Velveteen Rabbi

Motherhood, the bitter & the sweet, in Zeek

Just in time for Mother's Day (in the US, anyway), I have a new essay out in Zeek. The essay tells the story of what becoming a mother was like for me. Here's where it begins:

My memories of the earliest months of parenthood are blurred by that perfect storm of surging hormones and sleep deprivation. In retrospect, I can’t imagine how we survived sleeping in 45-minute increments, much less learning how to care for a newborn while doing so. Even more disorienting: I wasn’t sure who I was, now that I’d had to set aside my identities as student, writer, scholar. In that one long day of labor, it seemed, I lost access to almost everything that had previously defined my existence. The exceptions were those stalwart souls who made the effort to stay actively in our lives despite the colicky infant — and, however faintly, poetry.

As the essay continues, I talk about postpartum depression and how dubious I was that anything would ever get better -- and about the miraculous fact that, once I got the help I needed, things did change. They didn't necessarily get easy, but they did change, and I am forever grateful.

Over the course of the essay, prose is interspersed with excerpts from several poems from Waiting to Unfold. I think the essay contextualizes the poems in a certain way. Reading the collection takes you on a journey through my experiences of that first year. Reading this essay offers you that in microcosm, along with some of my thoughts about that year and about motherhood now that I've been doing this for three and a half years.

Here's another little taste of what the essay says:

There are times when parenting is an unalloyed joy, and at those times it’s easy to feel connected: with my own mother and grandmother, with all the mothers I know, with all the mothers who have gone before me and who will come after me. I feel cradled in an endless chain of blessing.

And there are also times when parenting is hard. Miserable. Exhausting. Overwhelming. For those of us who have to wrangle postpartum depression, those times may wildly outweigh the sweet ones, for a while. I wish I could find every mother who feels the way I felt in those early months, and say to her: it’s going to be okay. You are not alone. It won’t always be like this.

Beyond that: feeling this way doesn’t disqualify you from motherhood. There shouldn’t be shame in not savoring every instant of exalted motherhood. And feeling that anhedonia, that inability to savor — whether it’s fleeting or recurring — does not exclude one from the community of mothers, the chain of connection as far as the human imagination can see.

Read the whole thing here: The Bitter & the Sweet: Reflections on Motherhood. My gratitude is due to Erica Brody, the (new) editor at Zeek, for soliciting this essay and giving it a home.

 

 

Lessons in gratitude from a three year old

The last pink rays of afternoon light are coloring the very lip of the distant mountains. Everything else is already in shadow. Wind rustles the dragonfly chime, a periodic descant over the quiet song of spring peepers, a distant car, a barking dog. Our son is in bed; I'm on the deck as twilight begins to take over from afternoon.

Watching our son experience his fourth spring has been delicious. As excited as I've been to see the leaves unfurl (and I have; I relish this spectacular chartreuse unfolding every year -- spring is one of my very favorite seasons in New England), he's been more so. "Look, mommy," he keeps saying. "The trees are waking up! The trees are waking up!"

Each morning we pull up to his school's parking lot and he asks, "can we go see the purple flowers?" He means the stand of tulips along the walk by the bank, next door. "They growed up! They're so beautiful!" Beneath a flowering tree, he solemnly tells me, "this is the most beautiful tree I've ever seen."

I don't think I can take any credit for his finely-honed sense of wonder; I think it's innate to who he is. Or at least I hope it is. Family lore has it that my first word was "wow," and there are reasons why modah ani is my perennial favorite prayer. There's so much in the world to appreciate, so much to be grateful for.

All I can hope for is to help him cultivate and retain his gratitude and his willingness to say thanks. To the teacher who pours him a glass of water ("it's the best water I ever tasted!"), to his father ("thank you for building me a big-boy bed, daddy"), to the Holy Blessed One ("thank you God for this beautiful car!")

Thank You, God, for this beautiful child. Thank You, God, for this beautiful evening. Thank You, God, for everything.

 

(Another) Daily April poem: words chosen by NaPoWriMo

RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW


Powered by an everlasting generator
until bedtime when you shove your fists
into your eyes. Curl beside the giant tiger.
Playgrounds are miraculous. So are trains.
Changing from blanket sleeper into clothes
is a tragedy, sunscreen is an insult.
You're mercurial as April weather, sunny
with occasional snow squalls. I don't want
to squander your long arms clenching my neck,
your solemn rendition of Twinkle Twinkle,
your long willowy body sidling into our bed
to mark a new day with a blue bear kiss.

 

 

---

I'm posting two poems today because on Tuesday I won't be posting a daily poem here -- I'll be sharing something exciting and don't want anything to draw attention away from that day's post.

