out if the school’s surrounding environs included a great diner.

Ken was the easiest going of the four of us. He wants Anna to be happy and fulfilled. The rest is commentary for him. He was also the brains behind College Tour 2011-2012. He planned and executed this trip like a six-star general. (That means he joins an exclusive group that only includes George Washington and John Pershing of World War I). We ran on time and our accommodations were first rate.

As for me, my priority is also for Anna to be happy and fulfilled in college. Having said that, I think she can achieve those things on campuses in quaint towns with great shopping. But when it came down to it, I liked schools that had some curriculum requirements—I was especially fond of one university where students had to be proficient in a foreign language. I also paid close attention to places that were equally strong in the sciences and humanities.

In conclusion, (don’t use that well-worn phrase on your college essay!) here are the more salient lessons of College Tour 2011-2012:

Parents, do not speak until spoken to before, during or after a tour or information session. Give your child a neutral answer if she accuses you of favoring one school over another. Say something like: My only wish is for you to be happy. Your kid won’t believe you, but it can make a three hour car ride more bearable.

Whatever you do, take this process one day at a time. That includes not freaking out about the application essays or the tuition within earshot of your future college student. Never, ever, suggest to your child to apply somewhere early decision. Let her come to her own conclusion about a potentially binding contract with a college’s admissions office.

Do marvel at how independent your future collegian is as she marches up to admissions to confirm tour and interview times. And don’t forget to take Vitamin C before, during and after the trip. Stress can weaken the immune system and lead to colds.

Mourning Aurora by Judy Bolton-Fasman

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Terry Tempest Williams is an extraordinary writer. She recently published a memoir inspired by boxes of journals her mother bequeathed to her – all of them blank. There was not a single word on those fresh, white pages. They were, as Williams wrote, “paper tombstones.”

That’s what I visualize—paper tombstones—as I invoke the dead and the wounded for this column. They are the victims of the wave of hate and terrorism of the past couple of weeks. The youngest victim at the movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado, where a madman opened fire on an unarmed audience, was six years-old. All she did to tempt death was sit next to her mother at the midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises—the latest Batman movie. Her fate was intertwined with 11 other people, some of whom died shielding their loved ones.

Here we are again, reading names. Piecing together life stories from the snapshots and accompanying biographical summaries. Here we are again in another “there but for the Grace of God Go I” moment.

And there are more names to remember. A suicide bomber attacked a tour bus of Israelis vacationing in Bulgaria. Five were flown home for burial and 33 more were wounded. Geopolitics boils over and once again Jews are targeted.

It’s a brutal time.

God has come up a lot in discussions with my kids over the Aurora tragedy. I dare say at this point Spiderman and Batman are more divine to them than a seemingly absent God. It’s not surprising. A movie featuring these two superheroes is not just a blockbuster; it’s what the industry calls “a movie event.” It’s a phenomenon. Think about Gotham City, Batman’s stomping grounds. It’s a deeply dark place with psychopaths at the ready behind every building.

A masked gunman armed to the teeth. The bewitching hour of midnight. Sex and violence on the screen. I don’t think for a moment that The Dark Knight Rises short circuited the killer’s brain. But the movie provided a horrifying backdrop. Reading the bewildering amount of commentary about the Aurora massacre, I remembered that President Reagan’s would be assassin, John Hinckley, Jr., was obsessed with the movie Taxi Driver. Loner to loner. Was it a deadly case of transference? Were Hinckley and the Aurora gunman seeking fame, attention, intensely negative admiration? Notice that I won’t name the gunman in Colorado. In this post-Internet age, I won’t make him easier to find on a search engine.

But in the aftermath of this tragedy, how do continue to live with any kind of normalcy? Thanks to Rabbi Harold Kushner’s deceptively simple, brilliant insight we know—we accept to some degree—that bad things happen to good people. Rabbi Kushner wrote his best-selling book from the rubble of his own heartache—his son, Aaron, died in his mother’s arms two days after his fourteenth birthday from a rare genetic disease. It’s no wonder that Rabbi Kushner’s title has a permanent place in our lexicon; he has put a name to a phenomenon so perplexing, so universal. People cling to the notion that tragedy is not deserved. God is far too complicated to want a tit for a tat. God is rarely in those details, I tell my kids.

