The Lilith Blog

April 20, 2009 by Maya Bernstein

Why is This Night Different?

The Lilith Blog regrets that a technical fluke prevented this post from going up before Passover, as planned. We apologize for the delay and hope you enjoy Maya’s excellent writing.

My three-year-old came home from nursery school when she began learning about Passover, and, at the dinner table, asked “why do we do so many strange things at the Seder, like eat matza instead of bread?” I almost jumped out of my chair. That’s why! I wanted to shout. So that you’ll ask that very question! The very fabric of the Seder, Passover’s central ritual, is woven from questions, and, in particular, the questions of children. In fact, one could argue that the reason we celebrate Passover at all is to engage the next generation in the narrative of the Jewish people; the form of this engagement is the question. The story of the Exodus in the Bible anticipates these questions from the young, “and when your child asks you tomorrow – what is this?” and the Rabbis, over the course of Jewish history, ritualized this back and forth conversation between the generations.

The “Mah Nishtana” – the Four Questions – is traditionally recited by the youngest member of the family. My three-year-old’s been belting it out at the top of her lungs for a month now. My id would like to respond by stuffing a pie into her face, or screaming “aaaahhhh” each time her sweet lips open into the “mah” shape. Instead, I smile and praise her. For her, it’s just another song. She asked the question already, over a bowl of noodles, some time ago. Our challenge at the Seder will be to engage her so that, in addition to standing on her chair and making her grandmother and great-grandmother proud, she’ll actually ask a real question, and we’ll actually take the time to respond to her. That, after all, is the point.

The purpose of the Seder is to tell stories. Not just any stories, but our stories – the stories of our people, of our families, and our own deepest stories. And not just to anyone – but to our children, those, perhaps, before whom it is most difficult to expose ourselves. We are challenged to sit down, face to face, and talk. This, I think, is what the “Mah Nishtana” is about. “Why,” it begins, “on all other nights, do we eat leavened bread and matzah – and tonight we eat only matzah?” Matzah is bread stripped of all its protective coating, all of its layers. On most nights, and days, when we interact with our children, we do so with armour. With the shields of infinite excuses – “great question – but nice try – go brush your teeth; yeah, remind me to tell you that story some time.” The Seder night is all matzah. There are no barriers – and we respond as we are, honestly, vulnerably. We answer that question, really. We tell that story, with all its embellishments. “Why on all other nights do we eat many vegetables – and tonight we eat only marror?” Because tonight, even when the answers and the stories are bitter, we share them. “Why on all other nights do we not dip even once – and tonight we dip twice?” Because tonight we delve deeper – dipping, over and over, into ourselves, and sharing ourselves, wholly, fully. “Why on all other nights do we sometimes recline and sometimes sit straight – but tonight we all recline?” Because tonight, finally, we sit around the table together and we are present with each other. We relax. We converse. We share. We celebrate.

And, leaning back, for a moment, we remember that we are full, that we are whole, and our children, wide-eyed, lean forward, and drink us in.

–Maya Bernstein

The Lilith Blog

March 30, 2009 by Maya Bernstein

What’s For Dinner?

The baby’s got a new trick. She can turn her hands into wind-shield wipers. When it’s time for breakfast, I drop her into her high-chair and dump some cheerios and a hunk of banana on the tray while I go get the yogurt, or oatmeal. Her older sister sits at the table eagerly, awaiting the show. I approach the high-chair with trepidation. The banana and cheerios are now glistening on the floor. Mmmmmm – yogurt! I say. Go go gadget wind-shield wiper hands, she squawks, and the spoon, dripping with blueberry goop, cannot, despite my athletic dexterity, approach the holy zone of the closed mouth. Her sister giggles in delight. I persevere, placing a beloved piece of strawberry on top of the yogurt. Look, I say, strawberry! But the hands go wild, swish swish swish swish, as if the light drizzle has become a torrential downpour.

How to get (healthy) foods into the mouths of babes? My parents tell me that I was a terror; they would put on a song and dance show, involving puppets and costumes, to get bites into my mouth; as the show and the meal progressed, my mouth would get fuller and fuller, and I would perform the finale, expelling from my cheeks the entire meal.

It doesn’t seem to get any easier as they get older. My three-year-old’s latest is: “I’m hungry for candy.” And my babysitter, whose two grand-daughters are eleven and thirteen, comes in worried each morning with new stories about the dinner-table tears, and the after-dinner fights that revolve around picky eating and body-image issues.

