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. 

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.

Books, fear and all that

It’s the end of 2^nd grade and my son, like most 2^nd graders in Israel at the end of the year, came home with a book report assignment.

Having no prior warning and with several other pressing matters involving a distant health appointment for my other child, a trip to the pharmacy for what I will lovingly call “school drugs,” and a short effort to appear at the job that pays our bills, I came home late.

“Mommy’s home, time to turn off the TV.”  Having lost half my audience here, I will continue.  We are bad parents.  We work too late and come home too tired.  Our kid watches too much TV.

“He has homework and I couldn’t get him to do it.”

Now this is the kid who the night before at 9 pm, after a special birthday dinner party, sat next to me on my bed while I studied to teach, got out his own math homework and did it.  But instead, on the following day, I can’t even find him.

I check the inside of the house and the entire yard.  I check the closets.  He’s not here.

He is found outside, climbing on my car.

Back inside, he develops an intense interest in his Lego.

I finally corner him.  “Is the reason you are running away because of what the homework is?”  I get a nod.  He tells me it is something about a story; he is going to write about Bon 12.

Bon 12 is a comic book with very small writing.  I estimate he has read maybe 20% of what is written in the boxes.  I can’t read the book – the writing is too weirdly shaped, I don’t understand the plot or the characters.  It has too many words. Comic books don’t work so well for me for reading, but I do pretty well with Ricky Robot and Lunch Lady.  I've worked to get my Hebrew reading skills up to reading to him (that was Kitah Alef for me), but when we move into Hebrew comic books, I have a tough time.

We get him to the dinner table and attempt to talk him out of Bon 12.  He says he told his teacher he is doing this book and she won’t let him change it.  He develops an intense interest in pasta and salad and becomes completely non-responsive verbally.

I decide we need a change of scene and tell him we are going out for a walk, which he is very excited about.  “See a friend!”   We take the homework, a soccer ball, my phone and a bag of bamba and start walking.  

I start reading to him from the 3 page assignment.  I start reading the first page out loud, which is addressed to parents.  “Read that to yourself” he tells me.  I read to him that he has to write the book name and author and he tells me them.  I tell him he has to write a summary including beginning, middle and end.  He tells me what happens in the book - about 4 sentences in a row, including some characters’ names, and one he has forgotten but then remembers.  I understand none of what he says but at least he is putting words together into sentences.  I start to feel a glimmer of hope.  He is speaking Hebrew, I am reading Hebrew to him but switching to English to talk to him.  I wonder distantly to what extent this is part of the problem, but having achieved 5 minutes of actual verbal communication about the homework assignment, I feel a very minor sense of victory, coupled with ongoing dread about the coming days.

We get to the park.  He takes his ball and goes to a group of boys.  The park is fairly empty, and the clientele is 90% boys on their own.  It’s about 7 pm.  Not a parent in sight.

He finds a group of four of his classmates, three of whom live right next to the park.  (We missed the memo about buying a home right next to the park.)  They have a shopping cart and are collecting wood for Lag B’Omer.   They bring the cart and unload the wood in one kid’s yard.  A dad is there, talking either to dogs or younger children, paying little attention to the boys.  When they tip the cart over and the wood spills out, the dad rights the cart for them.  Another dad, we’ll call him dad #2, rolls up in his car, coming home from work.

After about 5 minutes, Mom #2, wife of Dad #2, comes out of her house.  I ask her if the boys always come here on their own; she admits how convenient it is to live here. 

“I’m trying to talk with him about the book report,” I say, showing her the page in my hand.  She glances at it, interested but not alarmed like I am.  “Yeah,” she says, “I saw they have that but my kid forgot his book at school.”  I detect no major anxiety.  I recall, as I do each time we meet, that Mom #2 works half-time and comes home by 2 pm.

I say I don’t feel I can leave my kid here to come home on his own so I am hanging around.  “Does he have a sense of time?” she asks.  “Could you tell him to come home in half an hour?” 

I look at her like she has three heads.  If my boss, who pays my salary, asks me to come to his office in the next building in half an hour, and I am sitting at my computer, with a clock staring me in the face every second, I’d say there’s a 50-50 chance I’ll show up there on time. 

