The Lilith Blog

January 25, 2021 by admin

Totally Normal

Four years ago, I cried watching the Presidential Inauguration. Literally cried. I felt overwhelmed, scared and defeated. Last Wednesday, I cried again watching the Presidential Inauguration. Crying with relief, excitement and exhaustion. I can finally breathe. 

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October 23, 2020 by admin

Parenting During the Pandemic

SARAH SELTZER: 37, Lilith’s digital editor and mom of two.

Dear Friends,

I’m in NYC with a baby and toddler at home and little childcare help; my partner is a recent cancer survivor so we’re cautious. Like so many working moms, my job is more flexible (and provides less income) than my male partner’s, so my work overflows into lunch breaks, early mornings, naps, weekends and after bedtime. But it gets done.

When the weather is good, a two-hour trip to a park with some social-distance visiting is the day’s highlight. When we’re stuck at home? Tears, yelling, and messes.

Every day, I track Covid statistics on my phone. Early on in the pandemic, when our own New York was suffering gravely, I had my husband change my Twitter password so I would stop obsessing. I slept better. I hated that I slept better.

The tiny pleasures and stolen cups of coffee that kept me sane as a working parent of little kids are totally out of reach. Here comes the disclaimer (and we all do this) that I am one of the lucky ones, and being with my kids has its blessings, too. But as my quiet text threads with other friends who are similarly “lucky” reveal that we all feel a sense of drowning, and fear. The headlines bear this out: “Single Mothers Hit Hard.” “Real Life Horror Stories from Pandemic Motherhood.” “Pandemic Could Scar a Generation of Working Mothers.” The substance of these pieces? Women, especially women of color, single moms, and working moms, are bearing the brunt of the economic and social fallout: double burdens at home, discrimination at work if work exists, the twin terrors of anti-Black state violence and disease, a generation set back on the path to equality.

I’ve asked some women Lilith knows (but who don’t know each other) to talk about how this feels right now. Let’s dive in. Where are you all quarantining? What is your day like? What do you miss? Anything you’re OK with giving up?

TAMAR FOX: 36, a writer and editor who does not bake sourdough bread, but does obsess about houseplants.

I’m in Philadelphia with my five-year-old back in daycare, and it feels incredible. My partner and I both worked from home before Covid, but when it hit, we spent three months passing our child back and forth, counting the minutes until her afternoon screentime. My 12-year-old stepdaughter was going back and forth between us and her mom, doing schoolwork, understandably bored and frustrated. I spent every minute feeling intense guilt about what I wasn’t doing: being an attentive parent, focusing on work, getting dinner on the table before 8 PM.

We have childcare now, but school is starting again, and it’s going to be virtual. How do you do kindergarten online? We will likely join one of those “pods” that everyone is talking about, though I’m also worried about how to do this in a way that doesn’t reinforce segregation and divert resources from schools, as some have argued they will. Yet there is no possible way for me to teach my child and do my job at the same time. Every family I know is inventing its own plan, and I’m so full of rage I feel on the brink of screaming.

In the “before times,” every Shabbat we would go to a playground near our house. All our friends would be there, and for sometimes four hours or more we would just hang out–the kids yo-yoing back and forth from the slides to the spiderweb to the parents with the snacks. It is cheesy, but I just yearn to do that again. I miss sitting around for hours at a time and not worrying about dying of a virus.

ARIELLE DERBY: an elementary school principal and the 41-year-old mother of “two amazing kids.” She lives in Silver Spring, MD.

Hi everyone.

I’m a single mom. I have an eight-year-old son I share custody of with my ex-wife, and I had a baby on my own in November. He’ll soon be a year old, which I cannot believe. I’m a school principal, and since we went virtual on March 13 I feel like I have not stopped to breathe. Trying to run a school for other people’s kids and a school for my own (same school, but different experience, of course) and a daycare and a household all from our one-bedroom apartment was a constant succession of Big Feelings, most of them bad.

I’m good in a crisis. I felt grateful to be employed, to have (some) money to throw at our problems—like being able to pay to have groceries delivered, to have friends and family to Zoom with and reliable internet and devices for everyone. I thought we were doing pretty well, despite everything. But things started to fall apart for me around the end of May, when I realized this wasn’t a crisis. It was life.

On July 6 our daycare opened for infants again and I started sending the baby. It was amazing. He went for a week and two days and then a staff member got sick, and they shut down for three days. It wasn’t a teacher who worked with infants, but it was sobering. Following that the baby ran a low fever for two days, which caused me to get us all tested…negative.