Today's NaPoWriMo prompt includes a list of words and invites the writing of a poem which uses at least five of those words. I wound up using six of them: generator, curl, miraculous, mercurial, squander, willowy. I love prompts like this one because they often impel me to work with words I wouldn't otherwise have chosen. Unsurprisingly, I worked their words into a poem about parenting, which is so frequently the subject matter on my mind.

A bar mitzvah gift for the rabbi

Somehow I always forget that I'm going to be moved.

We're a small synagogue, so every time a kid becomes b'nei mitzvah, it feels like a big deal. I imagine that in some big-city shuls, where there might be one or more bar or bat mitzvah celebrations each week, maybe it becomes a little bit ho-hum. But not here. Here we only have one or two a year, and each one stands  out.

I always love looking out into the sanctuary and seeing the expectant faces of those who have gathered to celebrate Shabbat and to celebrate a young person's coming-of-age. I love leading us through Shabbat morning prayer, offering words of explanation to string the prayers together like pearls in a necklace.

I love inviting people up to see the Torah scroll in all of its unique handwritten beauty. I love singing English words to Torah trope and surprising people with hidden meanings. I love the laughter which erupts as we sing Siman Tov u-Mazal Tov and people throw candy at the b'nei mitzvah kid who has jubilantly finished the d'var Torah.

But I'm typically so focused on the service, on keeping things running smoothly, on trying to facilitate genuine prayer both for myself and for all who've assembled, that I forget that the morning always turns out to hold a gift for me, too. This time what made my heart catch in my throat was hearing one of the mothers of the bar mitzvah boy offer him a blessing she has spoken to him countless times over the course of his life: the priestly blessing, "May God bless you and keep you..."

As soon as she began, I felt tears banging at the back of my eyes. I say those words to our son every week too, punctuating each English and Hebrew phrase with a kiss to his forehead. And it hadn't occurred to me until today that someday I'll say those same words to him in front of our community, as he stands tall in a brand-new tallit -- maybe awkward and gangly, maybe bashful and beaming -- and steps over the threshold into Jewish adulthood. Right now our guy is only three, but I remember when this bar mitzvah boy was only three, too. The days are long but the years are short.

As the mother of the bar mitzvah blessed her son, I pressed my hand to my lips and blinked a lot, really fast, to clear my eyes. By the time I returned to the bimah, my emotions were under control and I was able to speak and sing clearly. But that moment of realization, that glimpse of the future, is still reverberating in me. An unexpected gift.

Daily April poem: a greeting

THREE AND A HALF

I sense you waiting in the wings, but
my nearsighted eyes can't quite make you out.
What are you holding: a new sun hat?
A pair of floaties, to help you overcome
the swimming pool's vast aqua deeps?

I can't wait to press my lips
against your sunwarmed skin.
Even if you still hunch your shoulders
to telegraph abject woe
when I put the Milanos too high to reach.

If you're anything like the little boy
who plays hide-and-seek with his ballcap
and asks me to pretend to sit on him
so I can leap up in mock surprise,
we'll get along just fine.

But say: would you consider
letting me sing to you again?
I wasn't ready for that window to slam shut.
If I have to, I'll murmur while you're sleeping,
serenade you as you dream of four.

 

---

 

The folks at NaPoWriMo invited us to write poems of greeting. I found myself greeting the next parenting milestone: our son turning three-and-a-half. As of this writing, that milestone is (unbelievably) only about six weeks away.

Shabbat in the modern world

The challah is hidden beneath the animal-print cloth, a challah cover made from a potential nursery fabric reject. The wine, juice, and candles are obvious. What's perhaps less obvious is why there's a laptop open on the table: so we can Skype with my parents in Texas while we say the blessings over candles, wine, challah, and the kiddo.

I close the priestly blessing with the line asking God to bring our son peace, and he still tears off a corner of challah and says solemnly "and the last thing we bless is, I ask God to give you a piece," and hands me some more bread. I know he won't do it forever (he's already outgrown some of his early malapropisms) but I so love that he does it now.

And I love that the miracle of Skype allows me to share that with my parents week after week.

Shabbat shalom to all!

Daily April poem: on the couch

POST-OP

You're pale against the red velour
and where your moose pyjamas gape
your belly is jaundiced
the curry-powder yellow of betadine.

They promised you a popsicle,
pressed a berry-scented mask
to your struggling face
and then you woke

to uncooperative legs and tender tummy,
a tube biting your hand like a snake
and monitor cables streaming
from your skinny ribcage.

Now you lie limp as the blanket
draped over your knees.
When you try to move, confusion
blooms: why does it hurt?

And clustered like ghosts
in the back of my heart:
all of the children who won't
be fully recovered tomorrow

all the parents who've learned
to mask oxycodone with honey,
who shave their own heads bare
in powerless solidarity...

How does God bear it?
Maybe the same way we do.
The heart shatters, but keeps beating
just love, just love, just love.

