July 27, 2020 by admin

Relative Privilege in a World of Suffering

YAEL SCHONBRUN is an assistant professor of clinical psychology at Brown University and a co-host of the Psychologists Off the Clock podcast.

Brandishing the Captain America shield we crafted out of duct tape and a Tupperware lid, my three-year-old proudly said, “Mommy, you will never be alone. I will always be protecting you.” I told him (very seriously) that I appreciated it.

Later, though, I half-joked to my husband that our son had just confirmed my deepest fear: I’ll never again have a moment alone.

In a larger world of suffering over health, economic crisis, and horrifying social injustices, I’m almost embarrassed to admit that pandemic working parenthood has been hard. Like many female co-parents with the more flexible job, I’ve taken on the bulk of parenting for our three boys. I yearn for a better choice than snippets of work time with three hyper bodies bouncing off the walls or getting work done after an exhausting day of parenting is done. I pine for rest and I fantasize about alone time.

At times I feel ashamed. I have no right to complain.

I am with my small superhero and his two big brothers, enshrined in my privilege of having a job, health, a stable residence, and White skin. But as I often tell patients who see me for therapy (virtually, now), pain doesn’t acknowledge hierarchy. If you stub your toe, it hurts. It hurts even if your neighbor has broken her leg. It hurts even if your neighbor has shattered his spine. To be sure, your neighbor isn’t likely to rush over to console your toe pain. But you don’t do yourself any favors by pretending your toe doesn’t hurt.

Pain—physical and emotional—is meant to be felt. Without pain, we can’t know when something has gone awry, we can’t determine what problems need to be addressed, and we are without a compass toward healing.

We need to open up to our pains, even as we contextualize them in the larger world. For parents during this time it means the weariness of never having a moment alone, the exhaustion of needing to work late into the night to make up for the day you spent parenting is real. The injustice of women taking on more childcare burden and suffering greater loss of work is real—as is the peril facing the long-neglected childcare industry which so many depend on, and the fear that gains in gender equality both at home and work will be undone if these trends continue.

All this is accompanied by the broader horror of the hundreds of thousands of lives lost to Covid-19. And the horror of fellow humans being brutalized—yet again—by those meant to keep them safe.

All of this pain needs our thoughtful attention. If we are willing to let it in, that pain will teach us what matters to each of us, and to our society. And that clarity in “what matters” can become a superpower guiding us towards a better future.

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January 10, 2019 by admin

Fiction: The Proper Care of Silver

Marianne wonders if people still say housekeeper. Maid sounds too Southern, and cleaner sounds industrial and it’s just the two of them here today, so without knowing the terminology—despite years together— they empty the sideboard of Marianne’s grandmother’s silver. Nana had used her oven to store shoes but owned a silver service for 22, including large wine holders cleverly designed to store ice in a hidden compartment. Nana had come to Washington Heights in 1939 with money rolled up and stashed in her vagina. Right in the hoo-ha, she’d told Marianne. Not once had Marianne seen the service used.

“What was she thinking, bringing it all here?” Marianne says aloud to Zelia. Despite knowing Zelia won’t understand, Marianne explains how sad it is, having such pieces all go untouched. Marianne pictures Nana, spidery hands clasped in her lap, waiting for partygoers who never show up. How tragic, she thinks, but then, just as quickly, she thinks how well preserved the set is now, right there in her sideboard. “See,” she points out to Zelia, “it’s like new!”

Zelia, perched on a folding ladder, passes a silver wine holder to Marianne who places it next to its pair on the empty dining room table. Small, decorative lions on the holders gaze out at them as though they, too, are baffled as to why this massive cleaning effort when both Lily and Daniel declared they aren’t coming for Passover this year; Lily because she is celebrating Easter with Mark’s father who has no one else with whom to eat lamb and mint, and Daniel because William’s parents asked them first, which only makes Marianne feel she—the mother—should have asked at Thanksgiving although if she had she’s sure to have been scolded for thinking too far ahead. “It’s not a competition,” Daniel had told her, his voice sounding interplanetary with hands-free. “That’s exactly what it is,” she’d said. “Well,” Daniel had said, “Maybe we’ll show up. Who knows.”