My older son had a hard time with Zoom school. We talk a lot about feelings, and he said recently, “Everything is just so crappy now that when little things happen it just makes it even more crappy.” (He’s inherited my potty mouth.) He’s also thoughtful and sweet and funny and has spent more time playing Minecraft and watching Minecraft YouTubers in the past months than I care to admit. I am terrified about what the new school year will be like for him.

What do I long for? Not worrying about the trauma this is inflicting on my kid and all my students. Being able to buy groceries without its being A Production. Hanging out with colleagues in my office after school. Going out for coffee. Not feeling like every single fucking decision is life or death.

I started using Facebook like a public journal when this all started. I posted every day and tried to focus on the little moments of joy. My neighbors’ gardens blooming, my kids giggling. I know I am lucky. And yet. And still.

KATIE COLT: a writer, musician, and parent in the Chicago area.

Hi everyone.

I live in the suburbs with my husband and two kids. My daily life is centered around making sure the kids have what they need. Most of the domestic labor falls on me, as my husband has had to go into work from Day One of the pandemic (he’s a brewing production manager at a nationally distributed brewery).

Our five-year-old, a delightful and boisterous boy, is a “mover” (he physically cannot sit still) and is suspected to be ASD. Remote learning for his pre-K class was a disaster, and I am dreading our district’s remote-for-everyone plan, even though it’s safest. With my two-year-old, I’ve been trying to give him extra attention to help with his speech delay, but most of the time I just end up the referee between the kids. I’m worried that the younger one is missing out on socialization time, and that his speech delay is a result of being isolated. I feel like a failure because I can’t split myself into two people that can simultaneously give each child 100% of me.

On top of this, all I want to do is be alone. In April, I lost my dad to Covid. I’ve barely been able to get space to myself to grieve. Before this all happened, I was looking forward to sending the five-year-old to full-time kindergarten and the two-year-old to daycare a couple of days a week so I could spend time creating: writing and making art and music. I fear I will lose myself completely if I cannot figure out how to do this.

CHAVA SHERVINGTON: a longtime diversity activist in the Jewish community, as well as an attorney and mom in Los Angeles.

Hi everyone.

I’m a mother of two living on the West Coast with my husband and two daughters (four and six). I’m managing most household responsibilities, a house renovation, and am on the leadership team of an organization with a focus on racial equity work in the Jewish community. I’m on a hamster wheel: my husband is an essential worker, my kids are old enough to need real education and entertainment but not old enough to manage it themselves, and my professional responsibilities have exploded because of the new attention to racial justice.

My day cycles through conference calls, webinars, interior design, and refereeing household arguments. As an incredibly social person, I’m struggling with the fact that my circle has disappeared. Instead of conferences, social gatherings, smachot, and our warm shul and school community, I’m home with most of my in-person communication relegated to explaining for the 1000th time that, yes, my kids have to clean up their room even though they’re “still playing with it.”

An extreme extrovert, I am starved for adult interaction, leading me to spend more time on social media than I’d prefer to. I try to assuage my guilt with the fact that it does assist me in building relationships with my fellow Jews of color, but it also leads me to disappointment in the larger community as well, especially some responses to the movement for racial justice.

My kids are rotating between Zoom, the longest running game of house in history, and constantly anticipating the things they’re going to do when this gets better. Baruch Hashem they’ve adjusted to their new normal, but it was fraught with early behavioral regressions, chutzpah and clinginess combined with frustration that Mommy being home doesn’t always mean that Mommy’s available. My general 80s approach to parenting seems to be paying off, as my kids can entertain themselves for hours with dolls, books, and art…with only a few mishaps. I’m impressed with how resilient they’ve been and how much they’ve been willing to sacrifice until “after the virus.”

I feel like I’m creating infinite extensions on when that actually is, when they’ll be able to play with friends, return to shul, visit cousins and grandparents who live plane rides away. But I am inspired by their generosity of spirit and willingness to take this in stride. One thing I’ve learned so far is that there are lessons all around us, if only we’re willing to pay attention.

All the best,

Chava

AUTUMN LEONARD: a mother of two who leads workshops and conversations for parents and kids about race.