And all of that “getting food into them” assumes that the food is on the table, prepared, diverse, colorful, delicious, piping hot, and nutritious, exactly when they’re hungry.

I asked my three year old if she likes being a kid, or if she’d rather be a grown-up. She thought for a minute and said – I want to be a grown-up, because grown-ups cook all the time.

Who knew it was going to be so hard, and so all-consuming?

Apparently, lots of people. Everyone, from the New York Times to Michelle Obama to the Mommy Bloggers, like Chef Mom, Weelicious, and Meals for Moms, to name a few, is talking about how to get healthy food into kids (and all their relatives).

Now, I love to cook. But it’s exhausting to plan meal after meal after meal. It takes so much time, and constant creative energy. And, within minutes, it’s on the floor, or smudged into their hair, or is a stain on their clean pajamas. And then it’s messy dishes and pots and left-overs, which get lost in the cavernous fridge.

Feeding one’s family is part of that never-ending up-and-down cycle of parenting, a cycle expressed by T.S Eliot, in Little Gidding of his Four Quartets – “what we call the end is often the beginning, and to make a beginning is to make an end – the end is where we start from.” Even if, last night, you cooked the most incredible dinner in the universe, which your children ate neatly and with great appetite, you’ve got to cook another one for tonight. There is no arrival; there is, simply, the journey. The show must go on.

–Maya Bernstein

The Lilith Blog

March 19, 2009 by Maya Bernstein

In Motion

The baby learned to walk – ah! The freedom of it! Tentative steps for a month, and then, seemingly suddenly, the determination palpable, the joy uncontainable, the falls inevitable, she is on the move. Most radical, I imagine, must be the change in perspective, from feet to knees, from the steady lines and right angles of carpets and table legs to the vast expanse of air and space between the objects perceived from two feet off the ground.

She looks to me like the vision of a dream my father had, when, as a grown man, he went skiing for the first time, and, after a cold day of carving wide turns on Vermont’s icy slopes, he slept soundly, dreaming of flying.

Bumbling elegance. Blocks, shoes, and her sister’s dolls, dwellers of the now-remote realm of floor, once studied scientifically, intimately, are now constant obstacles on her path, that of all-consuming movement, a-shimmer with the distant twinkling of objects on low shelves and tables, the treasures of the Promised Land.

Avivah Zornberg, in her book The Particulars of Rapture, cites an essay by Adam Phillips, from his work On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored. The essay quotes Sartre (in Being and Nothingness) who discusses someone confronted with an overhanging rock face while on a walk.

For the simple traveler, who passes over this road and whose free project is a pure aesthetic ordering of the landscape, the crag is not revealed either as scalable or not scalable; it is manifested only as beautiful or ugly.

Phillips comments:

If I am simply on a walk, the rock face is an obstacle; if I am a painter, it is not. But the absurd – the psychoanalytic – possibility…is that I may realize I am on a walk only when I perceive the cliff as an obstacle. That is to say, the only way to discover your projects is to notice – to make conscious – what you reckon are obstacles…The desire does not reveal the obstacle; the obstacle reveals the desire.

I watch the baby glide from room to room, and she is beautiful. When I am not in motion, I am the simple traveler, the painter, the mother, standing to the side, observing her journey, dreaming, as I watch her fly, of flight.

But, when I am in motion, when I’m on my walk, this baby is my crag and that crag is my obstacle, and I must determine – scalable or not scalable – in order to survive. Then must I pick her up, and tuck her under my arm, and run down the stairs, and out the door, and she, eyes-wide, knowing, and not knowing the desire for flight, and its obstacles.

–Maya Bernstein

The Lilith Blog

March 12, 2009 by Maya Bernstein

A Parent's Job Description

My mother-in-law forwarded me an email with this description of a Parent’s Job Description. I haven’t been able to find the author–-though multiple links come up when you Google “Parents + Job Description.”

I admit to laughing out loud at least once. In the spirit of Purim, which we celebrated this week, I wanted to share it with you.