---

The second 30x30 poem prompt was "on the couch." I immediately thought of our son on the couch when he was recuperating from (perfectly ordinary, unremarkable) hernia surgery. Then I thought of the recent tough news at Superman Sam (The post you didn't want to read), and of all of the kids who are recuperating -- or not recuperating -- from infinitely more terrifying medical adventures than ours. The reality that children suffer is almost more than the heart can bear. Of course, we ache, and then we keep on loving; and in that, I think we mirror God, the cosmic Parent Who does the same.

If you want to send a note to Sam, you can write to him at Sam Sommer, E584 / Children's Hospital of Wisconsin / P.O. Box 1997 / Milwaukee, Wisconsin 53201-1997. Receiving notes, cards, etc (many featuring superheroes in some way) cheered him last time they were in the hospital for an extended stay.

On the 30 poems / 30 days front: some of us who are writing poems in response to these prompts are submitting them to the 30x30 website. If you're interested in other people's responses to these prompts, you can check out each day's submissions by clicking on each prompt link, here. And if you're interested in other folks who are attempting this same daily poem feat during National Poetry Month, don't miss NaPoWriMo, now in its tenth year!

On children, and suffering, and this day of the Omer

Whatever gets in the way of the work, is the work. So taught the poet Jason Shinder, may his memory be a blessing, and that sentence has become one of my mantras. It works for me on both a poetic level (whatever is obscuring the poem I think I need to write, that very thing is probably what I really ought to be writing about) and a spiritual one (whatever life "stuff" is getting in the way of my spiritual practice needs to itself become the spiritual practice.) The work -- of creativity, of spiritual life, of living -- is made of whatever I experience in the moment, not whatever I imagine I ought to be experiencing, or whatever I had planned to experience.

Lately what's getting in the way of (at least some of) the work is latent anxiety about the certainty that our son will experience pain. This has arisen for me because we've had a few medical adventures recently, and as a result I've been newly-confronted with reminders that just as everyone who lives in a body sometimes experiences pain, so will our little boy. Intellectually I can tell you that nothing he's experiencing is a big deal. (Really, really not a big deal.) But emotionally, the prospect of our son suffering stops me in my tracks. I would do anything to forestall or prevent that, if I could. As would any (healthy) parent; the sentiment is so obvious that it's banal. Of course I wish I could protect him from pain. And I can't.

I know that his minor bumps and bruises and routine procedures are vanishingly insignificant, and that not all children are so fortunate. Take those two little boys who are sick, about whom I wrote back in the fall -- a six-year-old with leukemia; a four-year-old with a brain tumor -- just to name two examples from within my online circle of friends. (Sam appears, thankfully, to be doing great. ETA: As of the next day, Sam's leukemia has relapsed. Gus is finishing chemo; please read his mom's latest update, which talks about their journey and the other kids they've met along the way.) There are so many sick kids in the world. I ministered to a few of them when I was a student chaplain. I know that I would have a much harder time with that part of hospital chaplaincy now that I'm someone's mom. I know in my head that children suffer, but I can't bear to know it in my heart. Or: I know it in brief flickers, and then I put at least a partial lid on that knowing, because I can't inhabit that knowledge and also function in the world. My heart feels too tender.

Several of my friends have been reading and discussing Sonali Deraniyagala's book Wave (see, e.g., Lorianne DiSabato's post after Wave at Hoarded Ordinaries, or Teju Cole's review A Better Quality of Agony in the New Yorker.) Deraniyagala lost her entire family in a tsunami: husband, children, parents, everyone she loved. Wave is her memoir and her remembrance of them and of what she lost. I believe that the book is powerful and well-written and important, bit I don't know if I can bear to read it. There, too, I'm operating out of heart rather than head. I'm inhabiting the realm of yetzirah, emotions, rather than briyah, intellect. Intellectually I believe that Deraniyagala's book is tremendous. Emotionally, I don't think I can face it. At least not right now.

"Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body." I've seen that quote floating around in various forms for years. (It's attributed to Elizabeth Stone, author of A Boy I Once Knew.) Granted, it's a cliché to say that I didn't wholly understand it until I had a child, but I suppose there's a reason why some clichés endure. Yes: some part of my heart is walking around in the world, learning and trying and striving and falling and laughing and wailing and doing all of the things that children do. A part of my heart is out there, independent, living on his own. And I can't spare him suffering, even though I wish I could. It's a kind of emotional and spiritual exposure, as though some part of my own heart and spirit which had been safely tucked-away were now open to the world, to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, to the physical suffering which every body comes to know.