Hello new thought partners. It’s lovely to be sharing ideas. My family has been quarantined in our fourth-floor walk-up apartment in Brooklyn for the centuries that have passed since March 16: the day NYC schools closed. My son turned seven two days before the closing. The pictures from his slumber party look so forbidden now, like we were fiddling on the Titanic as it sank. That was before wearing masks was supposed to be important. All of my work quickly dried up. I teach yoga and do facilitation and anti-oppression coaching. Once the yoga studios closed I had to wait and see if they would go online, and once they went online, I had to wait and see if they would invite me to be on the roster. Meanwhile my husband’s job exploded. He co-directs a parenting organization, and every single person on staff besides my husband is a working momma. My husband was the only person on his staff who had a partner who was no longer working full time, so I experienced more pressure to take care of the kids in order to free my husband up to backstop all those other mommas he works with. It was a masterclass on how I put unnecessary pressure on myself. I waded into remote learning while my husband worked up to 70 hours/week.

Remote learning was a slow-motion disaster for my first grader. He did not want to be seen on Zoom calls. I bribed my kids with chocolate to run laps up and down our hallway and stairwell. I kept taking videos of my youngest in apoplectic tears and then talking myself out of sending them to our teachers.

Here’s what I know about my emotional state: Dissociation is my superpower, I often feel fine in an emergency while knowing that in a few months or years I will have panic and anxiety and not know why. It’s like taking out an emotional loan against my future. So when this first began that’s what I did. I stayed very calm. It was an adventure. We would figure it out.

I have been teaching yoga via Zoom from my living room, or from my bedroom (with the bed flipped up against the wall), or even sneaking up onto the roof of my apartment. I have been holding space for other people while embracing how much I could not feel myself. There is a generation of kids whose entire lives will never be the same (they are calling them Generation C for Covid and/or Change). There are so many families who have been decimated.

Then George Floyd was murdered, the uprisings began, and suddenly I was absolutely incapable of pretending everything was fine anymore. So now I have become a stay-at-home momma, who intermittently teaches yoga from every room except the bathroom, who stayed indoors for most of three months—and then took her kids out to protest in the middle of a pandemic. While I have handled the pandemic of racism my whole life, I couldn’t handle the twin pandemics of racism and Covid and just stay safe.

ARIELLE DERBY:

I do appreciate hearing your stories, and at the same time it’s like a horror novel I don’t want to read.

Autumn, your words resonated with me. As an educator and a parent, I cannot stop thinking about the long- and short-term effects this will have on our kids. What lessons are they learning? God, I hope I am modeling and teaching resilience, gratitude, flexibility, strength…in my mind I am pretty much hiding in bed all the time.

What are our kids learning about who and what is valued in America? What will it mean for them to see and process that the grown ups can’t fix it? Can’t fully protect them? We are all affected, and at the same time my skin, my class status, my resources change the level and nature of my affectedness. Perhaps that is one thing for the “silver lining” list—having to think about and confront my privilege and what it means, the abundance of gratitude that comes with those realizations, the spur to action as a necessary response to those realizations.

KATIE COLT:

Arielle, this sentiment really resonated with me. What I am doing and where I am in my head are usually two completely different processes, as if I am split in two, each piece located on separate continents. When my five-year-old was a baby, I was struggling with postpartum depression and anxiety, and I was telling my mother about the terrible thoughts in my head while I was nuzzling him and feeding him. “You may be thinking of terrible things, but you’re not doing terrible things,” she said. If reassuring my kids while I quake in fear is considered “lying,” like one men’s magazine article described it, well, I’m nearly pathological. Everyday I’m full of dread and believe it MUST be leaking out somewhere, yet my kids ask to put their masks on the moment I open their car doors to unbuckle their little seatbelts. If anything, this makes me feel a little triumphant, this normalization of pandemic life. Because ultimately we have lost, but we are here.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how ineffective communities in today’s world can be at providing basic care for each other. In my neighborhood, I’m lucky to know several neighbors on my block, but we watch each other struggle with grief and loss, with working from home, with lack of childcare, and we say very little about it.

Because, somehow, the privilege we share has sent us our own independent islands, all lined up neatly in a row, and no one knows how to swim or wants to learn. Anyway, maybe that’s what the future, post-pandemic looks like to me: social contracts of reciprocity. I’m ready to jump in the water and discover how to float.

