What Happened - About Lucas, parental fear, and Tzuk Eitan

הייתי השבוע בדיון על צוק איתן ועל פחד הורים וישבתי שם ופשוט רעדתי.  הצלחתי להגיד כמה מילים והרגשתי איזה הקלה קלה אבל הרעד המשיך ובסוף רציתי רק להכנס למיטה ולבכות.  בדרך הביתה חשבתי על התמונה הזאת של ילדה מתכרבלת במיטה וגיליתי שזה משהו שאני זוכרת מחברה שלי, ג'יל, שאחרי הלוויה של אביה היתה במיטתה, בוכה.  הייתי בת 10 בערך.  הפגישה הראשונה שלי עם מוות. 

משום מה, הבת שלי גבי משורשת בעולם הזה ואני לא דואגת לה.  פעם, כשהיא היתה בת שנתיים היא רצה אל הכביש.  אני עדיין מקבלת צמרמורת כשאני חושבת על זה.  אבל כעיקרון היא נזהרת, שומרת על עצמה, מתקשרת.
 

הבן שלי הוא משהו אחר.  מתקופת ההריון לא הייתי בטוחה בקיומו.  הייתי בשמירת הריון ומישהי אמרה לי לנצל את הזמן להתחבר עם התינוק שלי והרגשתי "איך?"  עד הרגע שהוא יצא לא האמנתי.  ואז הכל התחיל – האי נוחות שלו בעולם, האסטמה ודלקת הריאות בשנה ראשונה ובהמשך.  מתוך 5 שנים הראשונות 4 פעמים דלקת ריאות.  הלילות עם אסטמה ובמקביל הסיפורים של גיסי וגיסתי על לוקס והאסטמה שלו.  הם היו באותו גיל.  היו לנו משפחות מקבילות, לכל אחת בת ובן, באותם גילאים.

ואז הנורא מכל – הטלפון ב11:30 בלילה.  כשבשרו לנו את הבשורה על לוקס, שמת בתאונת דרכים בגיל 4 וחצי, כל החדר התמלא באור.  לא אשכח – אולי גם זאת סיבה שרציתי לחזור לחדר שלי השבוע.  אני יודעת שיש מעבר מן החדר שלי לטרינידד – שם אנחנו נמצאים עם קרובינו.  ללוויה של לוקס אלן נסעה לבד וגם למות של אביה לא נסעתי – אני נשארתי במיטתי מחוברת איכשהו דרך המעבר הזה.

לוקס היה ילד עטוף בצמר גפן – לא יצא מהבית בלי ליווי מבוגר.  המטפלת שלו חיכתה לו מחוץ לגן כל השעות המעטות שהוא בילה שם.  אמר לאבא שלו זמן קצר לפני מותו שהוא לא צריך ללמוד לקרוא כי הוא לא עולה לבית הספר.

לעומתו סשה היה ילד של סכנות – טיפס על חומות, חיפש גירוי סנסורי בכל מקום.  קבל תלת אופן והתאמן במרפסת על נפילות ממנו – איזה עשרים פעמים נפל, בכה ב"כאלו", הקים את עצמו לעשות שוב.  

אחרי מותו של לוקס שאלתי את עצמי איך?  איך אני אגדל אותו?  אם לוקס ששמרו עליו כל כך מת, איך אשמור על סשה?  אין לי סיכוי להצליח.

כשלוקס נהרג סשה בא מגן ואמר – מצאנו את הנשמה של לוקס בחצר.  זה היה אדום.  נחפור ונוציא אותו ונחזיר לו.  

זה פחד הורים.  חשבתי שהאמנתי בה' אבל גיליתי שהאמנתי בסנטה קלאוס.  חשבתי שיש עסקה ביננו לבין היקום – שמים תמיד את הילד בכסא בטיחות ושום דבר לא יקרה לו.  ה' הפר את עסקתנו.  