“Ohmygod.” Zelia, unsteady on the ladder, drops Nana’s teapot and it lands with a muffled thud on the carpet. “Ohmygod.”

Zelia knows only a few scattered words of English. Oh my god is all-purpose—torrential rain ohmygod; Marianne’s father has lymphoma ohmygod. If Marianne needs to convey anything she has to act it out—wipe the shades in exaggerated motions or mime mopping the bathroom floor all the way to the grimy corners. Anything serious and she emails Zelia’s fifth-grade daughter to translate.

Marianne had written the instructions for today because it was crucial that the silver be handled gently, that Zelia not scratch it or put it in the dishwasher as she’d done the year before. Marianne doesn’t criticize Zelia for living in this country eight years and knowing basically nothing, but when Zelia’s sister visited from New York and demonstrated her fluency (and sisterly love by splitting the housework that week) it did make Marianne think that if only Zelia would force herself to learn she’d be so much better off. She could negotiate more hours or apply for positions with people who had child care needs or have a job that didn’t require counting forks, though it was possible Zelia liked counting the utensils, proving they were all still there, not stashed in her lunch bag and brought home to sell or to melt down and then sell.

“Oh, it’s OK!” Marianne picks up the teapot, overly cheerful to hide her disappointment. The thin spout is dented and the lid dinged. The thing survived Nazis and 70 years of tarnish and hiding in Washington Heights but can’t survive four seconds with the Brazilian housekeeper.

“Never mind,” Marianne tells her and makes a big show of putting it with its imperfect lid next to the wine holders. If Daniel shows up he will certainly notice the ding. Martin will not.

Marianne will have to show her husband, displaying for Martin the small lid on her palm like a game show hostess with a tiny hummingbird prize, and narrate what happened. The ladder, the cleaning. Martin will shake his head and examine the spout as though a.) he were a silversmith rather than a radiologist who spends his days in the dark and b.) this mishap opens the door for him to have his bi-weekly whinge session about Zelia. “If I can’t find my socks I guess I should look in the produce drawer…”

“Okay,” Zelia says and hops down from the ladder. Marianne sticks her hand out to steady the cleaner, both of them working together to fold the stubborn ladder and begin on the silverware drawer, which is a chaos of cutlery, knives wedged into fork tines. Zelia is speedy at organizing these and Marianne takes a moment to marvel at her delicate fingers, the gentle ting of each item as she fits it in exactly the correct spot.

“That looks good,” Marianne tells her and Zelia beams, the one dead and slightly gray tooth of hers prominent in the late morning sun.

Marianne chose this room for its light, bought the house without Martin even seeing it. She was pregnant with Lily then, Daniel age four or nearly so she remembers, because he used the bathroom all on his own as she wrote a deposit check. Martin didn’t mind. He praised her, actually. We have the kind of marriage, she’d bragged to friends, where we don’t have to even talk about things. She’d meant she had jurisdiction, unlike one friend who couldn’t even buy a mug—a single coffee cup—without her husband’s approval of color, design. But perhaps in the end those small conversations were necessary, crucial in a marriage—who buys a house without even discussing it?

Zelia fits the final knife into its slot in the blue velvet holder, points to the empty space where knife number twelve should be. “I don’t know.” Her voice is lyrical, music in the vowels. Iiiidunnnoooo. She doesn’t know.