I’m not wise or worthy enough to understand why God does the things that God does. I do know that when tragedy strikes as it did last week in Aurora and Bulgaria, I don’t believe God is vengeful or sadistic or masochistic. I try to convince Adam, in particular, that God has His reasons for stepping back to observe what human beings, purposefully created in God’s image, have wrought. I don’t know what those reasons might be. I only know that it’s a crazy, twisted, scary, beautiful world out there. Maybe God needs to see what we do next. We are, after all, in a relationship with the Almighty. Pass that along to the children, but don’t forget to talk through the anxiety and fear generated by the Aurora shootings. Don’t plaster this experience with “paper tombstones.”

In Terry Tempest Williams’ Mormon community she notes that the women keep journals and bear children. Her mother’s blank pages are an act of rebellion.  “How do you know your mother didn’t write her entries in invisible ink?” a woman asked Williams at a bookstore reading.

Williams said she wasn’t keen to find out if her mother had pulled a stunt like that. “My mother’s journals are words wafting above the page,” Williams writes in her memoir. Just like the spirits of the innocents that were violently murdered last week in Colorado and Bulgaria.

The Unluckiest Poet in America

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Last week The America Library of Poetry was more than “fanning the flames of literacy” at our house.  The Library, sponsor of free poetry contests for kids in kindergarten through twelfth grade, had finally picked this year’s winners. Adam was not among them.

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He had been so hopeful after he was notified this summer that he was still in the running for the grand prize. To confirm that he was a serious contender, his poem would appear in a volume of other entries set for publication in December. For $35 my son would forever have his own personal copy of his first work to appear in print.

September 30th.  Adam noted the date on our family calendar. It was the day the winners would be published on the Library’s Web site. He visited the site several times a day throughout September, trolling for hints of how his poem was faring in the contest. Nothing. He was nervous. I was nervous for him because I knew all too well what was coming down the pike.

It’s hard not to take rejection personally. And, boy oh boy, did my son take it personally. I was out when he logged on to the Web site on the evening of September 29th. When I checked my BlackBerry there it was—Adam’s righteous (or self-righteous) indignation that his poem was not among the winners.

My son-turned-critic berated the winning poem in his age category as “a sure sign of uncreativity (sic) and poetic weakness. You rhyme when you can’t be vivid or use figurative language.” Ouch. Who made him the poetry maven?

Welcome to my world Adam. I’ve got a collection of lovely rejection letters from editors at some of the best publications in this country. And you know what? When I started out, I clung to those hand-written two line notes like a life preserver. “Not quite right for us. But send more.” These days I get rejections mostly through email and they’re not nearly as exciting. Ten point Arial dilutes the urgency, the optimism embedded in the rushed handwriting of those earlier notes.

My near misses don’t make me all that angry anymore; they make me determined. Fiercely determined (maybe that’s constructive anger) to show every editor who has rejected me that they were flat out wrong.

In the meantime, Adam needed some perspective because frankly he is not, as he claimed in the heat of the moment, the best children’s poet in America. I know because once upon a time I thought I was the best children’s novelist not only in America, but the world. I was so sure of it that when I was nine I sent my first “book” to a legal publisher I found in the yellow pages. The CEO was charmed and he called my parents to tell them so.

I told Adam the truth about the writing life—albeit one that was dipped in maternal honey:

Congratulations! Every single accomplished and talented writer has been rejected. If he or she hasn’t been rejected he is not remembering correctly. Some of those poems were not as good as yours. But some of the poems were just as good or better. The judges are not “impaired.”  However, judges are human and they have their preferences.

I followed up with a call to home. Ken answered and I asked him if Adam was still upset. My husband had no idea what I was talking about. “He didn’t place in the poetry contest,” I said. “He hasn’t said a word to me,” Ken said. “He saves that stuff for you.”

Yes. I’m the more reactive parent, the mushier parent. While every kid needs a mushy parent, that same parent must take precautions against becoming too malleable. Adam needed to understand that he may have deserved to place in that contest, but so did the actual winners.

The Adam I came home to bore no resemblance to the raging poet who fired off that earlier e-mail. I asked if he would like to read through some of the winning poems with me. I read the Grand Prize Winner aloud and he agreed that it was a very accomplished poem. I pointed out that the poet was a senior in high school. And as for that rhyming poem that took first place in his age category? I said that I thought it worked. We read that one out loud too and he reluctantly agreed.