מאז מותו קשה לי בכל ברית מילה – כשאומרים "קיים את הילד הזה לאביו ולאמו" אני צועקת בפנים.  מה?  גיסי וגיסתי לא היו ראויים לזה?  באיזה תמימות עומדים ההורים בטקס.  כששרים "המלאך הגואל אותי" אני מתמלא בדמעות.  איפה היה המלאך?

צוק איתן – בזמן שהתחילה נפילת הטילים, חמי נכנס לבית חולים וגילו ולא גילו את המחלה שהרג אותו בעוד 4 חודשים.  בזמן שהתחילה המבצע אלן העבירה בקושי קייטנה ממקום פתוח לבית ספר סגור ואז יצאה לחופשה מתוכננת לארה"ב עם הילדים והשאירה אותי כאן, לעבוד.  חלמתי על הזמן הזה וציפיתי להרגשה של חופש.  קבלתי פחד, בדידות, ודאגות.  לנסוע דרך חוסן או לנסוע דרך ההרים ב"שטח פתוח" שם לא יורטים בטילים אם שוגרים.  והיו לנו 150 סטודנטים שבאו מחו"ל, לא בטלו, ואני נותנת תדרוכים איך להגיע למרחב מוגן .  מלמדת תהילים ואומרת שאני מחפשת אמונה שימושית – אמונה שתחזיק ותחזק אותי בימים אלה.  

ויוצאת לחופשה, וחוזרת, ואלן בטרינדד עם אביה, והיא חוזרת, החגים, אני פתאום חולה, אז עוד טיסה בבהלה ואלן יושבת ליד אביה ביום האחרון שלו.  ואני מקבלת בשורות במיטה ומתקשרת דרך המעבר הרוחני הזה להיות לצידו ולהיות עדה למעברו.  ומחליטה לשנות את חיי. 

What Happened? Part Three

I've been thinking about Part Three of this story for weeks.  Finding so much I want to say and then wondering if everything I plan to write is lies, or at least a skewed way of thinking about things.  And I've been stymied about how to write this part of the story in a way that honors and respects my parents.  What is written below doesn't really convey the angst of this change in my life.  I still have days where I just don't know what happened.

My grandmother, my father's mother, left school at 12 years old, I've been told, to care for her new baby brother.  That's how old Gabi is now.  Then she went back and did a secretarial or business course, and worked until she married.  She told me, I am pretty sure, that she and Grandpa were very pleased she did not have to work after they got married, that this was very important to them, a point of pride, that he supported her.  Of course, she worked like crazy at home - her home was spotless and she was a consummate homemaker.  Every morning, she fresh squeezed Grandpa orange juice. 

My mother, her daughter-in-law, was the first woman in her family to go to college.  Her own mother wanted her to go to secretarial school.  She got a Ph.D.

I grew up between these two formidable women.  Grandma has been gone 20 years but her presence is very real in my life.  She was my only grandparent for 22 years after my grandfather, her husband died.  (My mother's parents had died relatively young - my grandmother before I was born and my grandfather when I was 4.)

My parents were super happy to be parents and often talked about how important it was to them to have children.  But at the same time, I felt that their work was more important to them than anything else, or maybe more that work was what defined a person's identity.

I noticed how deep my feelings about this run when I was on my first maternity leave.  Since I gave birth late, I had been out of college and working full time or in graduate school for like 20 years.  On maternity leave, my identity was "mom", but sometimes it felt more like "milk cow" and I noticed how hard it was to feel good about myself in that circumstance.

So when I figured out last year, in the wake of my illness and Vlad's death, that I really wanted to "make the main thing the main thing" and to be home more, to focus on my kids and to have the flexibility to travel more and see my parents more, to be available to my partner and to maintaining our home, it was very confusing to me, because it has meant giving up a professional identity that has been really important to me for 30 years and a career I have had for 20 years.  This is the first time in well over 30 years that I am not either a) working for a non-profit organization or b) a full time student or c) both.

What I miss most about my former job is my colleagues and the professional identity.  I can't believe I chose this kind of disconnected freedom.  My feelings are not so closely connected with earning money or working, because I've been working pretty much every day since I left my job.  I have work.  What I don't have is a job.  I opened a business so I can get paid, and I am trying to earn a certain amount and to be fully employed by the work I am doing, but I don't see myself as "building a business", I just see myself as working for myself and for clients who choose me to work for them.  It's much looser, less connected, and less demanding than what I have done before.  It feels oddly relaxed.