In the Counting of the Omer, today is the day of tiferet she'b'chesed, harmony and balance within lovingkindness. The quality of chesed, of overflowing love, is one that (the kabbalists teach) we and God share. "Parent" is one of our foremost metaphors for God. God is the Parent Who births all of creation, who feels our joys and our sorrows, who suffers when we suffer. And God also manifests through the quality of tiferet, harmony and balance. Today is the day when, as the kaleidoscope of the Omer turns, the two qualities reflect and refract one another. The day of balance within the week of lovingkindness. Lovingkindness filtered and framed through the kind of harmoniousness which arises when everything is in balance.

Maybe my work today is to (re)learn how to imbue chesed with today's quality of tiferet, to temper my overflowing openheartedness with the harmony which arises when good love has good boundaries and balance is reached. Suffering is real, and children experience suffering, and I wouldn't want to be the kind of person who doesn't feel tenderhearted dismay at remembering that reality anew. But today is a day for finding balance within that space of tender heart. Maybe I can find it through celebrating the caregivers, parents and grandparents and nurses and doctors and friends, whose loving hands manifest the presence of God in caring for all of the children in need.

Parenthood and Pesach

Pesach is my favorite holiday. This has been true for as long as I can remember. I have always looked forward eagerly to seder, the way one looks forward to a birthday party or a vacation. When I was a kid, I loved seeing my aunts and uncles and cousins each year at this season. I loved singing the Mah Nishtanah (a.k.a. The Four Questions), I loved hunting for the afikoman with my cousins, I loved the familiar litany of songs and prayers, I loved getting to stay up late. I loved seder. (I loved getting an afikoman gift once the hidden matzah had been found.) I even loved the fact that our second-night seder was exactly the same as the first night (except for the addition of the counting of the Omer) -- children love repetition, so the fact that it was an exact reprise made it even better.

Cousins at seder, circa 1983. I'm one of the little ones.

Now my son is three and I'm bumping up hard against the question of how I can help him love Pesach the way that I do. I know I can't give him the seder experiences of my childhood. No matter how hard I try, I can't give him my memories! I had over a dozen cousins on my dad's side of the family, and Pesach was a family reunion each year. To this day, I associate these prayers and these songs and these melodies with those cousins, and that gives them an extra patina of sweetness. But that's not my son's context. He won't grow up with memories of flying to Dallas, staying at the hotel with the glassed-in elevator, going to Aunt Sylvia and Uncle Bill's for seder year after year. So what will his seder memories be, as he grows up? I've wondered this each year since he was born, but this is the first year that he's old enough to be becoming conscious of holidays -- Halloween, his birthday, etc -- so this year the question takes on added urgency.

Seder with friends, a few years before we became parents.

We never did a children-oriented seder when I was a kid. Or at least, that's not what I remember. In my memory our seder was the same year after year, the texts and practices and songs geared toward the grown-ups, with the notable exception of the Mah Nishtanah which was sung by each child in turn. Once I was old enough to read the words, I sang the Four Questions, too, and looked forward to showing off a little. (Yeah, I was that kid.) But after that I mostly remember running around the house looking for the afikoman, making sure to be away from the table during the gefilte fish course and back in time for matzah ball soup.

In talking with friends and colleagues who have young children, I'm hearing from a lot of people who do seders geared toward the youngest people present. I wonder what that would be like. Should we begin the evening building pyramids with the giant cardboard bricks we keep under the stairs, and have someone play Pharaoh who Will Not Let Us Go, and pelt the Pharaoh with stuffed frogs until he agrees to let us walk through a sea of blankets to freedom? Would that teach our son the heart of the story we retell each year, and in the retelling constitute ourselves again as a community? Would we then save the poems and prayers, the psalms and responsive readings, for after he's left the table to play in the living room with toys?

Many of the customs of the seder are designed to provoke the children at the table to ask why we're behaving so differently on this night than we do on all other nights. There's the custom of placing pillows on the chairs so that everyone can symbolically "recline," as free men did at banquets in the Ancient Near East. The custom of putting a series of strange symbolic foods on a ceremonial plate in the middle of the table -- from the roasted bone and the haroset to, these days, the olive and the orange -- and pouring an extra glass of wine for an invisible prophet who we never see. But I don't know whether these things will seem strange enough to provoke his curiosity.

At my sister's house last year for first-night seder.

I don't know yet exactly what shape our first-night seder will take, this year. (The second night, we'll be going to my shul for a community seder, which our son will attend until he runs out of patience or wakefulness, at which time his dad will bring him home.) But I'm keenly aware, as a rabbi and as a parent, that I want to find a way to open up this holiday's traditions for my son in all of their beauty. And, of course, I know that he may not even be willing to taste the matzah balls or the haroset whose flavors and textures are so evocative for me! And since right now he resists most lullabies and new songs, he may not want, this year, to learn the songs which speak to my heart.