A few minutes after we had discussed the winning entries, Adam sent me a contrite e-mail. He explained that he felt “angry and unappreciated” when he pounded out the first message. After the disappointment passed (isn’t it great to be twelve?), he asked Ken and me never to work for The America Library of Poetry. Employees and their families are not eligible to enter the contest. Only a true writer would be so optimistic and yet such a glutton for punishment.

Congratulations, Adam. You’ve arrived.

Dear Sarai: A Letter to a Young Israeli Soldier

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In anticipation of reviewing  a collection of linked stories coming out in September called  The People of Forever Are Not Afraid— a collection focusing on three young women doing their mandatory service in the Israeli Defense Forces–I revisited an epistolary essay I wrote after I met Sarai, a young Israeli army officer. Sarai was mostly skeptical about peace for her country. But towards the end of our conversation I heard a glimmer of hope in her voice. Here’s the letter I dedicated to her after our encounter four years ago.

Dear Sarai,

There is a lot on your young shoulders. Twenty-one years old and you’re already an officer in the Israel Defense Forces.

Thank you for defending Israel. Thank you to your mother for sending you out into the world to do this work for the Jewish state, and for Jews everywhere. Back home in Boston descriptions of what you and your unit do sound surreal. People will shake their heads in disbelief as much as in admiration that your unit—18 and 19 year-old young women—monitors the Israel security barrier and the surrounding area 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

“It’s only a job for girls,” one of your charges proudly says. “Because girls can multitask better than boys.”

Girls with long, shiny ponytails—the same ponytails I see swinging up and down the soccer field when I watch Anna play. They’re eating the same junk food teenagers everywhere eat. But these teens munch on potato chips while wearing their country’s uniform and focusing on their monitors. They blink as often as the guards at Buckingham Palace. The room where they work is uncannily silent.

I wonder what your subordinates think of the American visitors cheering on one of the girls as she follows a suspicious character and then communicates with soldiers in the field to pick him up for questioning. It’s stunning to realize that the decision is hers alone on who warrants a closer look. And it’s even more stunning to know that the soldiers on the ground have only her judgment to rely on. She’s the one who guides them if they have to crawl around brush and barbed wire to capture a suspect. If things go badly, hers is the last voice a soldier hears in his earpiece.

Sarai, your charges are only four years older than my daughter. I wouldn’t blame you if you were resentful that my daughter and her friends are relatively carefree. I can understand if it bothers you that American groups observing your work sometimes relate to it as if watching a video game. Please be patient with us. The first Gulf War was beamed into our living rooms like a remote video game. But that was in 1991. You were only 3 years old and the soldiers now in your charge were babies. None of you remember being bundled into your safe rooms.

I was so sad when you said you’ve lost all hope for peace. You chide your friends for being unrealistic, even naïve about peace between Jews and Arabs. You say it’s because you’ve seen too much. I can understand why it disheartens you to see 5 and 6 year-old Palestinian children throwing rocks through the fence at your fellow soldiers.

But your hopelessness coupled with those Arab children’s burgeoning hatred are also casualties of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

I’d like to share a personal story with you. When I was a little older than you I worked for a civil rights organization where my job was to monitor right-wing extremists. You have infrared cameras and the latest communications equipment to do your job. I collected my information by reading hate rags put out by the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, skinheads and Holocaust revisionists. I was 25-years old and had never encountered such raw hatred. I monitored these right-wing extremists for 3 years. I knew where every Klan cell was in the United States.

After reading so much hate material day in and day out, it skewed my vision of the world. A few hate-mongers led me to believe that the United States was a country full of racists and anti-Semites. I had to pull out of that job to get my bearings again. Maybe you need to do the same after you honor your commitment to the army.

Sarai, your name tempts me into midrash. Sarai was Sarah’s name before God changed it. Perhaps this is a before moment for you. Maybe you’re more pessimistic as a younger Sarai. But I think you’ll find your optimism again. I saw a glimmer of that optimism when I asked you why witnessing the conflict up close wouldn’t want to make you work that much harder for peace.