Then there are the dishes.  And cooking.  And homework, 4th grade homework.  The grocery shopping, the orthodontist appointments, the prescriptions, the taxes, and the house.  I wish I liked housework.  I don't like it any better than I did before I quit my job.  I will never be my grandmother.  But I do a bit more of it.  And I cook dinner every night, and do the dishes, and walk the dog, and don't feel exhausted.  I have time to notice my children and feel good about them - to listen to what they have to say and to try to respond to what they need.  I am way more relaxed at home.  I can say yes more often. 

I saw a woman with a beautiful dog a few weeks ago, and she was saying how they might give the dog up because they didn't have time to walk it as much as it needed.  I figured if my lifestyle didn't work for my dog, it was time to change my lifestyle.  Thanks Popeye.

Immigrant Mom musings

I guess I should take comfort in the fact that the experience of being an immigrant parent is something I share with my brother, my mother, and two of my great grandmothers, Pearl Antine & Fannie Diamond.

Today's Bat Mitzvah tekes (ceremony) at Gabi's school began with a learning session.  For the first activity the teacher asked everyone not born in Israel to stand up.  Alen & I stood with about four, yes only four other people, and two of them seemed to be grandmothers.  The other immigrant moms are the moms of my daughter's best friends in her class, who are Russian.

Then she asked everyone whose parents were not born here to stand with us, and then everyone whose grandparents weren't born here, and by then most of the room of parents and kids were standing with us.  Only a small number of kids and parents stood in the place for people whose grandparents were born here.

We learn from this that we were a nation of immigrants, but I learned from it that we are no longer one.   I felt sharply how we are different here and how we stand out, in my daughter's class at least.  She feels it and we feel it.  I know that other schools in town and other towns in Israel have different compositions, but we are mainly around people who were born here.

Then we had a Beit Midrash, which fittingly enough began with a verse from Psalm 126, "When G-d returned the capitivity from Zion we were like dreamers."  I had plenty to say, as did the other parents, but I was conscious how the girls in the group, my daughter and her friends, were not talking much, and of her strictures to me earlier that I was to keep my mouth shut.  We were two men, four women, three girls, and one man did most of the talking.  I would have said more but for the pressure I felt to be quiet from my daughter.

The story was about Honi HaMaagel, who slept 70 years and woke up to a world he couldn't understand.  I can relate.

At the ceremony itself, the 59 Bat Mitzvah girls from her grade in the middle, the boys in two sections on either side.  I'm thinking how much I hate gender, the whole thing about what girls are meant to be and look like, the whole confusion.  The girls are wearing white with garlands of flowers on each girl's long hair.  I'm thinking of all the conflicts and contradictions of this age.

Two moms tried to sum it up in their blessing and couldn't - saying that times have changed, that girls can be anything, knowing full well that if they choose "anything" they will give up on some other parts of things.  They reminded the girls to stay true to what is real in being girls and women, whatever that means.  One mom said that the girls should speak up or be quiet as they wish - could it be I am a mom who speaks up with a daughter who prefers to keep quiet? 

I was emotional all along, but got most emotional hearing the boys sing, with cracking voices, about how "Mashehu hadash matchil achshav" (Something new is happening now).  There was something so cute and poignant.  Each boy gave a girl a plastic flower with a heart, very embarassedly.  And the girls did their dance, and everyone clapped.

Then at the end Hatikva, and me feeling emotional that I am here, and in a Jewish setting, and at the same time wishing I was some place that felt familiar or comfortable in any way.  I'm probably the only person who thinks at the end of Hatikva, "play ball!"

And my daughter came out smiling, until about two minutes later when she got mad at me for posting a photo I took of her, and stomped off.  And in the car on the way home she told us how the moms who gave the blessing, the kind of moms I like, aren't cool and how I had better never stand up and say anything like that at any event.