JOB DESCRIPTION

TITLE

Mom, Mommy, Ma, Mo, Mama, Ema, Amma, Maman

Dad, Daddy, Pa, Pop, Papa, Abba, Ba, Baba

JOB DESCRIPTION

 Long term, team players needed, for challenging permanent work in an, often chaotic environment. Candidates must possess excellent communication and organizational skills and be willing to work variable hours, which will include evenings and weekends and frequent 24 hour shifts on call. Some overnight travel required, including trips to primitive camping sites on rainy weekends and endless sports tournaments in far away cities. Travel expenses not reimbursed. Extensive courier duties also required.

RESPONSIBILITIES

The rest of your life. Must be willing to be hated, or at least bite tongue repeatedly. Also, must possess the physical stamina of a pack mule and be able to go from zero to 60 mph in three seconds flat in case, this time, the screams from the backyard are not someone just crying wolf. Must be willing to face stimulating technical challenges, such as small gadget repair, mysteriously sluggish toilets and stuck zippers. Must screen phone calls, maintain calendars and coordinate production of multiple homework projects. Must have ability to plan and organize social gatherings for clients of all ages and mental outlooks. Must be willing to be indispensable one minute, and an embarrassment the next. Must handle assembly and product safety testing of a half million cheap, plastic toys, and battery operated devices. Must always hope for the best but be prepared for the worst. Must assume final, complete accountability for the quality of the end product. Responsibilities also include floor maintenance and janitorial work throughout the facility.

POSSIBILITY FOR ADVANCEMENT & PROMOTION

None. Your job is to remain in the same position for years, without complaining, constantly retraining and updating your skills, so that those in your charge can ultimately surpass you.

PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE

None required, unfortunately. On-the-job training offered on a continually exhausting basis.

WAGES AND COMPENSATION

Get this! You pay them! Offering them frequent raises and bonuses. A balloon payment is due when they turn 18 because of the assumption that college will help them become financially independent. When you die, you give them whatever is left. The oddest thing about this reverse-salary scheme is that you actually enjoy it and wish you could only do more.

BENEFITS

No health or dental insurance, no pension, no tuition reimbursement, no paid holidays and no stock options are offered (though this job supplies limitless opportunities for personal growth and free hugs for life if you play your cards right).

–Maya Bernstein

The Lilith Blog

March 6, 2009 by Maya Bernstein

Friending

A friend of mine was visiting from out of town for a conference recently, and a group of her women friends gathered to see her. We ordered in pizza, and the woman who was hosting lit candles, which she arranged on her twin boys’ ping pong table, opened a bottle of wine, and baked heart-shaped mint brownies. I arrived first, and watched as everyone walked in and gushed “It smells so good!” “Wow – candles!” as the hostess handed them glasses of wine. We sat around and caught up, talking about our kids and our work, the pros and cons of being on Facebook, and finding time to exercise. The conversation could not help but come back, over and over again, to how nice it was to be sitting together in this house, eating on pretty plates (which we would not have to wash), drinking wine, candles lit, on a week-night.

The hostess told us all we had to get out more.

We told our visiting friend she had to visit more.

We thought about starting a non-book club book club.

Then dessert was served and one woman said that she should come here to get her daily dose of fruit – it looked so much more appealing than in her house. I agreed – who ever has time to cut up a pineapple? We all laughed at ourselves, acknowledging how nice it was to be mothered.
When I first moved to the West Coast, before I had children, I was tired of making new friends. I missed my old friends, my “real” friends, dispersed across the globe. I hated the phone, the time-differences, and all of the superficial technological innovations that create the illusion of “being in touch.” I missed touching them. I still do, terribly. But I have become more open to my definition of friendship. I’ve realized that there are many types of friends; for me, the common denominator for the basis of all friendships is sharing pivotal life experiences while living in close proximity. Friends are the people who have at some point given you a hug when you need it. They are people with whom you’ve shared pineapples, face to face, and then, later, the people with whom you talk about that pineapple, and whose hugs you remember.

When I became a mother, I became friends with other mothers, mothers who live nearby, whose kids play with my kids. We are sharing together one of the most profound journeys, and, thrust together by circumstance, we have become friends. In today’s age of countless Facebook friends, and of vast geographic distances separating us from the people who have known us our entire lives and with whom we feel the closest, these friends are precious. I’ve come to accept that new friends don’t annul old friends, just as a new child does not diminish the love one has for an older child. As Papa Bear sings to Baby Bear in Three Bears and a New Baby, “I love her cuz she’s curly and small; I love you cuz you’re furry and tall – curly and small love, furry and tall love, everyone loves through all their days, different people, different ways.”
We have a capacity and a need for endless friendships; these friendships arise in different circumstances and fill different needs, and, rather than negating one another, they accentuate the uniqueness of each era of our lives, revealing the infinite prism that compiles our very selves.