Even though you were stunned by the question, I saw an older, wiser Sarai briefly emerge. “I never thought about it this way,” you said. “I need some time before I can answer you.”

While you are thinking my dear Sarai, I want to leave you with a saying from the Talmud. “You are not required to finish the task, but neither are you free to absolve yourself from it.”

I know that your duties as an officer in the Israel Defense Forces wear on your soul. Remember that you don’t need to solve every problem you encounter. But please marshal your strength, your experience—and yes—your optimism to work for peace.

The Swing Set and the Birthday

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The couple that bought the swing set from us drove a Honda Civic with two car seats side by side in the back. Just like us. The little girl had a baby brother. Just like us. I remember when we went to pick out the swing set—a gift from Grandpa and Grandma who told us to get the best for Anna and Adam. And we did. Two swings, a glider, a slide, a canopy and a ladder leading up to monkey bars.

On the car ride down, Anna suddenly announced that she was something that began with an “F.” Ken and I couldn’t imagine. Actually maybe we could, which is why we braced ourselves. “I’m firsty,” she said. “Ah,” we smiled, producing her sippy cup.

Anna’s eighteenth birthday is around the corner. Last week, the young family in the Honda Civic returned to our house in a rented van, took apart the swing set and went away with it. I watched from the window on the landing. The last thing to go into the U-Haul was the yellow glider. It lay on the ground washed up from the past. The man, the woman and the grandfather squeezed into the front seat and drove off into a life that was once mine.

Please, understand, I’m thrilled that my children have grown and thrived. I thank G-d every day for having the privilege of ushering them through so many seasons of joy. But up until now the changes within my motherhood have felt gradual. We went through grammar school in a series of days in which I looped around Newton dropping them off and picking them up. Quite often I’d defy the carpool rules and linger in the line to watch them walk in to school together. I knew their childhoods would not last, and yet I didn’t quite believe it. I always had another year. How different really was fourth grade from third grade?

I don’t like change. Loathe it. Probably because I’m afraid of it. Always have been. Quite suddenly my daughter can legally buy cigarettes and lottery tickets. She can marry without my permission. She’ll vote in her first ever presidential election and she’s told me quite forthrightly that she’ll make up her own mind about the candidates. And my son. He towers over me. Nine inches taller than I am and counting.

When we bought the swing set, our cholesterol was normal and our blood pressure steady and uneventful. Our kids woke up so early on the weekends that they watched videos sprawled across our bed while we tried to catch an extra hour of sleep. They fit in our laps and they were light enough to carry up and down the stairs. Now we lie wide awake early on a Sunday morning and our exhausted teens cram as much sleep as they can into the day. Both of their grandfathers died over a decade ago. One grandmother can no longer walk. We put all of our hopes and prayers and dreams that the other grandmother stays just the way we like her.

Like the great chess player that my dear father-in-law was, I can see five or six moves ahead. Heck, I think I can see the endgame. This has been a morose summer for me. If another person tells me that I’m going to love having my daughter away at college—ecstatic was how one veteran mama put it—I’m going to collapse and weep uncontrollably. Think of your newfound freedom, said another empty nester. I didn’t realize that I was in jail. What breaks my heart the most is that my kids know I’m sad about the coming transitions. No amount of denying on my part convinces them otherwise. Adam offers to cue up The King’s Speech for me when I’m teary. But he knows that not even Colin Firth can lift me out of my funk. I just have to wait until it burns off like fog. That’s what my father the inveterate weather watcher used to say about sadness. It burns off.

For fifteen years our swing set was the backdrop of my life. Flash, I see Anna’s friends trying to one up each other on the swings. Higher and higher. Flash, Adam and a friend are racing each other across the monkey bars. Flash, someone goes belly down on the slide. Memory has tempered old worries of broken bones and deep bruises. I’ve gone on to worrying about other things like broken hearts, crushing disappointments and anxious decisions.

Little kids, little problems. Big kids, big problems. I never liked that saying. And despite all the gloom and doom I’ve sprinkled between these lines, I don’t really believe the big kids-big problems equation. Especially today on my daughter’s eighteenth birthday. A few hours after Anna was born, I nursed her for the first time and watched special programming on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the moon landing. But the only thing otherworldly that night was that I was a new mother to the most spectacular baby girl on earth.