And I came home feeling......like an immigrant mom of a teenager, awash in a future and a country I will never understand.

Good To Be In Woods Hole

My kids just left the house with Alen at 4 am to fly to Woods Hole for a month.  This trip was planned since last summer and though I am going to miss them a great deal until I join them in two weeks, I could not be happier that they are going.

Growing up I had two anchors:  Judaism and Woods Hole.  I had the enormous privilege to spend every summer in Woods Hole, and it really was almost like another, non-competing, religion.

The values of Woods Hole began with reverence for Nature.  Louis Agassiz said, "Study Nature, not Books," and that was the motto of the Children's School of Science where we learned each summer.  During the day time the town is criss crossed by groups of kids with buckets, nets, and sometimes cameras, learning from the sea, earth and sky.  Seashore Life, Marine Biology, Oceanographic Electronics, Invertebrate Zoology, Advanced Marine Biology were some of the courses I took.  I'm grateful I had a great biology education before I met my sexist high school biology teacher Mr. DeMarco (maybe I'll write about him one day).  If you know Alen and her work you can understand how deeply I "get" what she does from this amazing aspect of our Woods Hole education.

Woods Hole, of course, is home to adults who study science as well, but my experience was from a child's perspective.  Adults worked in labs, attended lectures, spoke on the beach about their research.  Kids went to science school.

Though there was no synagogue in Woods Hole, there was a "rabbi", Phyllis Goldstein.  She was my childhood hero and even as an adult I held her in awe.  The religion she taught was democracy and human rights, reverence for all cultures and for history, and of course the joy and value of music.  She taught it through folksinging every Tuesday night, each summer for forty years.  She was a living role model who had lived through tragic loss and risen.  She was incredibly charismatic - at times stern (to keep kids quiet) and almost always smiling and laughing.  She seemed like a walking encyclopedia of history and music.  She taught us about the evils of slavery, the music that accompanied the fight for freedom, the labor movement, the history of whaling and New England, songs from Africa and elsewhere around the world, languages and more.  We used to sing "Everybody Loves Saturday Night" in about 20 languages.  The message of her songs was that all people have value, all people have songs and stories, all people can care for and about one another.  It's a message that never grows old.

(I wrote more about Phyllis here when she passed away in 2011.)

So now a terrible war is on, and my kids are getting on a plane.  I smiled and hugged them and reminded them that although they are leaving, they are going to be "mini-me".  With tears in my eyes I remember how we traveled to Woods Hole in 2002.  We had made aliyah during the intifada, and for 20 months had not returned home.  We went back to the US at the end of a year we had spent in Jerusalem when 200 people were killed in terror attacks in Jerusalem and the death toll from the intifada on all sides climbed over 2000.  I remember seeing Phyllis and talking to her, and I remember the look in her eyes when I told her I was living in Israel.  It was a look of incredible compassion, and a moment in which I understood that she felt the pain of what I was living through and she believed in me to continue to stand up for the values she had taught me, even when their realization seems hidden.

Jeremy Korr continues to sing Phyllis's songs in Woods Hole with a new generation of children.  And my kids (who met Phyllis when they were young) are going to sing and to feel the earth, ocean and sky.  And just maybe, they too will find their an anchor.

עליה לצור הדסה

This is something I read at our shul for Yom HaAtzma'ut - סיפור עליה

עליה לצור הדסה

בלילה הראשון שלי בארץ ישראל, בשנת 1977, שתיתי הרבה ויסקי עם החבר שלי לאותו קיץ שהכרתי אותו באותו ערב.

טיפסנו בגדר הבריכה של חוות הנוער בסן סימון בירושלים, גדר די גבוה.  שחינו, יצאנו, נתפסנו על ידי המדריכים.  זאת היתה תקופה יותר סובלנית להרפתקאות ולא נזרקנו מיד מתוכנית הקיץ.