CHAVA SHERVINGTON:

Katie, so much of what you wrote I could have written myself. I don’t know if I would classify it as “lying” but I feel responsible for minimizing my children’s anxiety, sadness, and fear. I think there’s a distinct difference between avoiding and denying current realities, and helping children manage difficult circumstances. Given how isolating, depressing, and fear-inducing Covid, the continuing police brutality and rhetorical backlash around the current civil rights movement, and the economic downturn can be for adults, I have made specific choices around how we discuss these issues around them. I’m constantly questioning whether I’m making the right decisions about what we do and don’t discuss, but I’m hoping that I’m instilling core values around equity, justice, and communal responsibility.

And I miss my village! This pandemic has exposed the lack of governmental and societal support for women and children, how structural racism exacerbates that lack of support, and even for those in privileged circumstances demonstrates how necessary a village is. It’s also raised so many questions that society must reckon with in a serious way as we come out of this pandemic. Going back to “normal’ is not an option. This moment has exposed how normal is not working for so many of us. The new mommy wars around pods or no pods, remote learning vs. in person learning are only a reflection of the disparities that already exist.

Those of us who profess to value equity need to re-evaluate how we engage with institutions. As I see businesses who refuse to take cash, I think of all the folks with no credit or no bank accounts who are now prevented from accessing resources.

How much are we willing to sacrifice because of inadequate childcare options, how do we ensure that kids with food insecurity have proper access to nutritional meals, are employer expectations based in efficiency or in patriarchy, how do our personal relationships need to be reevaluated so that women aren’t overburdened? What are the many ways that this pandemic has more widely exposed racial disparities in health care, education, wealth, job opportunities, how many folks have been thrown into an economic tailspin due to a societal crisis? How do we build systems of resilience that don’t rely on exploitation?

One of my biggest fears is that this moment will pass, these questions will get pushed aside and pushed off until our next moment of crisis.

AUTUMN LEONARD:

My grandmother was an undertaker, firmly a member of the black upper-middle class in her town of Flint, Michigan. When I was a kid, everyone there knew my grandmother. She ran a funeral and undertaking business. I was seven the first time I saw a dead body in her basement. Since then I never lost the realization that death was something that could happen to any of us at any time. It has changed the way I live my life, because if you keep in mind that one day you will die it changes your idea of what is important. It has made me think a lot about how adulting is just playing an elaborate game. Some folks make up the rules to the game, and the rest of us try to win. When you look at life that way, rather than being fixed, everything seems adjustable.

The strange thing for me about Covid is that suddenly large sections of society are not ignoring mortality and the fact we can change the rules of society when necessary. Here in NYC, we could pause paying rent and mortgages for those at risk of homelessness. It’s in our power to keep people from being forced out into the streets during a pandemic. When survival is on the line, we rethink what is necessary.

I have had conversations with my 97-year-old grandfather (Jewish, not Black) about how he’s satisfied with the life he has led. I cannot imagine him saying this to me pre-Covid. I cannot imagine discussing it with my kids. But I have been discussing these things with my kids. “No matter what happens to Poppa, he will be satisfied. He is not worried.” We have no control over what happens at Poppa’s retirement home and they are all locked down there, no visitors, and anytime someone tests positive all the residents cannot leave their rooms. So suddenly we are talking to Poppa more than ever. My kids may know their greatgrandfather better than they might’ve. I think because of these discussions my kids are avid social distancers. We do not sugarcoat or ignore or pretend that anything other than our lives or someone else’s life is in the balance.

Recently we went to what we thought would be a distanced playdate and the other girls ran and hugged each other. They then turned to my eleven-year-old and tried to shame her into hugging them. My kiddo said “You have to respect my boundaries.” Until then I didn’t know just how determined she could be.

And yet I would give back knowing my daughter has a core of steel and my grandfather is at peace in a heartbeat if it meant we were not living through what we are living through.

TAMAR FOX:

For years I’ve been saying that the old folk tale It Could Always Be Worse is basically the story of my life, and should be printed on my headstone. As a foster parent, I do sometimes add people to my house and it always does make me feel like I’ve lost my mind, and when it’s over I always do feel this intense peace that I’m able to be there for kids that need a safe space. That has been a big piece of Covid times for me. Feeling overwhelmed and stressed and livid, and also grateful.

I worry for my friends who don’t have partners or kids. My best friend is a frontline doctor in New York. After months of excruciating work, he suddenly had to put his dog down last week, and my heart is breaking for him. I have caught myself wishing I had some alone time to watch all the Netflix, and sleep uninterrupted and keep the house cleanish for more than 5 minutes. But having people (and pets and plants) to take care of has also kept me from descending into madness.