She could have walked off with spoons stuck into her bra and Victoria’s Secret sweatpants and Marianne probably wouldn’t have said anything. Even when Martin’s wallet went missing for two weeks and he was driving to the hospital without an ID and having to ask the attractive night nurse to buzz him in, Marianne didn’t accuse Zelia of any wrongdoing. And, sure enough, it turned up when Marianne went to get Martin’s car inspected. He’d locked it in the glove compartment before the trip to Marrakesh, taking only a single credit card and his passport. “There are other cleaners,” he’d said.

And there are. Lois has a housekeeper who bakes tortillas when her grandchildren are visiting. And there are certainly services that come in, speak English, and don’t leave the scrub brush in the bathroom sink or rearrange the living room furniture because they feel it’s better that way. There are better cleaners. But if Marianne lets Zelia go and this new, miraculously efficient and bi-lingual woman comes, and she leaves the house tidier and—this would be the key—orderly in a way that is rational, meaning their clothes are segregated by owner not color and the golf clubs are not with the similarly sized standing dustpan—well, then what in God’s name would Marianne talk to Martin about?

Because the sad truth of it is that Zelia’s foibles are some of their best conversations these days. Martin will listen— with his eyes and face and ears—as Marianne recounts today’s escapades and she will be rapt as he flings open drawers and closet doors to reveal the latest gross injustice with his dress shirts or the wrapping paper saved from Lily’s engagement shower to which she had only been invited by phone. Martin’s fingers might accidentally lose themselves over her knuckles and maybe he’d have taken Cialis and maybe. Well.

Zelia and Marianne have a generous understanding. Marianne never criticizes her terrible cleaning or suspect organizational skills and Zelia can’t—or doesn’t— judge her employer for a.) Marianne’s messy house, jam rings on the fridge’s glass shelves, hair in the soap or b.) having a cleaner when it’s just her and Martin now or c.) the fact that Marianne gives Zelia’s daughter presents on birthdays and Christmases even though she never asked if this was okay and, as Daniel pointed out, speaks more to Marianne’s needs than to the girl’s.

Under the silverware caddy are ripple-edged Haggadahs that haven’t been used in years but which Marianne refuses to recycle because they might be used again (they won’t) and they were her mother’s (they weren’t used then, either) and since Daniel and William were already exploring birth options, they might want them (they don’t—Daniel will make his own). “I just can’t be free of them,” Marianne says, fully aware that Zelia won’t get her Passover joke. She points to the Hebrew text. “Prayers.” Zelia smiles. Last year, Marianne had made a vat of matzoh ball soup, and presented Zelia with a bowl. Marianne thought Zelia would try it and understand something about Judaism or at least have a snack that wasn’t the Coke and Filet-o-fish she normally brought for lunch, but Zelia dumped the soup into the farmhouse sink, assuming Marianne wanted her to wash the bowl.

“I wash?” Zelia reaches for a small silver cup.

“Polish,” Marianne says, miming scrubbing and immediately wondering if she still has silver cleaner. “You have to do it gently, like this.” She leads her to the sink. Zelia watches as Marianne finds the polish, uses the pads of her fingers to apply the blue-gray goop and with the smallest trickle of tepid water, rinses while scrubbing with a paper towel. “It’s Elijah’s cup. You put it on the table and wait for him.”

Later, Marianne can hear Zelia on the floor above—putting laundry away in the wrong place, arranging pillows in a way that would make sleep or getting into bed impractical at best, possibly scraping the hardwood with the new vacuum.

Marianne, ripe from the success of polishing the chalice, has a pile of silver, even the dented teapot, by the sink, her hands slicked with tarnish. You won’t believe it, she will tell Martin, I had to do the silver myself. Imagine paying 20 dollars an hour to clean your own house!

Zelia gathers her lunch from the fridge and slings on a coat the color and texture of abandoned tires; it once belonged to Marianne. “I go.”

“Ok,” Marianne says, her fingers puckered in the water. Isn’t it early for Zelia to leave? Has she done all she can? She should say something.

“No. I go…” Zelia holds her arms, the Target lunch bag swinging and crackling as she appears to do yoga or swim.