“There’s a big street between here and our house.” I say.  She knows, and I know, that the kids aren’t supposed to cross streets by themselves till age 9.  Age 8 is the most challenging age.  Ready to go but….

As if on cue, a car starts backing out of a driveway where the boys are, and one kid runs behind it into the street as it is backing, and as I draw a sharp intake of breath and start moving, my son comes behind him and does the same thing.  “Oh no, it’s not going to be like this,” I say loudly as I start running.  I’m next to my kid in about 10 seconds.  Mom #2 is still where we were standing, mid-sentence.

A difficult encounter ensues in which eventually I get my kid’s attention and convey to him that we are now leaving, and that he may not run behind a car that is backing up and must stop.  All in English, pretty loudly.  Mom #2 arrives and decides to maybe say something to her child.  I am half way down the block on the way home with my kid, with him arguing with me that the man who was backing up saw him and the other boy.

Hours later I wonder, what would it be like to be an Israeli parent, who didn’t jump, who didn’t worry, who knew her kid would understand and complete the assignment?  How is it that the native born in this crazy country, full of minefields at every turn, can be so relaxed and confident?  Would language, a sense of belonging, a part time job, a husband who came home late and earned a good salary, a quiet son, any of the above, ever give me that elusive sense of “yihyeh beseder?”

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 - 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!

Standing on earth

I have been thinking for some time about coming clean and writing what I am really thinking about on this blog.  It’s a hard thing to do because I think that some people, including people I love very much, think I am crazy.  On the other hand, I also think that my experience might help some people. 

When Lucas died two years ago in a car accident I went into a profound spiritual crisis.  After six months, my best friend told me that I had to do something.  Not wanting to go speak to a therapist, I chose to go to a cranial-sacral healer.

During the healing, I understood many things.  I understood that the car accident that killed Lucas also shocked me out of balance on earth.  The healer worked on grounding me and I understood that I had somehow, since the accident, been not grounded.

I understood that some part of me was jealous that Lucas got to leave the earth.  I understood that I knew Lucas and Sasha from a previous life, a life I had seen before.  I understood that Lucas was a very high soul, who had been a monk in that life. 

I understood what I have known for many years, that I was ambivalent (that’s too soft a word) about being alive.  Many years ago I came to understand my traumatic birth (I had the cord around me), as not wanting to be born.  I connected this with the fact that I died in the Holocaust in my last life.  I have seen these things since 1988.

After this healing, I became motivated to want to be here.  I understood that Lucas had left the earth and that I was still here.  I wanted to work on wanting to be here.

I went to another healer I see who understands these things.  We spent some sessions on this issue of “wanting to be here”.  While I was working on this, on January 9, 2012, I said, “I have to stop taking responsibility for other souls.”  I have to claim my journey.  Other people, even my own children, have their own journeys.  That was on Monday.

I was sick at the time.  I went home and came down with pneumonia.  On Thursday night I was lying in bed and I had a feeling.  I was about to go on a trip to California.  I had a feeling that an important message about my trip was about to arrive by email.  I kept getting up to check.  Around 10:30 pm a message came from the mother of a friend of mine.  I had been meant to see him, for the first time after 30 years, during my upcoming trip.  The message was that he had killed himself.  On January 9.

In the following days, I was sick in bed and thought only of him.  I began to see him in our last life, in the Holocaust.  He was my cousin.  I began to understand his story – how hard that life was for him and how that was behind much of what happened to him in this life.  How he was also someone like me who lived somehow not fully here.  How he had to leave.

What I see now, in these days when his image and life are coming back to me again, is how in this life we re-create scenes from past lives to re-do them.  Do-over. 

When Lucas died in March 2011, I was teaching Hallel in an online course.  In Psalm 115 it says, “Lo hametim yehallelu Y-h – The dead will not praise G-d”.    We had studied and discussed that phrase in class just before Lucas died.    A student of mine pointed us to a paper, which analyzed Yakov Gladstein’s 1946 poem, Dead Men’s Praise.  Since Lucas died, I have held that poem, taught that poem, and the words of Hallel together. 