One of the weirdest parts of all of this has been figuring out how to be there for friends experiencing loss (deaths, but also miscarriages, cancer diagnoses, job loss, etc) when I can’t give them hugs, or easily make them meals, or help with childcare. I keep thinking about how much I needed my friends when my mom died, and when we had new babies. It sucks to not be able to do the things for others that helped me. My old standards are pretty useless now. I’m doing text check-ins. Sending postcards to friends every week. But it doesn’t feel like enough.

SARAH SELTZER:

It’s 5.30 am and I’m nursing my baby as the sun rises: so in the new normal, office hours have begun. As Autumn and Arielle have said, the revelations and insights I may have gained because of this mass suffering—I was schlepping way too much “before,” focused on providing for my kids (Pumped breastmilk! Dinner!) rather than just being with them—are valuable, yes, but not valuable enough.

Autumn, I also broke my quarantine to walk in a BLM protest with my kids, and my partner has been doing an intensive antiracist curriculum with our oldest, but I yearn to do more that’s physical: to make marching and organizing a part of my rhythm as I used to do during Occupy Wall Street, during various feminist uprisings, and earlier, during protests of the Bush era.

One of the things I struggled with as a new mom in the Trump era is that my body isn’t mine to use spontaneously. It is the center of a small ecosystem. But sometimes I wear a teargas- proof bandanna from Occupy as my Covid mask, to remind myself that protest movements always return, that, as my mother and Lilith colleagues remind me, the period of life with young children is finite, even short, and that someday I may be marching along with my kids, celebrating victories with my kids, being taught how to be in intimate spaces with other people again by them, and with them.

And now to try to get an hour of sleep before the day begins, again.

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October 23, 2020 by admin

Perilous Childbirth. Yes, Even Now.

In a small ultra-Orthodox hospital in northern Israel, pregnant women seek the Rebbe’s blessing before undergoing medical procedures, like induction of labor, or surgical birth. Recently, Dr. Chavi Karkowsky, an obstetrician who sees patients with high-risk pregnancies, attended a woman whose water had broken at 23 weeks, far too soon. She feared the woman’s rebbe would instruct her to continue the pregnancy, even if it was life-threatening. She told the woman in Hebrew, “You are the most important person in the world.” The woman smiled and replied, “That’s exactly what the Rebbe said.”

Whether or not they have a rebbe they rely upon for religious counsel, all people giving birth should have their own lives viewed as sacrosanct. Naturally, they enter pregnancy filled with hope, anticipating joy. Media, art, and most pregnancy books stoke these expectations by depicting pregnancy with a happy ending. But birth stories are almost always far more complicated.

Karkowsky’s new book, High Risk: Stories of Pregnancy, Birth, and the Unexpected (Liveright, $26.95), is a specialist’s meditation on caring for women in this life stage. Karkowsky, who currently practices in New York City, pulls back the drape veiling American hospitals to tell dramatic and tragic stories of birth and pregnancy—one pregnant patient is so debilitated by pregnancy morning sickness that she is hospitalized for weeks, another’s life is saved, and a third woman’s baby is born but won’t live.

These stories often end in cliffhangers. We are left guessing what happens to some mothers-to-be in Karkowsky’s care—one has an abnormal ultrasound, another is dosed on unneeded medication (and given too much), and a third leaves hospital care to tend to her family against Karkowsky’s advice. The incompleteness of these stories undergirds one of Karkowsky’s central points, which is that birth stories are not simple, nor are they fixed. Where they begin and end is muddy, since doctors and patients rarely see each other completely.

The book benefits from a fascinating central tension that is both personal to Karkowksy and highly political. She loves her patients, supports their bodily autonomy, and champions their ability to direct their own care. However, she also acknowledges the failings of the modern medical system she works in, one in which birthing people are often traumatized, dehumanized, and suffer more than they should. Witnessing her wrestle with these opposing realities highlights the intractability of the problems that beset hospital birth today. And yet her willingness to both personalize these problems and confront them gives me hope.

Karkowsky’s chapter about implicit bias and racism in obstetrics—which has produced a maternal mortality rate more than three times higher for Black women than white women—provides powerful testimony. Too many Black mothers are dying during and after childbirth. Curiously, we rarely hear from their doctors. Karkowsky is quick to recognize her position of power in a medical setting, not only as the doctor, but as a white woman. She describes feeling grief for the unacceptable loss of these Black women’s lives, and also shame for being part of the system through her role delivering babies. Routinely, Black women’s postpartum suffering is ignored, or their pain isn’t believed, as was the case with tennis great Serena Williams, who nearly died of a blood clot after delivering her daughter in 2017. Williams had a history of blood clots and knew what was happening, but nurses assumed that she was confused. Karkowsky describes how racism seeps into Black women’s perinatal experiences, and shapes how they relate to their doctors. Her perspective is an important contribution to the work needed to provide unbiased care for Black women giving birth.