I guess this is one more place where we'll do the best we can and hope that the love comes through. (But if you've navigated this question, or if you're navigating it now, I'd love to hear about your solutions and what turned out to work for you.)

Bedtime prayers and the alphabet

My mother taught me to say my prayers before I went to sleep. She would sit by my bedside, and every night, I would recite "God bless Mom and Dad, Lali and Eppie" -- my grandparents, of blessed memory, who were then living -- and then go on to mention all of my siblings (and, in time, their spouses), and Eloisa (one of my childhood caregivers), and "my aunts, and uncles, and cousins, and friends, and everybody else, amen." And then I would say, or sing, the one-line shema.

I didn't know then that what I was doing had a formal name and was part of daily Jewish practice. Saying my prayers before bed and ending with the shema was a shortened version of kriat shema al ha-mitah, the traditional liturgy of the bedtime (or "in bed") recitation of the shema. That's something I've come to know in adulthood, as my study of Judaism has deepened. All I knew, when I was a kid, was that this was what I did every night, with my mother sitting by my bedside.

(I've posted about my favorite prayer from the bedtime shema liturgy before. If you want a beautiful downloadable rendering of that whole set of prayers, with transliteration and meaningful English, you can find one at the end of Rabbi Daniel Siegel's post The Cycles of T'shuvah.)

Saying my prayers before going to sleep was such an ingrained childhood tradition that I've never stopped doing it. Even on my tiredest nights, when I climb into bed, I silently thank God for people in my life, for the blessings of home and bed and enough to eat, and I say the shema. The tradition is more or less unchanged since my mother gave it to me -- though some of the people I used to bless have died, and others (most notably our son) have joined my list.

So it's probably not surprising that as Drew has grown, I've shared this practice with him, as my mother shared it with me. Before he goes to sleep -- as we're sitting in the gliding rocker where we used to nurse, after we've read a book together and turned on the white-noise machine and turned off the lights -- we ask God to bless his parents, and grandparents, and aunts and uncles and cousins and friends, and everybody else, amen. And then when he's in bed and I'm sitting by his bedside, smoothing the Thomas the Tank Engine fleece blanket over him and nestling all of his stuffed animals by his side, we say the shema. And then I tell him I love him, kiss him goodnight, wish him sweet dreams, and quietly tiptoe out of the room.

Well: that's how it goes some nights. Exactly like that, sweet and serene. But other nights, nothing goes as planned. He giggles his way through putting on pyjamas (often running around the room half-dressed, or pretending he thinks the bottom part of the PJs goes on his head), resists brushing teeth with remarkable stubornness, and when I invite the saying of prayers or singing of the shema, he shouts "no!" On those nights, what he usually wants to do is sing the alphabet song, instead. He sings it to me, then I sing it to him in lieu of a lullaby. (I miss the lullabies I used to sing to him when he was a baby, but I try to respect his desires.)

Anyway, last night was one of the nights when he happily joined me in listing the people we wanted to bless, but didn't want to sing the shema. Instead he sang the alphabet song. And asked me to sing the alphabet song. And then sang the alphabet song to me again. And as I sat on his bed listening to his voice, I remembered the Hasidic story about the little boy who came to synagogue but didn't know any of the prayers. So as the congregation was immersed in prayer, he recited the alef-bet -- the only Hebrew he knew -- in hopes that God would assemble the letters into prayers on high. And it was his sweet, simple recitation which lifted up the prayers of the whole congregation.

(There's a one-paragraph version of that story in a post from Rabbi Phyllis Sommers: Alef Bet. Another version appears in The Hungry Clothes and Other Jewish Folktales, and the story's available online via google books search: the boy who prayed with the alef bet.)

I love the idea that even when he doesn't want to join me in a formal prayer before bed, God can translate his alphabet singing into the most meaningful prayers of his heart.

Best-laid plans

Friday begins with a hitch in our plans: my car won't start. So Drew and I won't be going in to town for school or work. We're staying home and waiting for the tow truck instead.

Midmorning it occurs to me that we have flour and yeast and water. Instead of going to the A-Frame as we usually do, we can bake our own challah!

Drew's willing to be lured away from the cartoons and the marble run game for a while. He pulls his footstool into the kitchen. He stirs the bowl a bit, announcing excitedly that he is helping.

A few hours later, when the dough has risen, I invite Drew back in. He seems to like patting the flour (which he calls, adorably enough, "flowers") and trying to roll snakes of dough beneath his hands.

Braiding seems like too much of a challenge for him, so I braid one big challah and one tiny one, and with the other pieces we make a twist and a spiral roll, which we set to rise.

 

While the smaller challot are baking, we read It's Challah Time! -- a longtime favorite -- and he takes obvious pleasure in being able to say, "I did that!" every time we come to a step in which he participated.