–Maya Bernstein

The Lilith Blog

February 27, 2009 by Maya Bernstein

I’ve Been to the Mountaintop

And it was cold. And snowy. A blizzard, actually, and the winds were so strong that despite the gravity and despite the skis and despite the thick wet snow we were stopped in our tracks. And my gloves were soaking wet, inside and out, and the mountain was steep.

But I didn’t mind.

Because my husband and I were on the mountaintop without our kids.

And we peered at each other through foggy goggles and skied down to the Promised Land. Of ten hours of uninterrupted sleep. Of reading novels, all in one sitting. Of eating what we wanted when we wanted. Of adult conversation. Of quiet. Of hiking and long baths and did I say sleep? Sleep. And sushi and mango ice-cream and movies.

Vacation. From the Latin vac re (variant voc re), to be empty. A strange root; I had always thought of vacation as being filled, like sitting down to a good meal and re-energizing, filling the tank with gas, moving from a state of depletion to a state of fullness, rejuvination. It is a strange notion, to think that we need to be emptied, rather than filled. We are always trying to be filled, and to fill others, and to fill time, and to fill space. On the four hour drive that took us from one life, that of parents, and one climate, spring, to another life, that as a couple (it’s strange, isn’t it, that we wear wedding bands as a public symbol that we are in a committed relationship, and that there is no public symbol that we are parents, the most binding relationship of all? I felt like an impostor all weekend), and another climate, winter, my husband asked me what I was most looking forward to. I thought for a moment, and answered sheepishly, and honestly – “to forgetting.”

Is it healthy to forget that we have children? To empty ourselves of that which fills the most? I had pure moments of forgetfulness. They were few, and didn’t last, but they were, and they were joyous. Like long exhales in a yoga class, exhale fully, exhale the fullness, and empty yourself of breath, of memory, of the selves beyond your self, and, finally, of self. Abraham Joshua Heschel, writing about the Sabbath, says: “Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to holiness in time. It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation, from the world of creation to the creation of the world.”

Children, before they are born, are sparks of passion and potential, part of the mystery of creation, the empty eternal. Once they are born, they too are subject to the tyranny of things of space, and subject us to them as well – endless piles of laundry, fevers and stomach-aches, the infuriating cuteness of wide-eyed 6am awakeness, night after night of what should we make for dinner, and the endless variations on “are we there yet.” Now that we are living again in the blessed fullness of the tyranny, I see that it was good to be on the mountain, the storm and winds and cold all around us, and we, fully empty, silent and warm within.

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop.

–Maya Bernstein

The Lilith Blog

February 19, 2009 by Maya Bernstein

The Milky Way

When my friend’s son was one year old, she and her husband threw a big party in their back-yard to celebrate the baby’s weaning. It was June in Northern California. People arrived in sundresses and sandals, on bikes and roller-blades, and drank lemonade in the dappled shadows of the late afternoon. There was a lot of wine and beer, and champagne too. And delicious food – someone brought a red-pepper dish, in honor of the mother who had abstained from red peppers throughout her pregnancy and lactation, for the baby’s sake. Another friend brought an anatomically correct mammary gland cake, icing and all. On a tree in the yard, my friend and her husband had hung laminated sheets of paper, cut in circles, which fluttered and twirled in the early summer breeze. On one side of each twisting orb was a question; on the reverse side an answer. “Approximately how many GALLONS of milk did our family farm produce?” quivered one side. “58” twisted its response, slowly turning against the bright blue sky.

This was no ordinary weaning party. My friend was wearing a tight t-shirt that read “Exclusive Pumper.” Her son was unable to breast-feed at birth, and, despite “How many lactation consultants did we see (bonus: what were their names?)” “4 – Nancy, Nancy, Joanna, and Nancy,” he was never able to nurse. My friend and her husband made the commitment to feed him his own mother’s milk, and so, “on average, how many pump and bottle pieces did they wash each day?” “100.” My friend told me that once, when she was pumping on an airplane, and her husband was bottle-feeding her breast-milk to the baby, a woman leaned over and said: “Wouldn’t it be simpler for you to just feed him directly?” It took all of my friend’s will-power, and then-some, not to knock her out with the pump and gag her with a hands-free bra.