כמה שבועות לאחר מכן, ביקרנו לשבוע במושב ליד בית שמש, שהשנה גיליתי היה מושב נוחם.  וכמה שבועות אחרי כן טיילנו בהר שמשם ראינו את המושב מלמעלה – אולי זה קרוב לנו כאן אך איניני יודעת איפה זה היה.  אני וחברה ראינו את המושב "שלנו" מרחוק ויצאנו דרך היער לקפוץ לשם להגיד שלום.  אחד המדריכים היה צריך ללכת אחרינו ולהחזיר אותנו באוטובוס.

אותו המדריך גר כיום ברחוב הפלמ"ח, בבנין שגרים בו חברים שלנו מקורס הכנה ללידה שעשינו לפני הלידה של גבי.  ראיתי אותו לפני כמה שנים והיה נדמה לי שהוא זוכר אותי - לא לשבח.

בשנת 1990-1991 גרתי בירושלים ברחוב וושינגטון.  כשחזרתי לארץ עם אלן במסגרת עליה, התקבלתי לעבודה כמעט ליד המקום שגרתי בו אז, וגרנו ברחוב טשרניחובסקי, לא רחוק ממקום ההרפתקאה הראשונה שלי בארץ.

כשהגענו לצור הדסה ולקהילה, בא אלינו להציג את עצמו דוד קריגר.  הדוד שלו, Seymour, היה מורה של אלן אחרי הגיור שלה ב1995 ולימד אותה להגיד שמע ישראל וואהבת בעל פה. 

אחרי שהגענו לצור הדסה, גילינו שאבא של רחל שבת ואבא שלי למדו ביחד באוניברסיטה, שסיימו ב1950 ו1951.

בשנת 1999 כתבתי שיר שדמיתי את עצמי לרקפת צומחת ליד אבן בהרי יהודה.  כל הרקפות שאי פעם נתנו לי בארה"ב מתו בקלות.  כאן נדמה לי שהן צומחות בלי שום מאמץ של אדם.

לא קשה לי להאמין במושג של "unseen hands",ידיים שמובילות אותנו למרות שאנו לא רואים אותם.

Trust and the flower pot

I have a flower pot on my dresser that I received as a gift when I was a junior in high school.  This is a story about how I got it and about the things I have come to wonder in recent years about what it means to me.

I took a class in high school called “Communications”.  It was a popular class, taught by a popular teacher.  This was the late 70s and I think it’s fair to say the teacher was an aging hippie and his class was definitely influenced by the spirit of the times.  Having been preyed up on as a child, I actually kept my distance from him.  I had a radar for adults who violated boundaries.  I had already worked to get switched out of a class where the teacher was known for smoking pot with students.  This teacher also had that reputation, as well as a group of much cooler girls than I who surrounded him.  Maybe there were guys too, I just don’t remember them as well.

I liked the class.  It was all about the ways we communicate with each other – pop psychology type stuff.  There was a retreat too.  We talked about issues like honesty, trust, you know. 

I think that on the last day of class we were supposed to bring a gift for one person in the class.   I think I brought something for a girl named Jill, someone who was much more popular than me in the complicated social order of the high school of 2000 kids where this took place but whom I had become somewhat close with over the class. 

I was very surprised when the teacher chose me, of all the students, to give a gift to.  He gave me a spider plant, quite a healthy one, with babies on it, in a small flower pot.  He said that he had had the plant and tended it for quite some time.  He said that he was giving it to me because of all the people in the class, he trusted me.  He trusted me, he said, not just to tell me something personal, like we had practiced doing with people in the class, but he trusted me in the way that if he ever wanted something done, I was the person in the class he would trust that he could turn to and that I would get it done.

I can’t begin to tell the value to me of this gift and of what he said that day.  I guess the fact that this plant, and after it was long gone the pot it grew in, stayed with me in every dorm room, home or apartment I ever had, made aliyah with me and still sits on my dresser 36 years later tells that tale.  In a high school of 2000 kids, in a life in which I felt often invisible, unpopular or unimportant, that gift and statement had a lot of traction and helped shape the positive ways I saw myself for many years to come.