Once the first batch is out of the oven, I say hamotzi and we share a little challah roll. It's delicious: light and fluffy, tearing apart like the dinner rolls they used to serve at the Barn Door when I was a kid.

But as yummy as the bread is, Drew's obvious delight is even more so. (To be fair, he's equally delighted by the appearance of the mechanic and his big tow truck later in the day. Large vehicles are super-exciting to this three-year-old boy.)

As sundown approaches, I put one of our small braided challot beneath a napkin and tuck candles into our candlesticks, extra-excited about making the blessings with Drew over Shabbat challah we made with our own hands.

 

 

Of course, because nothing ever goes as one anticipates, it turns out at dinnertime that he doesn't like our challah. It seems to have become denser, now that it's cooled; it's not as soft and airy as the one the baker makes. He refuses to eat it. And then, for good measure, refuses to eat anything else, and blithely tells me he's done with dinner.

Oh, well. I'm still happy we made challah together. Even if he didn't eat a single Shabbat bite.

Morning blessings with Drew

Drew enjoys the snow. Photo taken earlier this month.

As we make our way out to the car, I can't help marveling at the spectacular crisp cold morning. Half an inch of soft snow limns the trees, the sky is bluest blue, the sun is beginning to tip the mountainsides with gold.

"What a beautiful morning," I say aloud as I help Drew into the car.

"It's a beautiful sunny day," he agrees. This is one of his stock phrases; I think he got it from the narrator on Pocoyo.

"Thank you, God, for this beautiful morning!" I say, because that's how I roll.

"Thank you God for the snow," Drew adds.

I'm charmed, so I reply with another blessing. "Thank you God for my coffee." M'chayyei ha-meitim, I think: blessed are You who enlivens the dead.

Drew isn't finished either. "Thank you God for the trees!"

"Right on," I agree, thinking of Tu BiShvat which will be in a few days. "The trees are pretty awesome."

We drive a bit. Drew eats his waffle. I sip my coffee.

"Thank you God for the earth which is sleeping," I say, as we drive past the snow-covered stubble of a cornfield.

"Thank you God for Daddy," Drew says, getting into it now. "Thank you God for my coat! and my shoes!"

"For the clothes we get to wear, yeah, absolutely," I agree. He doesn't know that thanking God Who clothes the naked is part of our liturgy of standard morning blessings, but I do, and it makes me grin.

There's a pause. I think it's my turn. "Thank you God for me and Drew being together," I offer.

Drew's face crinkles into a smile. "Mommy," he chides, "that's silly."

"Okay," I agree, but I'm thinking: maybe to you, kiddo, but not to me.

In which Drew blesses me with peace (after a fashion)

Drew enjoys a Shabbat PB&J.

First we play peekaboo with the candles. I cover my eyes, Drew covers his, and we peek at each other and grin. I sing the blessing over the Shabbat candles, sometimes rushing a little bit when Drew imperiously tells me to stop singing now.

Then we bless the fruit of the vine. Drew raises his sippy cup of watered grape juice, I raise my wine glass, we clink them together and say "cheers," and I sing the one-line blessing over wine. After it's over, Drew likes to sing out with "a-a-men."

Then we bless the challah we picked up at the A Frame bakery earlier in the afternoon. I uncover it and raise it up and sing the hamotzi, and Drew sings a-a-men. (If I forget, and sing it myself, he chides me: "No, mommy! I want to do it!")

And last of all, I bless him. I go over to his side of the table and I say the words of the priestly blessing in English and Hebrew:

 יְבָרֶכְךָ ה' וְיִשְׁמְרֶךָ , May God bless you and keep you.  יָאֵר ה' פָּנָיו אֵלֶיךָ, וִיחֻנֶּךָּ , May God's face shine upon you and be gracious to you.  יִשָּׂא ה' פָּנָיו אֵלֶיךָ, וְיָשֵׂם לְךָ שָׁלוֹם, May God lift up God's face to you and bring you peace.

And then I kiss him on the head and tell him I'm proud of him.

Tonight, a few moments after we've concluded our blessings, Drew turns to me and solemnly says, "And last, I blesses you." This is new and adorable, and I beam. "I blesses you and bring you piece of challah. Do you want a piece of challah, mommy?"

Of course. He has no idea what "bring you peace" means -- as far as he can tell, I'm blessing him that he might receive a piece of yummy bread. All I can do is laugh and tell him that yes, I absolutely do, and also, he's the best. Which he is.