Reading this book, I often thought that had I faced major pregnancy complications, I would have been very lucky to have looking after me a highly trained professional as thoughtful and wholehearted as Karkowsky. Some of her patients feel this way. Others don’t, and instead reject what she has to offer— technology, expertise, advice—and she recounts those tales too. They support another one of her theses, that the stories women tell about their healthcare and their own bodies are subjective, evolving, and very much their own.

Allison Yarrow is a journalist and the author of 90s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality (Harper Perennial, 2018) and the forthcoming book, The Mother Load: How Patriarchy Stole and Controls Pregnancy, Birth, and Motherhood, and How We Can Take Them Back (Seal Press).

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September 9, 2020 by admin

My Hair as a Metaphor

I lived trying to fit in. It was much more than “curly hair wasn’t in style back then.” It was: “You can’t exist.” It was: “Do not exist.” It was expressed as: “What’s wrong with your hair?” with the questioner trying not to laugh when asking.  

My hair was a problem to be solved. From inside and outside the walls of my house, my hair was a symbol of something larger that had nothing and everything to do with me.

(more…)

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May 29, 2020 by admin

I Told Our Son He Can’t Come Home

He asked to borrow the car. 

Just two weeks earlier, he’d been sheltering with us in our Hudson River town, where he’d stayed for the first two months of lockdown. Despite our pleas, he returned to Manhattan. On a whim before leaving, he took the antibody test and learned that, like 30% of people infected with the coronavirus, he’d had it asymptomatically. Considering himself safe, he asked if he could stay overnight before taking the Honda. I reminded him that no antibody test is highly reliable and that nobody knows yet whether a true positive test means a person is immune. I had to say no. 

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May 20, 2020 by Yona Zeldis McDonough

Embracing “Quasi-Motherhood” With Humor and Empathy

Dani Alpert is one funny lady, and like many comics, she uses her life as a prime source for her material.  After falling for a divorced dad of two, she struggles to find a way to embrace the offspring she claims never to have wanted.  Fast forward to the break-up with said boyfriend, which comes with an unseen punch—by this time, she loves the kids and wants to keep them in her life. 

Alpert talks to Fiction Editor Yona Zeldis McDonough about her new memoir, The Girlfriend Mom, in which she gives us the skinny on how she does just that—and what she learns along the way. 

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January 16, 2020 by admin

Toni Morrison Gave Me Permission

On one of my visits back to campus in my late twenties, I spoke to my former advisor, Toni Morrison about my fears about combining writing with (then-still-theoretical) motherhood. I’d grown up watching my own mother break gender barriers in her field of immunopathology; I was familiar with the challenges working mothers faced and with the efforts required to overcome them. Just recently, one of my grad school teachers had been vocal and adamant about his opinion that female novelists who had children were dooming their writing lives. Thrown by this assertion coming from a mentor, I repeated the words to Morrison.

“Yes,” she mused, utterly unimpressed. “They always say that.”

And there was nothing more to say. In a heartbeat, the boredom with which she viewed the topic fused with my own refugee- born mother’s one-syllable response to sexist barriers: “Feh.”

Years later, visiting New York from Boston with my six-month-old in tow, I took the train out to Princeton yet again. Scheduling this visit had been difficult and time was short; I sat in Morrison’s office, my baby in a sling strapped to my chest. There were some writing-related topics on which I was eager for her opinion, and after a quick update on work and life I launched into them.

My baby was facing outward at Toni Morrison, who therefore could see what I couldn’t see: my child’s face. Midway through the conversation, Toni Morrison said, in that rich, wry, resonant voice of hers, “I think your baby is doing something.”

I tried to keep talking, knowing each minute of this brief meeting was precious. But some things in life are undeniable. I ran to the bathroom, did the quickest diaper change of my life, and got back into the office to continue the conversation, which we resumed without missing a beat.

At a Jewish literary conference the prior year, a prominent critic had approached me and asked what I was working on—a question I’d never been asked by someone of that stature. Yet before I could open my mouth to answer, a well-known Jewish writer— having just heard me tell a friend I was a few months pregnant—literally elbowed me away from the critic, inserting himself between us as we walked and answering the critic’s question for me: “She’s working on a baby.” He walked off with the critic, leaving me behind.