I could identify, slightly, with this friend. I had pumped exclusively for two weeks and was then able to nurse my baby. My eldest daughter was born six weeks early. My water broke in the middle of the night, seven weeks before my due date; I rolled over and went back to sleep, and then immediately awoke, my eyes wide with awareness. I was put on bed-rest in the hospital for a week and then induced. The baby was whisked away to the NICU, and though, thank God, she was healthy, after I’d rested the nurse brought me a pump instead of my baby. I pumped four or five drops, which my husband extracted from the bottle with a syringe and raced to the NICU. A week later, when we were home and the baby was still in the hospital, I would pump bottle after bottle, and my husband, the milk-man, would wrap them in a towel to keep them warm, and drive them to the hospital, in time for the evening feeding. I pumped exclusively for two weeks, filling the freezer with bottles (“How long can breast milk be stored in a freezer?” “3-4 months”) which we later left out for the baby-sitter when we went out, tentatively, rarely, to the movies.

On the New Yorker’s blog, Jell Lepore, answering questions about pumping, writes: “I found pumping miserable (Dear God, how did it come to this? is the question pumping always made me ask).” What drives us to such irrational madness? Yes – there are rational, and terrible, answers. A child who cannot nurse, a work schedule that does not allow us to be with our babies, sickness, other reasons. Many women decide, willingly, joyfully, or unwillingly, heart-wrenchingly, not to nurse their babies. But what could bring a woman who has a dreadful Pavlovian reaction to the sound of a breast-pump to “cluster pump” (“What is a cluster pump?” “For a period of several hours, you pump until your milk runs out, take a break for 10-15 minutes, and pump again. In a four hour “cluster pump,” you pump between 10 and 12 times. For the first two months of her son’s life, my friend did a 4-hour cluster pump every afternoon”), a wild gleam in her eyes?

When we become mothers we become bewildered. A child, a breathing human being, comes out of our bodies. We, like Naomi returning from Moab, are left – empty husks of corn in the fields of Bethlehem. We eat fenugreek. (“What is fenugreek?” “Fenugreek is an herb that can be taken as a dietary supplement to increase milk production. It smells – and makes you smell – like imitation maple syrup”). We know that our fullness is beyond us, and we leak. Motherhood is the gathering of this endless flow of love, sheave by sheave, with a syringe, with the hope that the baby will taste one wild drop.

–Maya Bernstein

The Lilith Blog

February 12, 2009 by Maya Bernstein

The Nanny Diaries

I was in a meeting with a colleague when my cell phone rang; I didn’t recognize the number, but I picked it up anyway. It was the head of the home-owner’s association of my complex of townhouses. He is an older gentleman, owns a big Dachshund, is relentlessly jolly, and never calls me. He began what at first seemed to be a casual conversation, “how are you, sorry to bother you, by the way, are any of your windows open upstairs,” and turned out to be a conversation about the fact that my Russian nanny, Albina, had stepped into our yard to throw away a diaper, and the wind had blown the door closed behind her. Now she was outside, locked out, and my one year old was inside, awake, at large in a world we’ve really been meaning to baby-proof, really. She had stood there for a while, trying to figure out what to do; the baby crawled to the glass door and smiled, trying to figure out what game they were playing. Then she left the yard, and the baby inside, and ran to get help. We all kicked into action, and, five minutes later, they were inside, and I was 45 miles away, still on the phone. I heard the baby screaming, and heard Albina pick her up and soothe her. There was nothing for me to do, so I hung up, felt my legs turn to jelly, took some deep breaths, and went back to my meeting, systematically ignoring the relentless images of what could have been.

When I was growing up, I had a Jewish Russian nanny. My parents helped her daughter and grandson get out of Russia. Genya had been happy in Russia. She taught German at the university level. But her only daughter had wanted to immigrate to the United States with her young son, and had applied for a visa. Genya and her husband could not imagine living apart from them, and so they applied for visas, too. In a move typical of the Russian government at the time, Genya and Jack were granted Visas, but her daughter, Simona, and grandson, Artur, were not. In the early 1980s, if you were Jewish in Russia and received a visa to the United States, you emigrated. So when I sat on my father’s shoulders at rallies at the Russian compound in the Bronx, everyone around me chanting “Free Sharansky Now,” I was shouting “Free Simona and Artur now!” Eventually, they received their visas, and the family was re-united. My family is still in close touch with theirs, though Genya stopped working for us when we moved to Israel, in the late 1980s. She danced at my wedding with me; I cried with her when her husband passed away.