Then Marianne understands, Zelia miming an ocean wave now, flying. “Vacation?”

“Noo. I sorry. Back to Brazil.” She said this before once and then came back because it had been a six-week leave. Marianne felt her insides fold up. Zelia wouldn’t even need the handed-down coat in Brazil.

Marianne stood looking for something to give Zelia for her trip—because it could be just that, a misunderstanding or language error, right? This Brazil trip could be just a holiday, nothing permanent. She’d just open the door with her key and come right back into Marianne’s life as though there had just been simple miscommunication.

Or maybe Marianne wouldn’t lock the door and she’d find Zelia right there having milky coffee at the kitchen table. Wasn’t that possible? Nana or the kids or Martin and the cleaner all sipping and waiting for her to find them, almost as though the door had been propped open the entire time.

Emily Franklin is the author of a novel, Liner Notes, and a story collection, The Girls’ Almanac, and young adult books. Her work has been published in The New York Times, NPR, and named notable by the Association of Jewish Libraries.

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January 10, 2019 by admin

Cliques and Class in Hebrew School

“Have you ever met a poor person?”

IT WAS MY FIRST YEAR TEACHING HEBREW SCHOOL, and I wasn’t especially good at it. Yet the school paid well per hour—maybe too well for the amount of work I put in—and I needed the money, because my salary as an adjunct instructor in the city university system didn’t cover my bills.

The Hebrew school was located in a wealthy synagogue in Manhattan, just a few blocks from the Jewish day schools I had attended on scholarship from 3rd through 12th grade. I was teaching the same subjects I had learned back then: Hebrew, Torah, Jewish history. Teaching Hebrew school brought back an adolescent discomfort: feeling like a charity case in an uptown Manhattan Jewish community. We were not so poor by national standards. Still, my sense of feeling poor was constant when I spent time among peers who, I imagined, did not know about need. My family lived in a 275-square-foot tenement apartment in SoHo where I shared a bedroom with my two siblings. I never had classmates over, because my mother was embarrassed.

Every Thursday afternoon, I reluctantly took the train from my apartment in Brooklyn to teach at the Hebrew school, sweating in my winter coat. Other people move to New York to expand their worlds. I was taking the same subway line I’d relied on in middle school and high school.

At the synagogue, I would watch the kids and their nannies climb the building’s sleek, glass-enclosed staircase up to my fourth grade classroom, which bore the name of a prominent donor. I resented the evident wealth and comfort of the administrative staff; I resented my students and their parents. One of my students, Harper,* had a last name matching a classroom down the hall. She reminded me of the girls I sought approval from in my elementary school: rich, pretty, and domineering. Harper and her two best friends—her disciples—sat together at the U-shaped table, dressed in identical pink shirts with sparkly print that spelled peppy garbage like “#Teamweekend.” For a few weeks, they referred to themselves as “Teamweekend” and the other girls begged to be members of the team. “You have to apply,” Harper said.

Everyone in Teamweekend had gluten allergies and received a special snack: plain Pop Chips. They emptied the Pop Chips on the table and smashed them with water bottles. Then they crunched on the small pieces all through class to make the snack “last longer.”

One student who did not beg to belong to Teamweekend was Ella, who reminded me of myself: a kid on scholarship. Her parents were social workers while mine were struggling artists. She was a weirdo in a pink newsboy cap who read textbooks about ancient Rome under the desk. I had been a weirdo, but a conformist one, studying the other girls so I could dress in poor approximations of their outfits— cheap knock-offs from a store called Kidztown.

On my first day of teaching, Teamweekend said that they had to pee, all at the same time. Uncertain in my new position of authority, I wanted the girls to like me more than I wanted the class to run smoothly.

“Only one at a time,” I said hesitantly.

“Are you new?” Harper asked. I could tell you what she looked like—full cheeks, freckles, long straightened hair—but what matters more is that, at 10 years old, she spoke with a kind of assurance that I imagined came from the combination of looks and financial comfort. “You seem new to me,” she said.