Yet here I was in the office of Toni Morrison, a writer whose work dwarfed every other piece of contemporary fiction I was reading. And diapers didn’t diminish this conversation.

RACHEL KADISH on the Lilith blog.

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July 9, 2019 by admin

From M.D. to Baker, Beth Ricanati’s Memoir of Challah

What’s the story behind Braided?

About five years ago, I realized that baking challah had taught me a lot of lessons that were universal; maybe they would be helpful to someone else.

What life lessons?

When I started baking challah, I was stressed and unhealthy, as both a doctor and a mom. By making challah, I was able to reclaim some sense of self. I realized that making challah was a ritual—and this got me thinking about the importance of having a ritual in one’s life.

It also got me thinking about community. I’d serve the challah on Friday nights, and if my kids had friends over for dinner, they’d have challah, too. Then I’d get these calls on Saturday from my kids’ friends’ mothers, and they’d say ‘I don’t know what it was you made last night, but I want to learn how to do it.’ So I’d make challah with some of my children’s friends’ mothers, and [now] I make challah with other women here in Los Angeles or as I travel around the country sharing Braided; we are building community together.

We’re not just building community, we’re sustaining it, too. In 2019, the world is pretty stressful. You can see that just by opening the newspaper. But on Friday I can make challah here in L.A., and I know that Meredith is making it in N.Y., and Miriam is making it in Tel Aviv, and Allegra is making it in London. We’re all doing this activity for the same reason, and the world doesn’t feel like such a scary place.

There’s a real value in having sustaining ritual. It’s a different way of practicing medicine.

Do you read other people’s food memoirs?

I love them—Anthony Bourdain, Peter Mayle, Ruth Reichl, Kathleen Flinn, Kate Christenson… I have several of Laurie Colwin’s books. But I didn’t see what I was doing as a food memoir at first. In fact, it wasn’t until after my manuscript was complete that I realized that what I had braided together—a memoir, a cookbook of sorts, and a self-help/how-to book—could fit into this category.

You grew up Reform, but in the book it’s clear you’re more observant now. Was that prompted by the challah?

I probably started inching towards it before then. My husband grew up keeping kosher, and when our kids were very little, we found Judaism such a wonderful framework for parenting. But what challah gave us was the ready-made Shabbat practice. When there’s fresh challah, it’s very easy.

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January 10, 2019 by admin

“And With All Your Might”

“And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” —Deuteronomy 6:5

It’s not the three miscarriages that have distanced me from God; the three miscarriages make me wish I weren’t already so distant. It’s hard to remember that the wheels of my traditionally observant Jewish life were set spinning 14 years ago by an intense sense of meaning and flow, that God’s presence in my life was a gift to be unwrapped in eager breaths. At the time, I was underfed and scrappy, shelving books at work while my former classmates returned to NYU as sophomores, but instead of anger at my circumstances I experienced delight. When the delight faded, when I felt too tired and broke and lonely, I leaned on the backup power of my own resolve. “This is the path you chose,” I reminded myself. “So walk it.”

The previous fall, as a freshman, was my first time (that I knew of ) in a synagogue. I went with a friend to Rosh Hashanah services in the city. The singing was in Hebrew, but even the English side of the prayer book felt foreign, with lots of language about kingship and judgment. My friend and I left early. No one said goodbye. My Jewish identity remained what it had been during my secular childhood in Houston: mine only in name. But over the summer, something began to shift. It started with a boy I had a crush on. One night, I stayed with a friend in Manhattan, and my whole body buzzed with a sense of the boy’s presence and levitra. He felt so close; I was certain I would see him. I left my friend’s apartment and started walking south on Fifth Avenue. I heard jazz floating from Washington Square Park, and walked towards the music. At the fountain in the middle of the park, there he was. Of course he was there. We sat side by side and I barely spoke, overwhelmed by what had happened.