When we returned from Israel, my family hired another Russian woman, Zeena. Zeena was hard-working, and helped raise my younger sister; she was part of our family for ten years. One afternoon, my mother went upstairs to a locked drawer in the attic where she kept jewelry and other valuables, and found that it was unlocked, and empty. After a lengthy investigation, it emerged that Zeena was culpable, though she was never officially convicted. My mother’s diamond engagement ring was gone. A charm bracelet her grandmother had lovingly compiled for her was gone. Cash was gone. And Zeena was gone, a sniffing cop and rancid after-taste in her place. I was working in Russia at the time, running a summer camp. The day I heard about what had happened at home, a basketball was stolen from the counselor’s room. Poor campers, poor staff. I called camp to a halt. I gathered everyone together outside, under the trees. We sat there in silence. I was mourning the trust that had been broken between Zeena and my family. I was mourning a world in which you didn’t know whom you could trust, and what was safe. Then I talked for a long time about the basketball.

On the evening after Albina was locked out of our house, when I told my husband what had happened, I watched him respond. He knew that our baby was by now sleeping soundly in her crib. First he wanted to know all of the details – how long was she outside? How long did it take them to get into the house? Then he wanted to know why I hadn’t called him. Then I watched as he became angry. “We could fire her over this. She should have made sure the door was unlocked. She should never leave the baby’s side. She should always carry her cell phone.” Then the “what could have beens” swarmed around him, and he sat down.

How can you trust anyone with your children? Yes, we read resumes and look for CPR certification and check references, and watch, during those first few days, like hawks. Some go so far as to install video cameras in teddy-bears. Ultimately, though, trust is a decision of hope, a delicate sheet of ice thinly coating a roaring river of unknown.

When I got home day, I hugged my baby tight, and Albina broke down crying and hugged me, and I hugged her, and then the baby’s diaper needed changing, and then I had to make dinner, and before Albina left I reminded her to come early the next morning, so I could catch my train and go to work.

–Maya Bernstein

The Lilith Blog

February 4, 2009 by Maya Bernstein

Leben Oder Theater

After college, I spent a year living in Germany, working with the Jewish immigrants from the Former Soviet Union who were flocking to cities across Germany in such numbers that, to this day, render Germany the fastest-growing Jewish community in the world. My friend and I worked as Lauder Fellows in Frankfurt am Main. Twice a month, we would drive three hours to Trier, Marx’s birthplace. We would park ourselves in Trier’s synagogue and lead programs all day long, first for pre-schoolers, then for high-schoolers, and finally for adults. Neither of us knew how to drive a stick-shift, so we couldn’t be picky about the cars we rented; we often ended up in mini-vans, and laughed at how one day we would actually own these types of cars, shuttling our children from soccer practice to piano lessons, and that we would always associate them with this strange, free time of our youth, driving across this beautiful, scarred country, with no speed limit.

Once, we got pulled over on the Autobahn for driving too slowly. When the cop approached the car, I blasted Garth Brooks, rolled down the window with a smile, and put on my best fake “Howdy, Officer, How Ya Doin’, Ah don’t speak German” Southern accent, just to get my friend to laugh, which she did, convulsing in nervous shakes in the passenger seat. At the end of the year, before we returned back to real life, grad school and courtship and jobs and marriage and children, she got me a poster by Charlotte Salomon. It depicts a woman, close to the foreground, sitting on her knees, back to the viewer, the profile of her face gazing down at some unidentifiable object in her hands (the skeleton of a kite, perhaps?), and blue horizon all about her. On her back, the words “Leben Oder Theater” are written – Life? or Theater? The dichotomy used to resonate; which to choose? Life, the trodden path, in which you look out at the world as you engage in it, or theater, the path less traveled, in which the world looks in at you?