To Sleep, Perchance to Snore

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The last straw was when I woke up in the bathroom of the Ritz Carlton in New York last weekend. I had made a semi-comfortable pallet for myself—two terry cloth robes, a few fluffy bath towels and a pillow I snatched from the bed just before I was exiled.

The four of us – husband, daughter, son and me – were sharing a room at the hotel. At one in the morning, my fifteen year-old son tearfully shook me awake and said he couldn’t bear my snoring anymore. Please, he begged me, do the sleep apnea study.

This wasn’t the first time I’ve slept on the floor of a hotel bathroom. It started last year on a family vacation. It was to be an idyllic week of looking at colleges in New England and upstate New York for my daughter. Of course, we only needed one hotel room. Who were we anyway, the Rockefellers?

But this last time my kids’ were intensely anxious about sharing a room with me. The previous couple of months my children had taken to shutting my bedroom door and theirs because my snoring was so cartoonishly loud. One night my daughter and her friends taped me so I could hear for myself how bad it was. I was horrified. I asked my husband how he slept through the racket. “I love you,” he said. He refused to comment further.

It was clear I’d have to go to a sleep center to get my snoring under control. I don’t know how I got so loud and disruptive in the first place. Nor am I sure when it began. Menopause may be a factor in there somewhere. So is the sleeping medication I take. In my late forties, I decided that I had had enough of the insomniac life. I was past my childbearing years. I deserved some uninterrupted sleep.

Truth be told, I didn’t want to go to a sleep center. I wasn’t happy about having to sleep in a weird, sterile place hooked up to machines that measured my brain waves and kept track of my oxygenation. I also didn’t want to know if I had sleep apnea because that would involve sleeping with an oxygen mask for the rest of my life. Yes, the rest of my life. The sleep technician made a point of telling me that several times.

I had no idea what to pack for my overnight at the sleep center. Pajamas, sweats? I opted for a nightshirt that said “Hot and Flashy.” You can play with the double entendre. I brought along my iPad so I could watch one of my favorite shows—a British Masterpiece Theatre import called Foyle’s War. It’s about a police inspector protecting his seaside town during the Second World War. I have a crush on Foyle and his younger sidekick, Sergeant Milner. I thought they’d be good company.

But before I got set up with the right sleepwear and the Netflix instant cue there was a matter of finding the place. It was a nondescript building in a business office park. But it was set back in the woods and when the technician let me in all I could think of was that I was stuck in a version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I felt as if I were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I walked in with my little overnight bag stuffed with books and back up clothes. “Get comfy,” said the technician. A few minutes later she started spreading glob in my hair to secure the electrodes. She fit me with tubing in my nose so she could blast me with oxygen if she needed to. I had electrodes on my legs to test for restless leg syndrome and I was also hooked up to an EKG. To top it off, I had one of those bulky finger clips to keep track of my oxygen saturation. I wore a kind of necklace that looked like a fuse box that could easily plug in and out of the machinery keeping track of my body functions in case I had to go to the bathroom. I looked like a robot. I had to go to the bathroom a lot.

The technician gave me a perfunctory definition of sleep apnea—when your airways shut down temporarily—and how that affected sleep and overall demeanor. If I was experiencing sleep apnea she’d replace the nose tubing with an oxygen mask during the night. I tried on three different masks and chose contestant number two.

I called my house just before lights out and said I wanted to go home. “I know,” said my husband. We had already established he wasn’t allowed to come to the testing site to be with me.

I don’t know if I have sleep apnea. The technician told me that she was not allowed to discuss any results with me and I won’t hear anything from my own doctor for a few weeks. But I actually slept for a few hours and I woke up maskless. When I tried to confirm that I didn’t need a mask at any point in the night, the technician said again that she was prohibited from talking about any aspect of the test with me. She sounded like she was wearing her own fuse box.

“And if you don’t have sleep apnea,” asked my concerned children when I got home, “will you keep snoring.”

“Yup,”  I said. “And it’ll be your turn to sleep in the bathroom the next time we share a hotel room.”

Tefillin Barbie and Me

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The other day I was in my rabbi’s office for what she and I like to call my 10,000-mile tune-up. And there she was on a bookshelf in a plexi-glass frame—a super hero ready to wrap and unwrap at a moment’s notice to redeem the world—my old friend Tefillin Barbie.