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January 10, 2019 by admin

Motherhood and Godliness

In my own 15 years of formal Jewish education, I had learned many of the Jewish concepts discussed by Mara Benjamin. But until I read this book, I never would have thought of them in relation to motherhood. After reading The Obligated Self (Indiana University Press, $30), I’ll never look in the same way at biblical “nurse- maids,” God’s ongoing frustration with/ love of the Jewish people, and the power that my children have over me at times. The Obligated Self is a profound example of how feminist thought can enrich and expand traditional Jewish concepts for today

“To be a parent is, in some sense, is to be a child’s God,” writes Benjamin. An inspirational, comforting, terrifying thought. Not necessarily the fist thing that would pop into a moth- er’s head while changing diapers, cleaning food off the floor or driving carpool. It’s possible that there are Jewish mothers out there who, while performing the many repetitive, messy, sometimes boring, rarely rewarded with-a-smile-or-a- thank-you tasks of motherhood, have pondered the Jewish thinkers. It’s possible they have asked, “I wonder what Maimonides/Heschel/Levinas would think of these daily acts of care I do for my children.” But I’d imagine these women are an uncommon bunch.

Yet as a thinking/tired/working/caring Jewish mother myself, I was profoundly moved by Mara Benjamin’s readable Jewish “ethic of care.” She shows how many of the daily, multifaceted acts of maternal caregiving relate to concepts of love, obligation, and com- munity—the very concepts that are so o en discussed by male Jewish thinkers in their theological musings on the relationship between Jews and God and Jews to the larger world. Benjamin’s aim is to show that ignoring the “reality of child-rearing, and the profound existential and ethical questions that arise for those immersed in it,” has produced a de cit in Jewish thought and philosophy. In a review of ancient and modern Jewish philosophical and theological writings that compares them with feminist theorists and theologians, Benjamin comes upon the parent as a God metaphor. She sends texts that describe the relation- ship between God and the people of Israel as the ones most evocative of women’s and mothers’ experiences. (Benjamin acknowledges that bearing children and caring for them is an experience that still disproportionately affects the lives of women.) Each chapter names a theme connecting mothers’ experiences and Jewish philosophical thought. The first chapter, “Obligation,” examines a mother’s ties to her children through responsibility, duty, and affection.

Benjamin then explores how this relationship can help us reassess the ideas of “commandment” in Jewish thought. Modern Jewish thinkers, responding to Enlightenment ideas, and Jews who became eager to shed the visible obligations of Judaism in exchange for almost-equal participation in civil society, reframed the traditional idea of Jews being commanded by or obligated to God. Instead, they posited, in a universal,abstract way,the concept of individuals obligated to each other in everyday relationships. Parents, Benjamin reminds us, are obligated to their specific children, not only for those universal needs for clothng, food, comfort but also for an individual child’s unique needs and demands. Mothers also experience agency—“the exercise of action within constraints”—in their experience of raising children. The rabbis of the Talmud, she notes, also understood Israel’s agency in accepting the obligation of the commandments and their relationship with God. She cites the famous midrash of how God held up Mount Sinai above the Israelites and threatened them with death if they didn’t accept the Torah.

Yet the end of the midrash states that the Jews later “upheld what they already accepted.” That is, they armed that they were previously obligated. Mothers, too, experience this agency—of having chosen to be both obligated and constrained. Benjamin describes the duality of this experience as being at times like “slavery (‘avdut’) and at times like service (‘avodah’).” In her chapter “Love,” Benjamin examines “overwhelming, debilitating, and transformative love for one’s child” in relation to biblical, rabbinic, and liturgical portrayals of God’s complicated love for the people of Israel. “Power” is not a term o en used by modern parents to describe their relationship with their children, but it’s there. In this particularly engaging chapter, Benjamin shows how maternal power, like divine power in the Bible and rabbinic sources, always involves some control and superiority.

However (as she reminds any parent who has been held hostage by a child’s tantrum or adamant refusal to go where the parent needs to go) one’s children also wield power in the parent-child relationship. And biblical and rabbinic texts that show God as “‘dependent’ on the recognition of Israel” acknowledge this. Yet Benjamin notes that in biblical and midrashic texts, God is depicted as suffering when the people of Israel sin, engage in violence, or are exiled, a parallel to the pain parents feel when their children act badly. “This vulnerability is the price of responsibility and involvement,” writes Benjamin.

A chapter provocatively titled “The Third” delves into the many other people in a mother’s life who help her to raise her child—teachers, paid caregivers, family members, and their analogs in biblical and rabbinic texts. Despite protestations about the primacy of the nuclear family, families from biblical times onward have always had help with childrearing, and these relationships must be honored. With “The Neighbor,” Benjamin argues that parental love, rather than limiting one’s responsibility to the outside world, actually expands it to reflect the commandment to “love one’s neighbor as oneself.” 

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