The last toddler house poem

CHANGE IN THE TODDLER HOUSE

You run and climb, sit backwards
on your little chair, ascend stairs
one footfall on each step. You sleep
in the big-boy bed your daddy made
and we're about to remove the rail.
You speak in compound sentences:
remember when we went on a big airplane
to Nonni and Papa's house, to Texas;
when I get bigger I won't try quesadillas!
You have fervent opinions
about which book to read next
which blanket sleeper to wear
which song I should sing and when.
You're a magic beanstalk, tall
as a four-year-old, and when you kick
the wall beside your bed
it sounds like an officer pounding
at the door. You're not a toddler
anymore: you're a child, a boy,
a youth. Most nights now you settle
at the end of your bed for our routine
because on my lap you sprawl
from my shoulders to my knees.
You're uncontainable. Daily now I pray
for the good sense to fence you in
only as much as you need, to enjoy
your bedtime-forestalling antics
(as though you really thought
your head goes at the foot end!)
to let you into my lap anytime you ask
because you do give super hugs
and someday you'll roll your eyes
instead of clambering all over me
but not yet, thank God, not now.

---

I think this is the last of the so-called Toddler House poems. I was looking back over those collected poems this morning and realized that they chronicle a moment in Drew's life which is already over; he's not a toddler anymore, and hasn't been for some time. So I drafted this poem to serve as the capstone to that small collection. I'm not sure what the collection's fate will be -- a wee chapbook, a sequel to the not-yet-published (but due this year!) Waiting to Unfold? -- but I'm glad to have the poems as a scattered chronicle of the toddler year(s).

New toddler house poem, about waking early

DAWN IN THE TODDLER HOUSE

The wail -- wet pyjamas --
drags me bleary

past the flickering nightlight
at the red-eye crack of dawn

I wrap our cosiest blankets
at the wrong end of the bed

unwilling to flip the switch
and admit that it's daytime

but there's no more sleep
for either one of us:

I give up and make coffee
as early sun gilds the floor

Modah ani l'fanecha
living and enduring God

You wake me at 5:30
to remind me how good it is

to be awake
and to be dry

and to bring this mug
to my grateful lips

 

---

 

This is the latest poem in my occasional Toddler House series. Most, though not all, of these poems have appeared here at Velveteen Rabbi in draft. (The most recent was Morning Cartoons, Morning Prayer.) I'm keeping all of them in a single manuscript; I don't know if this will evolve into a full collection, but for the moment I'm enjoying how they play off each other.

The first Monday morning after the time change is always hard. Our little guy (not so little anymore; he's almost three!) goes to bed early and rises early, and though he hasn't batted an eye at going to bed an hour later than he used to (before the time change), he's also not sleeping any later than he used to, which has made this a week of earlier mornings than I might have strictly preferred. I'm aware, though, that sleeping through the night until 5:30 would have seemed unthinkable luxury when he was an infant.

Modah ani l'fanecha are the first words of the Modah Ani prayer, the morning blessing for gratitude. "I am grateful before You, living and enduring God: You have restored my soul to me with mercy; great is Your faithfulness!"

 

Debbie's Psalm 3 - After Returning to Work

I pulled Flames to Heaven: New Psalms for Healing & Praise, by Debbie Perlman (may her memory be a blessing), off of my bookshelf recently. One of the poems I read there which really moves he is her psalm three, subtitled "After Returning to Work."

Reading her psalm, I remember my own journey of returning to work and returning to normalcy after my strokes. And I marvel at the extent to which this poem rings true for me even in the most ordinary of times: no recent illness, thank God; no hospital stay; and still this poem says something I need to hear. Maybe it's something you need to hear, too.

 

THREE

After Returning to Work
For E.L.L.

From the flurry of my life, I will praise You.

As I drive the child-circle errand-round,
Hurrying to meet allotted times,
I will stop for You,
To marvel at Your creation.

From the tasks that await me,
That tempt me to focus on minutia
Of hometasks, and homework, and jobwork,
I will pause for You,
To remember Your goodness.

From my perpetual self-reproof:
Is it enough, could it be better,
One more effort, a different preparation,
I will tarry for You
To praise Your Name.

In this fullness of my life, O God,
Calm my constant motion,
Quiet my pursuit,
That I may wait for You with a serene soul.

 

A sukkah and a song

Drew admires the roof of our sukkah.

"Want to sing the angel song, mommy?"

Drew and I are sitting in our sukkah under the wet cornstalks and the little lights. It is evening; the skies are threatening, but it's not actively raining -- at least not yet.

I sing him Shlomo Carlebach's setting of the song about the four angels who watch over us at night. It's part of our bedtime routine. As I mention each angel, I wave my fingers at him: from the right, from the left, from in front, from behind. He giggles.

When I'm done, I ask if he wants to sing something, and he agrees. He sings me the alphabet song, then asks me to sing it, too. We sing "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star."

By this time the light mist in the air has intensified into a drizzle. Even in our raincoats and rain boots, we're getting more than a little bit damp. So we head inside, I unplug the sukkah lights, we watch some cartoons.