I let them pee at the same time. They returned to class 20 minutes later, giggling. The other students looked at me to see how I would handle this affront to my authority, except Ella, who continued to read about Marcus Aurelius, oblivious to the dynamics around her. After class, I went to Duane Reade and bought a bag of plain Pop Chips.

Hebrew school was just one of many sources of anxiety in my low-income life. My weeks were full of bureaucracy: applying and then reapplying for Medicaid; waiting on line at the billing office at Hunter College to ask why my paycheck was late. But Hebrew school played an outsized role in my emotional life. On Thursday nights, I would pour red wine and tell my boyfriend stories about the bitchy things Harper had said: “Harper called me out for wearing the same jeans two weeks in a row.” Or, “Harper said she liked the substitute teacher better than me because she had a S’well brand water bottle.” Or, “Harper told another girl that when a boy called her fat, it was ‘honestly really funny’.”

I would also talk about Ella: always chewing her hair at her desk, sitting wrong on her chair—sideways on her knees with her butt in the air—writing a fantasy story or drawing another map of the Roman Empire. During group work, the other girls refused to work with her. She’d tell me that she was fine; she wanted to work alone. But I couldn’t watch her, absorbed in another solo project, without my chest tightening. I wondered if she really didn’t care what the others thought of her. “To be honest” (to borrow my students’ favorite construction), I hated her for eliciting such uncomfortable tenderness.

When it was time for bed, my boyfriend would often play a podcast set on a sleep timer. One night, the podcast host’s cheerful voice in the darkness recounted a story about his 10-year-old daughter, who had used his wife’s $65 face cream to make “slime” in her bedroom. Slime, the host explained, was a mixture of different bathroom products that, in the right proportions, became a blob you played with. Tweens and teens across the nation were mixing it and selling it to each other. The slime market was “flooded.” I wondered what slime looked like? What made it so popular? As I drifted out of consciousness, twisted in the sheets, I imagined a liquid green slime, dripping from our bedroom walls.

Towards the end of January, Harper began bringing in slime. She snapped open the lid of a Tupperware container during my lesson, giving hushed orders to the rest of Teamweekend. She divvied up a sparkling gelatinous blob for her friends to play with. “Put it away,” I said, transfixed by the way the girls manipulated the slime, stretching it out and letting it ooze down to the desk. It stuck to their pencils and workbooks. “Just one second,” Harper said.

Harper told the other girls that she had made the slime at her ski house. In the summer, she explained, “I’ll have my own slime room in the Hamptons.” In the following weeks, this was a line I often recounted at parties, unclear if I was appalled or delighted by the image of her alone in a room by the sea, mixing slime. The slime was as trippy and loud and ugly as the Lisa Frank folders that had been status symbols when I was in elementary school. Harper had turned moisturizer, contact lens solution and glue into something exclusive, as only gatekeepers can do.

Growing up, there was never extra money for the small things I wanted, year to year: Tamagotchis, Beanie Babies and, later, Juicy Couture zip-ups. I once begged my mom to buy me Lisa Frank stationery, a folder with golden retriever puppies sticking their heads out of a blue and fuchsia sand castle on a psychedelic beach. Even then I knew that the folder did not match my true taste, which was muted. But it didn’t matter whether or not I liked Lisa Frank. Possessing that ridiculous folder made me feel like a girl who had her own pink and floral bedroom—and health insurance that covered visits to the dentist’s office. I treated the folder like a golden egg, wiping it down with damp tissues in the bathroom when I spilled on it. One day, a girl I admired for having her pulse on the latest trends noted the folder, which I had conspicuously placed on top of my books. “Finally you got something good,” she said. Finally.