In the poem, Gladstein describes the deaths at Maidenek as a reverse Sinai image – “we received the Torah at Sinai and at Lublin we gave it back.”  The central image in the poem is a Jewish child. 

This year another layer that has been added for me has to do with how we stand on the earth.  What does it mean to be “strangers and sojourners with G-d” on a land that belongs to G-d.  David said, “I am a stranger here on earth like my fathers before me, our lives are like a shadow and there is no hope.”   No hope, that is, of holding on to the things that we hold precious.  The word “shmor” – guard or take care of – keeps coming back in our songs and ceremonies.  I know that this is not promised in any literal way.  I believe that G-d is keeping Lucas’s soul – and my soul, and Sasha’s soul, and Gabi’s soul, and Alen’s soul.  But life on this earth is not guaranteed to us and nor is being able to protect our children.

Today, standing at Sasha’s kabbalat sefer Torah ceremony all this was with me – Sasha, Lucas, my friend Alan.  What it means to receive it all and to be standing here, on earth, in this moment, with my feet on the ground. 

Grief again?

I got up in the morning and opened facebook.  Sasha saw that Auntie Lisa had a photo of Lucas, and he asked to see it, and then the next time I saw he had a huge page of photos of Lucas up on the screen.  I'm thinking, this really sucks.  First thing in the morning my 6 year old is looking at photos of his cousin who died.  Why am I waking up in this kind of world?

We went to visit the kids other cousins.  I somehow made my way through watching Sasha so want the approval and attention of his 13 year old boy cousin.  How many 13 year olds want to play with 6 year olds?  The whole interaction made me want to cry.  I didn't figure out why I felt so strongly until we were on our way out the door and Gabi said something about "I have four and a half cousins." Her aunt tried to say she has five cousins, but it's not really true, because one of them isn't alive.

I've tried to soften my words here.

Then I read on Lisa's facebook that she just went to church for the first time since Lucas's funeral, which was almost 18 months ago.  That said it all.

Fresh Grief

A wave of events has brought fresh grief about Lucas.

It started innocuously (sp?) - almost in a way I felt good about.  In the first of three visits with friends from overseas and their kids, we talked and laughed and the kids played and then almost as they were getting ready to go, we realized they did not know.  They had not seen us in a year and a half, aren't facebook friends, don't interact with us daily.  At first there was an almost giddy shock - here we had spent two hours together without mentioning it - how life had changed in a year - one year ago it would have been the very first thing we mentioned.

But then the grief came back.  Suddenly the photos jumped off the shelves - at least figuratively - and I saw Lucas everywhere.

A few days later Sasha had a really scary asthma attack.  The next day I felt like I had post traumatic stress - it still has not completely dissipated.  That came a couple of days after Gabi and I thought we had lost him in the woods (he was playing with friends in a safe place).  It was just a few minutes, but enough to shake me up and to really scare Gabi.  At night she told me, "I'm afraid I'm going to lose him, afraid that poof, he just won't be here." 

Then we made plans to see some more friends we have not seen since before Gabi was born, with their kids.  So I tried to pre-empt it by telling them on the phone.  But she was horrified and I had forgotten how to tell.  Last year I knew to start, "we had a tragedy in our family" and then to tell.  I had forgotten how to do that.

Then yesterday Gabi and I went with an old friend of mine to see other old friends of ours and their kids.  I felt so heavy on the way there and on the way back.  I had a lovely time.  It was right after the final party for Sasha of kindergarten.  I could be in all this when it was happening, but before and after I felt like I was carrying a weight.

It's of course a joy to watch other people's kids grow - a marvel, one of the greatest miracles in life.  Our kids also are growing so incredibly - easy to see why these are called the wonder years.

This is not promised to us, it is not "muvan me'elav".

So we're starting another summer, I'm about to welcome another wave of students, Alen is somewhat back on her feet after breaking her leg but still not driving, I'm very tired, I'm still parenting a testosterone enhanced version of myself, still feeling so strongly the fear that I call the dark underbelly of parenting.  Taking lots of joy in their changes and trying each day to hold it all lightly and be grateful.