After my daughters were born, the notion of the dichotomy disintegrated, and the illusion that one could choose between them. Life happens in between the choices. And theater is thick in its midst. I felt this most strongly when I first became a mother, and realized that all of the people closest to me now had new “titles.” My mother was a grandmother, my grandmother a great-grandmother, my sister an aunt, my aunt a great-aunt, and on and on. It was as if we were all part of the theater of the absurd, a show in which we had been acting forever, and the director, on a whim, had decided everyone should switch parts. The show is the same – but you’ll be reading the part of “mother” from now on. Just pass your scripts on over, one person to the left please.

Sometimes, I catch my daughters gazing at me. When I nurse my baby, and she looks at me and reaches for my face, I see myself sitting there, a woman, feeding her child. Or, when I put my three year old to bed, and her eyes are wide as saucers, wondering how she’ll get from here, by my side, to the other side, alone in sleep, I wonder how I have gotten to this side, by her side, the mother side. It’s breathtaking. The gaze of this new generation, and of generations past, on me, a-twirl in the theater of mothering. It stops me in my tracks; for a moment, I sink to my knees on the stage, my back to them, gazing into the blue.

–Maya Bernstein

The Lilith Blog

January 27, 2009 by Maya Bernstein

Getting Into Med School

From time to time, I tutor girls for their Bat Mitzvahs. The other night, I had a first session with a new student, and, as I always do, rather than jumping right into trope, I talked with her. We discovered that we both love to swim. I swim twice a week, if I’m lucky, and am inordinately proud of my forty minute mile. She swims every day, for an hour and a half – about 2-3 miles each practice. She’s eleven. I changed the topic. “What other things do you like to do when you have free time?” She became serious and said that she doesn’t have free time – school and swimming takes it all up. I guess it’s not just a mommy problem.

And it’s not new, either. My mom often mentions that in order to get into medical school, she had to prove that she had diverse interests and activities. This was not hard for her; she is multi-talented and multi-faceted, and she gladly listed her “extra-curriculars” in her application. She got in – but then realized that she had not one iota of free time to pursue these diverse interests. How cruel, she has always said, to create a process that identifies and selects those with varied interests and talents, and then forces those people to turn their attention away from everything but one pursuit.

This past week, I attended an event called “Jewish Women, Making it Work” – discussing how 21st century Jewish women “redefine the paradigm of what it means to work and ‘make it work.’” The moderator asked the panel a question about self-nourishment – what do you do for yourself? All of the women on the panel shared that this was the most difficult aspect of mommying – finding, and allowing, time for themselves. One panelist shared that she had recently joined a book-group. Why? She felt too guilty reading for pleasure. Plus, if her husband found her reading, he was jealous that she was spending time with a book, rather than with him.

Now – in the spirit of making it work – you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. And I’m all for book groups. But must we have an underlying structure to everything we pursue? Can’t we allow ourselve to carve out time for ourselves, time to pursue the things we love, and proudly stand and say – I am taking time for me? Have we all spent our lives trying to get into med school, and then, once admitted, wiggling desperately for a way out?

Those tunnels of time are my life-line. Without them, the sand-castle of structure upon which my life is built would collapse. Yesterday, my husband and I took turns. When he returned from his run, he handed me the baton, and I got on my bike and started pedaling into the wind. At one point, I made a turn and realized I was on a path I’d never been on before. It was wet, and I had to stand to pedal. My tires were thick with mud. The path twisted and turned and I felt my brain change; I was suddenly completely unaware of where I was going. On my right there were clouds, huddling; on my left soft grass, green; in front of me, and behind, mud flying off the tires; and above, the dome of the unknown. I moved amidst the shafts of sunlight, breathing. The path eventually ended, and I came to a road I recognized. I rode downhill, arms dangling by my side, and remembered, suddenly, the first time I’d biked with no hands, when I was ten years old.

When I got home, I lay on the floor with my three year old, building a zoo with primary colored blocks. It was intricate. There was a police-man to deal with the misbehaving dinosaurs, and a zoo-keeper who was attempting to quench the relentless thirst of the baby panda.

Often, when I’m with my kids, I’m not quite with my kids; I’m with the supper that’s not yet made, the laundry that’s piling up, my work to-do list, glaring at me from a pink post-it on the computer, and the phone calls I need to return. I’ve learned that I need to be a kid to be a mom. I need to have me time, unstructured, unfettered, directionless and open. Otherwise, I find that my inner self huddles by the door, sneakers on, knees flexed, ready to flee. And I prefer to have her inside of me.

–Maya Bernstein