A little while later, Drew in his pyjamas, he brings his raincoat and Thomas And Friends rainboots over to me. "Want to go in the sukkah, mommy?" I am completely charmed, but I have to inform him that it's really raining now, and besides, he's in PJs, it's almost time for bed.

In the gliding rocker, when I sing him the angel song before bed, I think of the cornstalks and lights of our sukkah, and it makes me smile.

 

Sukkah roof by evening.

Season of transitions

It's a season of transitions, all sorts. After daycare, I picked Drew up and we went together to a local orchard in search of an afterschool snack and a bag of peaches. But they were out of peaches, though they promised to have more later in the week; what they had instead were some of the season's first glorious honeycrisp apples. So Drew enjoyed an apple cider donut with cinnamon sugar (and so did I!) and I bought a few big beautiful apples. Down the street at the farmstand we got half a dozen ears of corn for a song; I saved one to boil for him to eat on the cob, and stripped the corn from several others to make a corn pudding.

But I'd had my heart set on doing something with peaches. Was I too late? Had I missed the season? Thankfully, although the orchard itself was sold out of peaches, our wee market -- right around the corner from both the orchard and Drew's daycare -- still had a basket of local orchard peaches for sale. We brought some home, with great glee. I saved a few for Drew to eat in slices, and prepared the rest to become a crisp. Peach season is giving way to apple season. The days are still warm, even hot, but the nights are cooling. The hills are deep rich late-summer green, but here and there the first maple branch blazes red. Everywhere, goldenrod is tipped with yellow.

Next week Drew will attend one last day at this beloved daycare, and the next day he'll begin attending a community preschool near my synagogue. He's two years and nine months now; old enough to start in the youngest preschool room, which he and I have visited before. I know he'll flourish there. But some part of me is a little bit sad to be leaving the in-home daycare which we, and he, have so loved. His daycare provider is equally wistful, I think. "They'd better take good care of him there," she told me today. "I don't want him to get lost in the shuffle." I promised her that I was pretty sure they would -- and that we would visit her from time to time, too.

Change can be hard, even when it's a change one has looked forward to. One of my Torah study colleagues told me recently that when he dropped his daughter off at college, he had the distinct feeling that she had just begun preschool the day before, and now suddenly she was moving into this whole new adventure, leaving him behind. I know I'll feel that someday, too: weren't we just giggling and cuddling in the gliding rocker, watching early-morning cartoons, splashing in the kiddie pool?  I hope I can model grace and gratitude for Drew as we move through this change in his life and in ours, as we move from daycare to preschool, as we move from Elul to the High Holidays, as we move from summer to fall.

Morning Cartoons, Morning Prayer

 

I settle you with animated friends
and swirl my summer tallit
up and over to wrap my face,
tinting my world silky blue.

My intention is the deck, but
when you catch sight of me you ask
"Want to stay here, mommy?"
How could I say no? You're

one of God's most exuberant faces.
I curl into the sofa
and manage a modah ani, kiss
my tzitzit, and join you.

Bless God Who creates the light
which streams forth from this screen
and from your heart, Who creates
the love in your storybooks

and in mine, the Oneness at
the heart of all things
Who gives us capacity to change.
Today these cartoons are my prayer.

---

This is the twelfth poem in my occasional Toddler House series. (Here's the previous one; you can work your way back through them, and then through the first year of weekly mother poems, by clicking on the mother poems category.) It's also the latest chronicle of my attempt to maintain a prayerful consciousness even when I'm not explicitly able to make time for formal prayer. (That's been a theme here since my son was born -- see Prayer life changes, 2010.)

Modah ani is the blessing for gratitude recited in the morning. The trio of blessings surrounding the shema are, in order, a blessing for God Who creates light; a blessing for God Who creates love and manifests that love for us through the giving of Torah; and a blessing for God Who redeems us.

On a different note: deep thanks to all who left kind comments on my most recent post, about occasional brokenheartedness at the state of the world. Your responses were balm for my heavy heart indeed.

We are responsible for one another (VR in the HuffPo)

It's a dreadful story. A house of worship burned; hateful graffiti scrawled on the walls; worshipers feeling spiritually homeless, the place to which they would ordinarily turn for consolation now smudged with ash and tinged with hate.

If this had happened to a synagogue, God forbid, Jews around the world would be up in arms. Certainly my rabbinic colleagues and I would be horrified. We would denounce the hate crime from our pulpits, preach loving kindness and consolation, perhaps call in the ADL to condemn the act in the strongest possible terms.

Instead, this month, the house of worship burned was a mosque -- and the burning was almost certainly committed by Jewish hands.

That's the beginning of an op-ed which I wrote a few days ago -- in response to the burning and vandalizing of the mosque of Jabaa -- which has been published in the Huffington Post. You can read it there: We Are Responsible for One Another: Outrage Over Crimes By My Own Community.