Tefillin Barbie is modest and learned and devout. She wears a long denim skirt. Her sleeves are below her elbow. She wears a head covering and is draped in a tallit—a prayer shawl. And, of course, the most notable thing about her is that she wears tefillin. Prominently, proudly and naturally.

I know all the feminist arguments against Barbie, but I can’t help myself, I’ve always loved Barbie. She came into my life when I was six-years-old and bedridden for three months. My aunt sent me a Barbie along with the doll’s extensive miniature wardrobe. I kept her outfits in a black patent leather wardrobe created just for her clothes. I spent hours dressing Barbie in ball gowns, tennis skirts and my favorite—a bridal gown.

Over the years Barbie’s outfits have used over 105 million yards of fabric. She has owned over a billion pairs of shoes. Through it all it never fazed me that Barbie was blonde and tall and I was not. She measured an impossible 36-18-38, but I attributed that to the fact that she was a doll.

A few facts about Barbie and her creator. Ruth Handler invented Barbie in 1959 and named her after her own daughter, Barbara. Ms. Handler went on to co-found the toy company Mattel. Barbie was not her only significant invention. Recovering from a mastectomy in 1970, Handler discovered the need for a suitable prosthetic breast and invented Nearly Me, a prosthesis close in weight and density to natural breasts.

Barbie has had over eighty careers ranging from a rock star to a presidential candidate who focused on educational excellence and animal rights. She has served in every branch of the military and was a medic in Operation Desert Storm. In addition to being a devout Jew, Barbie is also black and Hispanic. Forty-five nationalities claim her as their own. She has been present at diplomatic summits and the dismantling of the Berlin Wall. And now she is a baal koreh—a woman who reads Torah.

I’m not surprised that Tefillin Barbie’s inventor is a soferet—a woman scribe who is trained and certified to write holy texts by hand. According to the Jewish Women’s Archive Jen Taylor Friedman is one of six soferot (plural of soferet) in the world. She has a workshop in her native Southampton, England handwriting an entire Torah for a congregation in St. Louis..

Discovering the occupation of this late incarnation of Barbie led me to do a bit of research on soferot. I learned that the first woman soferet was certified in October of 2003. A congregation in Seattle underwrote the cost of training additional soferot in order to be the first synagogue in the world to have a Torah exclusively hand calligraphed by women. Additionally, women metalwork artists are creating the breastplates, crowns and a clasp for the Torah.

All of this wonderful female energy sent me on a virtual journey that ended up at the Jewish Women’s Archives site where I came upon an entry for Joan Snyder’s lithograph “Our Foremothers.” Serendipity. I have a copy of Snyder’s print hanging in my living room, a gift from my mother-in-law. She thought it was my destiny to have it because the name Judith is so prominent among the Jewish women’s names that Snyder commemorates. Snyder uses shades of red and pink—the colors of blood and tutus—to write names like Hagar, Leah, Rachel and Sarah. She pairs these iconic names with those of her mother, daughter and life partner.

People have two reactions to the print—some are mesmerized and others think it’s the work of a child. “Did Anna make this?” more than a few people have asked me. Snyder’s presentation is both basic and profound. The listing and mixing up of these name reminds me that at some point in a woman’s life she has been cast out like Hagar. She has been adored like Rachel. Taken for granted like Leah or not taken seriously like Sarah. Our foremothers are not simply archetypes. They are us and we are them.

So where does this newest incarnation of Barbie fit in with our own mothers and sisters and foremothers? For one thing she’s an all-American girl who is at ease with every aspect of Jewish ritual. I’m envious of her. A couple of years ago I went to the World Wide Wrap at my synagogue where I was the lone adult among a group of bored pre-teens. I didn’t get a lot of support for trying to learn how to wrap tefillin as a grown woman, so thank God for Tefillin Barbie. When I look at her I remember that nothing in Judaism is off limits to my daughter and my nieces.

Here’s another fun fact about Barbie. Every second of every day a Barbie is sold somewhere in the world. And here’s a wish inspired by Barbie’s sales numbers. Every time that a Jewish girl comes of age, may she be comfortable in her own body and wrapping her own tefillin.