As an adult, I hadn’t really moved past that period of aspirational consumerism. I began to read articles about slime on my phone on the subway. I saw a luxury brand of slime advertised on a women’s fashion site—playing with slime, they argued, was a form of self care and stress relief. You could order fancy slime on Etsy in different colors and flavors: unicorn birthday cake, watermelon sangria, lavender milk and orange blossom. Soon, I was following slime-focused Instagram accounts created by tween girls.

“We should have a slime party,” I suggested to my adult friends. “We could drink and just, like, make slime,” I offered. And they agreed, though without my enthusiasm. They didn’t understand that Harper had made it cool.

In February, in a unit on tzedakah, my students acted out hypothetical situations: Your friend does not have enough money to pay for lunch. You have extra money but do not want to embarrass her. What do you do? The student who played the girl with money spoke loudly and cheerfully. “I’ll give you money!” she beamed. Meanwhile, Harper played the poor girl. As part of her performance, she folded into herself, looked down and spoke meekly. “I’m sad and poor,” she whined. She wrapped a sweater like a shmatte around her head and coughed as though sick with tuberculosis. I groaned audibly.

“Harper, have you ever met a poor person?” I asked her. The room was silent. I wanted the students to know that you couldn’t always tell, just by looking at a person, whether or not they were “poor.” Or could you? I wanted to tell her, I am poor, to shock her. I wanted to write it on the white board in the wrong kind of thick, black marker—permanent. But Harper was just a kid; a projection. And I wasn’t going to do anything that would upset the Hebrew school administration. I was hesitant even to ask them questions about my paycheck lest I seem too desperate.

BY SPRING, HARPER WOULD COME IN EACH WEEK with containers labeled according to variety: “butter” slime, “fluffy” slime, “glow in the dark” and “glitter.” She distributed these to select girls in the class: always to Teamweekend, and occasionally to an additional girl of her choice. Then the slimeless girls would beg to be allowed to touch the slime. “Just a poke,” they pleaded. There was a specific way to touch it with your fingertips that the girls had studied from Instagram videos. Even Ella took interest, awakened from her usual dream-state by the allure of slime. She’d sit close to Harper and try to touch it without asking. I once heard Harper tell her, “Look, some people just have bad hands for slime.”

One week Ella found a small Ziploc bag of slime in her elementary school bathroom. She brought it to my class and presented it to Teamweekend: “I got some slime!” she said with pride. It was discolored and hardened. It didn’t ooze and stretch like fresh slime is supposed to. “To be honest,” Harper said, “that is so gross.”

So I began the exhausting process of confiscating the slime. No one would agree to put it back into the Tupperware, so I’d go get the assistant principal, who was firmer with the girls. “If I see the slime out again,” she’d say, “I will be calling your parents.” Sniffling and frowning, the girls would put the slime back into the containers. I always hoped they would forget the Tupperware so that I would get to take it home. But no one ever did.

When the first green buds bloomed on barren trees, I had my friends over to make slime. I poured wine. We drank and put on music and smoked my dry weed. While everyone was busy talking in the living room, I eagerly went to the kitchen to mix the glue and other ingredients, feeling my hands sweating as I sunk them deep into the goop.

It was not joyous as I’d expected it would be. In fact, I found that I could not get the slime off my fingers. The glue stuck to the kitchen counter and dripped on to the mat on the floor. My friends were similarly unenthused. They poked at the slime absent-mindedly, half-heartedly indulging the activity I had endorsed. “This looks weird,” one friend asked. “Are you sure you have the proportions right?” Soon, the bowl of slime was set aside as we focused on wine and gossip.

The next morning, I was down on my hands and knees, peeling slime off the kitchen tiles, scratching it off the woven mat. A dull hangover made my recollection of the night seem more embarrassing than it probably had been. Had the slime made me look kind of desperate? Maybe the problem was my hands, I thought. What I had always suspected was true: I had bad hands for slime.

*Names and details have been changed.

Shayna Goodman is a writer in New York City.

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