And yet…

Some not so long while ago, something happened and a friend came to believe that I was not trustworthy at all.  As I reflected on this for some weeks, I thought about the flower pot, and I began to wonder about whether I had ever been the person the teacher said I was.  It seemed clear that :  the teacher wasn’t trustworthy, he was smoking pot with students; I wasn’t trustworthy – my parents couldn’t trust me and just the year before, for example, I had been stealing pills from the medicine cabinet of people I babysat for; the gift wasn’t trustworthy – what quality teacher singles out one student in front of the class to praise?  And years later, I didn’t feel like the person who could be counted on to get things done – I felt then, and often feel now, that I make too many commitments to too many people and can’t possibly carry them all out.  Sometimes it seems like the only way I can be trustworthy - to myself and others, is to cut back radically on what I commit to, and on who I am to others.  The more people expect of me, the more likely I am to disappoint.  Or something like that.

I would like to digress here to a story about a person I once met whom I think was named Lyn, but I fear if I go down that road I won’t get back to the present.  I'll save that story for later.

So….

Lately I have met two people who feel that the world is not a trustworthy place and that people in general cannot be trusted.  And I have found these people to be pretty hard or impossible to rely on.  Leading me to believe that how trustworthy we are may be connected to how much we trust others.  But beyond that, I have also noticed that my trustworthiness, my ability to follow through, help, stay committed, has been less than optimal when I have dealt with these people.  It is almost as though I have become less trustworthy when dealing with people who don't expect me to be trustworthy.  Or something like that.

So the flip side of this is that because my teacher said he trusted me, I worked all these years to be the person he saw me as.  I am not sure I have succeeded, but I believe I have tried harder because of what his words meant to me.  Which is something for each of us teachers to think about.

Many years ago, Reb Zalman gave me a blessing that I should see myself as G-d sees me.  This week, as we were studying Psalm 33, I asked my students if they believe in hashgacha pratit (that G-d oversees our individual actions).  One of my students said the following and I knew he had written the end of this story.  He said, “If people are created in the image of G-d, and if people see my deeds, then I believe some part of G-d sees my deeds.”  So I'm still grateful that my teacher in that moment saw, maybe not who I completely was, but who I could maybe become.  And that, with his shortcomings, he helped me get closer and work harder on being the person he saw I could be.

 

Ancient History - Part Two

I suddenly realized Coming Out Day will come and go and I won't have finished my story - yikes!  I just re-read the last installment and it feels so raw.  I'm impressed I was able to feel that close to that time last week and aware why it kept me awake.

That's something I remember - waking up at about 4 am every day.  Not know how to know myself, not knowing who I was. 

Secrets are bad for me from a young age when I started keeping some.  So that month of not telling anyone went very much against my nature.

I decided to tell someone.  An old boyfriend - maybe my most recent serious boyfriend - was coming to town and I thought maybe I could tell him.  First we spent some time together.  I think I told him I had something I wanted to talk to him about but I was afraid to tell him.  I never write about sex particularly but that was the last time I had sex with a man.  Then I got up to go to the bathroom and said, "I'll be right back, don't go away," and when I got back he said:

"You know, sometimes you say things and I don't know if you mean me to hear them."

And I said "what do you mean?"

And he said, "when you got up you said, 'by the way, I'm gay.'"

Which I never said, I said, "I'll be right back, don't go away."  I have proof he misheard things because once before I had told him something like, "I love you very much" and he thought I said, "I want to make you lunch."

So that was the first person I came out to, and I know G-d was acting in my life because he heard me say what I was afraid to say.

Then I started telling other people and all their reactions totally annoyed me.  Lesbian friends said, "oh, we always knew you were gay," and I was like, "how could you know when I didn't know, how can you say that?"  And straight friends were either like, "so what?" or "really?" or "yeah, we knew that," and I'm like, "It's a really big deal" and "Yes, really" and "How could you know that if I didn't?"

I wasn't happy with anyone's response.  Can't think of one person I felt like talking to about it except maybe the woman I was starting to have a crush on.  And one other friend who was coming out at the time.

