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?”

Sad at Christmas

I'm Jewish.  I'm married to someone who has been Jewish for 19 of the 20 some years I have known her.  Maybe finally, after all this time, I am willing to say outright - we're in the wrong place at Christmas.

I did not grow up missing Christmas.  I had a full life of Jewish holidays.  On Christmas day my family, like I assumed many English type Jewish families, had a roast chicken and a Christmas pudding.  The fun was in seeing my father try to light it. 

When I was in high school, my rabbi told me we shouldn't be celebrating Christmas at home in any way, and over the years that followed I came to somewhat agree with him.  The day didn't bother me or affect me one way or another.  The commercialism of the season could be wearing, but it soon passed, and I continued the full life of holidays I knew.

When Alen and I got together, I don't remember Christmas being much.  We visited with friends who celebrated, once with her relatives in England.  Another time we were with her family in Trinidad.  Mostly we were in our home and world.  We called her family on the day, but that was about it.

Then Alen's mom died.  The next Christmas in Israel was agonizing.  Here no one knows and no one celebrates.  Alen's mom was missing, Alen wasn't with her family, and no one even knew or thought to call because it was a hard day.  It passed for most of our friends without thought.  Just two months into her grief, Alen was miserable and I was miserable for her. 

After the kids came, we spent a couple of Christmases with her family in Trinidad and they were fun.  Then Lucas died.  The following Christmas was (at least predictably) a day of many tears in our home.  And the second Christmas after Lucas died, we were with her family, with our kids, strengthening bonds, making new memories, and also sharing grief for those who are no longer with us.

Today, the third Christmas since Lucas died, I feel we are in the wrong place.

I don't want Christmas for any religious reasons.  I don't consider whether halachically I should or should not eat a festive meal or give or receive a gift.  I just want our family to be with the people we care most about, enjoying a day that means something to them.

Alen and Gabi are watching the Queen's Christmas message on TV, there's a smell of Christmas cookies coming from the oven, but I'd rather be in a big living room with a big tree in the hills of Maracas Valley.  Merry Christmas.

Parve Tuna Pie

I was looking for parve tuna casserole but came across this recipe instead.  It's something easy and parve - I modified what I found online and it came out pretty good.  This is not for the pretentious healthy food types, it's for people who serve stuff like hot dogs and mac & cheese.  But then if your daughter stops eating milk and meat, well, here's something you can still serve.

Here it is:

2 cans tuna, drained
One onion
One carrot
About 2/3 cup frozen peas
3 eggs
salf
pepper
1 teaspoon soup mix if you want
1 tablespoon mayonnaise
frozen pastry (parve) - the kind that comes in a roll, defrosted some

Chop the onion and carrot and fry them with some oil and salt.  Let them cool.  Mix the tuna, eggs, frozen peas, salt and pepper, soup mix if desired, and mayonnaise.  Add the cooled onion and carrot.  Mix well.

Put one layer of crust on the bottom of a rectangular pan (or whatever pan you want to use).  Spread the tuna mixture on top.  Put another layer of pastry on top.  Bake at 350/170 for about 40 minutes until it looks done. 

The cooked tuna is less strong tasting than you would think, and the pie is sweet.  If you want, you could add an apple to the recipe.  Gabi, Alen and I all liked it - of course Sasha did not touch it!

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.

 

How I stopped wanting to hurt or kill myself

My motto for this month has been, “No negative self-talk.”  Almost every woman and many men who come to my office or call me on the phone have some way of talking to themself that is a put down or a negative comment toward themselves.  It could be as simple as apologizing when it’s not necessary or saying, “I was stupid to do that,” but almost everyone has a way to put themselves down.

For those of us who are abuse survivors, the problem can be much more acute.  When I got sober I found my thoughts often turned to wanting to hurt myself or wanting to die.

When I was a very short time sober, maybe one year, I heard someone tell a similar story to mine and at the end of it she said that she had not wanted to kill herself in five years.  I remembered this since then – it was about 20 years ago that I heard her say this.  For me, it was a complete message of hope, that someone with a similar story to mine could go five years without wanting to kill herself.  I think that was the day when I knew there was hope for me and the day that I decided to reach for being like her.  And today I can honestly say I have not wanted to kill myself in quite a bit more than five years.

Our minds have grooves in them and as we play the same messages over and over we deepen the groove.  I had a groove in my mind that was “I should drive my car into a tree.”  I had another one that I wanted to cut myself.  I did not do these things, but I did think these thoughts, over and over and over again. 

One thing I like to say is, “if you can hear it, you can change it.”  More on point perhaps, “if you can hear your thought, you can interrupt your thought.”  It was second nature to me to think, “I want to drive my car into a tree,” but as I started to listen to my thoughts I became willing to question them.  So when I heard myself say that, I could ask myself, “Do I really and truly want to drive my car into that tree?”  I began to think my thought through.  “I want to drive my car into a tree” was a shorthand way of saying, “I feel bad”. 

So then I asked myself, “why am I feeling bad?”  I took an approach Geneen Roth describes as “curiosity and kindness” toward my own thoughts.  And I found out there was usually a reason why I felt bad – I was upset by something someone had said, or I was tired, or I was hungry, or I was scared.

And once I found out why I felt bad – I could work to change how I felt – by eating, by sleeping, by talking to a friend, by writing about how I was feeling, by praying.  A big thing that helped me was the saying, “feelings aren’t facts.”  But more than that, I learned that I could change my thoughts and listen to my feelings.  Over time, my feelings changed.  But it began inside my head when I refused to indulge in thoughts about hurting myself, and started to take that first sign, the first thought of hurting myself, as a signal that I needed to do something to take loving care of myself and to help myself feel better. 

A friend tells a joke about the alcoholic with a flat tire who calls the suicide hotline.  I still go down that road sometimes, finding whatever I can’t handle as a reason to want to die.  But much more often these days, I can stop the thought before it starts, remember that there are ways, like roadside service, to deal with the flat tires of life, and that I can handle what comes my way without turning to negative thoughts and negative self – talk.  And I honestly believe that if I could make such a huge change in my thoughts that anyone, anyone at all, can make new choices and become a person who does not want to kill herself.  I find it to be totally worth it!

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!