So then I told my parents.  Why not, right?  I guess it was Thanksgiving.  I was applying to rabbinical school.  My mom said being a lesbian rabbi was like shooting yourself in the foot.   She said I would never have kids.  Then when I said I still wanted kids she said they wouldn't have a father and it would screw them up.  Yup.  Lesbianism was fine for all her friends but not for her daughter.  Makes sense.  I don't remember what my dad said, but no doubt it had something in it about the importance of biological reproduction and reproductive relationships being better than other kinds. 

I like my parents.  I'm not writing this to dishonor them.  This is really what they said.  You can read elsewhere on my blog about how my grandmother responded when I told her about 7 years later, after I had met Alen.  The good thing about my parents is they never stopped the dialogue and eventually, in time for our wedding about 9 years after this, they got it together, and after the wedding they really got it together.

I remember at the time I read some great books - Mary Borhek's classic Coming Out to Parents and another book called Parents Matter.  The Parents Matter book was based on a survey that found that the greatest relationship damage/danger of coming out was actually between lesbians and their fathers.  The most ruptures were there.  But the average time from coming out in the people surveyed for the book was 7 years and my boss told me it wasn't long enough.  She told me after 15 years there's real acceptance, and I have found that to be the case.

Coming out was like shedding a skin.  Everything was raw.  Nothing made sense and everything made sense.  I don't know how many years it took for the shock to wear off.  It was being comfortable with myself and no one else, it was making sense in a different way of everywhere I had been, it was hard and it was real.

A shout out at the end of this installment (I don't know if it is the end or not) to the ex-boyfriend and dear friend mentioned above and to others including Alan Kaufmann z"l.  I don't remember when I told and who I told (except the story above) but I remember I was met with love and support.   And to all my other friends who weathered the storm and stuck with me and to all my friends especially from work who showed me the way and to my family too who were always with me despite some memorable things they said.

Ancient History - My Coming Out Story

National Coming Out Day is October 11, and I have been thinking about when I came out in 1987 and what it meant to me then and means to me now.

The events aren’t fuzzy in my mind but the dates are.  I thought I was 26 turning 27 when I came out, but I am sure it was 1987, and that year I was actually 25 turning 26.  It was the fall.  I had received a call, I think in early September, asking me to take a job with the Pennsylvania Coalition Against Domestic Violence.  I left where I had been working, at Women Against Abuse in downtown Philly, and took the job in Reading PA.  The understanding was that this was temporary, for less than a year, until they could do a real search, for which I would also be able to apply.

Taking this job allowed me to move from downtown, where I had been working, to a more suburban part of Philly (Mt. Airy) which had more of a Jewish community.  My brother was living there and we rented an apartment together.  I’m not sure the sequence of events that fall – what happened first after the new job – the move or the monumental conversation that changed my life.

It sounds kind of funny, naïve and trite, but this is what happened:

I was working with a brilliant lesbian attorney and we were travelling the state.  The head office was in Harrisburg.  We also had meetings all over the state – I think we tried to meet each month in a different county with legal advocates.  Mostly this involved driving.  We also had trainings several times a year in different parts of the state.  Early in the fall, Ellen Pence, may her memory be a blessing, came to do a training.  I don’t remember where it was.  I remember of course how brilliant she was.  I don’t think it was the first time I heard her speak, but being in a room with her was always wonderful.   I read something online after she died that so captured the way she was in a room – at the same time making you feel really good and also challenging you to be so much better.

So my boss, me and Ellen were in one of our hotel rooms after this training.  And somehow the topic came around to me, and how I “thought I was not a lesbian.”  And Ellen told me that I was making a mistake if I thought I was going to marry a man, and that it was a bad idea, because one day, I would be working on a committee with some woman, and I would look into her eyes and fall in love, and if I was married to a man it would be a messy divorce, maybe a custody battle.  She presented it very romantically and I laughed and said, “Will she wear glasses?”

I said, “Why do you think I’m a lesbian, just because I am masculine?” and she said, “no you’re not, you are a fembot.”

Ellen was such a huge personality – when she tells you something about yourself, it’s not something you can shrug off.  Or maybe had I been more straight I could have, but as it was, I started thinking.

And I asked myself, “is it possible I am a lesbian”?

And the answer that came to me was that I had no idea, because for me any kind of feeling I might have for any woman was locked behind a door that said “don’t come in here”.  I couldn’t know if I was attracted to women or any woman because it was not something I allowed myself to feel.  Opening that locked door to wonder was a step toward finding out about myself.  In the words of Geneen Roth I read just recently, it was a beginning toward treating myself with kindness and curiosity.  It was an opening to learning about myself rather than trying to force myself to be what I thought the world wanted me to be.

It was about accepting myself and being myself.  What a concept.

Now that I have a 10 year old daughter, I see the process close up of how we (especially girls but probably boys too) try to mold ourselves to be what we think the world (in the form of our cruel peers, our teachers and others) wants from us.

What I felt in the coming out process was that all of a sudden I could re-access my 8 and 9 year old self.  I had energy, exuberance, and joy.  My 8 and 9 year old self had wanted to be a rabbi.  And lo and behold, I suddenly felt free to apply to rabbinical school.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

First I spent a month, a whole month, not telling anyone about this.  I spend a month driving 75 minutes each way to work and crying, wondering if I could be a lesbian and trying to figure out what that would mean in my life.

One day on my return trip from work I heard Joni Mitchell’s Song for Sharon.  And cried over the first verse:

I went to Staten Island, Sharon
To buy myself a mandolin
And I saw the long white dress of love
On a storefront mannequin
Big boat chuggin' back with a belly full of cars
All for something lacy
Some girl's going to see that dress
And crave that day like crazy

I cried because I was so sure I would never wear a wedding dress, cried again that January when I saw a photo of Jan Pierce in her wedding dress, after she died suddenly and I guess I was with her daughter looking at her old wedding album.

And I knew at the same time that if what I wanted from heterosexuality was that day and that wedding dress, it probably wasn’t enough.

Stay tuned for Part 2!

The End of Exile

The End of Exile

There’s a woman or man like me

Waking up this morning

In Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver

In London, Berlin, Amsterdam

In Stockholm, in Sydney, maybe even in Tokyo

Waking up next to a lover, a partner, a soulmate

She’s thinking of California, New York, Massachusetts, Florida

He’s thinking of how they met in Provincetown, Manhattan, San Francisco, Miami

In Rio, or Jamaica or Amsterdam

It’s been 5 years, 10 years, 15 or like us 20

Of falling in love, of worry, of lawyers bills, of fears and new horizons

Of losses greater than could be borne – of learning greater than ever dreamed

They have friends, family, new roots of all sorts

They have bills, mortgages, contracts, commitments

Is this home? They wonder
 

For years home has been where you are, choices limited, decisions made by others
For years I have held injustice, reached for acceptance, tried to understand G-d’s plan

For years we have missed loved ones, family events, a sense of all that’s familiar

It has been a kind of wall at each side, defining a narrow path

 

And suddenly, in an instant, what has held, constrained, controlled us for decades has fallen away
I am left standing, wondering, laughing, crying

Reaching for meaning in all we have walked through

Knowing that wherever you are is home

Top 10 things I've learned from my mom - for Mother's Day

For Mother's Day, I thought I would post a top ten list of things I've learned from my mom.

1.  It's ok to want a fulfilling career and to be a mom.  You can do both.

2.  If something has to go, let it be the housework.

3.  Scrambled eggs and/or fried tomatoes on toast makes a great meal.

4.  Honor your in-laws - they are your spouses' parents and your children's grandparents.

5.  Let your kids learn to cook as early as possible.

6.  Your students aren't as important as your kids, but they are pretty far up there, and you can get new ones every year!

7.  There's a lot to be gained from moving to a new culture.

8.  Go to shul - even if you don't arrive until Alenu, it's worth going.

9.  Ask people about themselves and listen to what they tell you.

10.  Be relaxed if your kids wet their beds - they will grow out of it.

That's just today's top 10 list.  Every day there's about a hundred things I do pretty well because my mom is such a great role model.   Thanks Mom, or as you probably more think of yourself, Mummy.