I Need to Stop Yelling at My Kids

By Yael Armstrong

Occasionally I like to think about the kind of mom I want to be and the kind of mother I actually am.  Am I calm and compassionate? Overprotective?  Who do my boys see?

Last week when I asked myself this question it was at the end of a very long day. I was tired from spending hours at the park, then coming home to a house that needed cleaning and followed around by two little boys who wanted me to entertain them but were soon content to entertain themselves by messing up whatever I’d just cleaned. The day ended with both boys refusing to eat what I’d made them for dinner. A momentary food fight ensued and I yelled at them to stop it. At bath time they splashed and shrieked and the headache that had been holding itself at bay throughout the day burst into my temples around the time that the oldest pushed the youngest down and they both started to cry. At bedtime they wanted to read Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. The irony was not lost on me. I put them to bed and they got up six times until standing over dirty dishes in the kitchen sink, I yelled for them to lay down and go to sleep.

Somewhere between the last dish and cleaning up the living room for the fourth time that day I realized what it was that I needed to change. I have become a mother who yells to get her point across. Throughout the day, at the park when someone wouldn’t come when it was time to go, or at home when someone didn’t want to eat, I asked them nicely to stop, to listen, then I inevitably hit my limit and was finished. I no longer cared why they didn’t want to do something, I wanted them to do it my way and stop whining about it. End of story. I stopped seeing the 4-year-old who was trying to figure life out and needed a little guidance, and only saw that I was tired and annoyed.

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My Southern Jewish Son

My Southern Jewish Son, the US Army Sergeant/Black Hawk Helicopter Crew Chief 

By Ann Zivitz Kientz

When we brought our baby son home from the hospital nearly 27 years ago, we imagined many things for his future.

The Army wasn’t one of them.

The Jewish Chaplains Council estimates that there are currently around 10,000 active duty men and women known to be Jewish. My son, Seargant Harrel Carlton Kimball, is one of those active duty Jewish soldiers.

I guess it shouldn’t have been such a surprise – from a very young age, he insisted on running outside every time he heard a “hoptercopter” in the sky! We got really lucky after basic training; he was assigned to his individual training at a base that had a retired Rabbi serving as a Chaplain. It gave him an opportunity to connect to something familiar and normal during this big transition in his life. Then he was assigned to Ft. Campbell, Kentucky, for his home base. He attended synagogue for a couple of Shabbat services and the high holy days in Nashville, Tennessee, about 45 minutes away, and the congregation was very happy to accommodate him!

And then came his first deployment in 2010 to Afghanistan. How does a Jewish mother bless her child before an event like this? The only thing I could think to do was the priestly blessing over him. Much to my surprise, he did not stop me, or even seem embarrassed when others passed us by at the airport. It was a moment I will never forget.

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My Super-Jewish Toddler

I've felt estranged by religion in my adult life, but my 2 year old sings along to blessings, dances in synagogue, and displays what might even be called a religious fervor 

By Anna Solomon

Summer was ending, and the dreaded question slipped up on us again: where would we go for the High Holidays? Which was inevitably followed–-after the usual debate over rabbis, distances, and the chances of there being strange organ music–-by the next question: why go at all?

It had been easy in Park Slope, Brooklyn to find a community of Jewish parents and rollicking Tot Shabbat services without ever having to answer this question, or join a congregation. But in June we'd moved with our 2-and-a-half-year-old daughter, Sylvie, to Providence, Rhode Island. And as August turned into September, we found ourselves at a Friday night open house at a nearby Reform synagogue where everything had been set up outside. The night was warm, the people were friendly, and the barbecue was good. There was even a crafts table for the children.

Then the service began. We sat in the back, next to a family we'd recently met, agreeing that as soon as our kids got antsy, we'd leave.

Sure enough, as soon as the cantor started singing, the children stood up in their seats. Soon, I thought, they'll start to whine, and we can all go off to the lawn on the other side of the synagogue, where the kids can play and the adults can debrief.

But there was no whining. Instead, as if on cue, the children started to dance to the blessings. They bent their knees, rocked their hips, chicken-winged their arms – but gently, as if they knew exactly where they were. Sylvie started to sing along with the cantor. She didn't know most of the words, of course, she just copied them the best she could, her mouth wide open, her body swaying.

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Cutting Family Ties

The cards my Christian paternal grandparents sent me as a child came with small checks—and a hidden agenda

 The cards my Christian paternal grandparents sent me as a child came with small checks—and a hidden agenda

I learned of my grandfather’s death through an Internet search.

I had been estranged from my paternal grandparents for more than a decade, but four years ago, I decided that the time had come to reconnect; they were getting old, and I longed to share some family news with them—I was expecting another child. I didn’t have a current address or phone number for them, so I entered my grandfather’s full name into a search engine, hoping to find contact information.

Instead, I found an obituary. He had died of a stroke two months earlier.

Stunned, I continued to read the notice of his death. My father, uncle, aunt, cousins, and great-aunts and uncles appeared on the list of surviving relatives. But there was no mention of my twin sister or myself. We had been obliterated.

The next morning, I called my best friend from college and cried wretched tears as the story poured out. “They want to erase our existence,” I complained.

She was sympathetic but candid: “How can you complain when you removed them from your life,” my friend replied, “just like they removed you from theirs?”

***

My parents split up when I was 4 years old. To describe their divorce as “acrimonious” would be an understatement. Raised first in the Congregationalist Church and then in the United Church of Christ, my father underwent an Orthodox conversion to Judaism during his marriage to my mother, who is Jewish; after their divorce, however, he gave up both Judaism and Christianity. He became a follower of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and took a Hindi name.

After my mother won full custody, my sister and I visited with my father only sporadically. He occasionally sent exotic gifts from his extensive world travels but remained distant from our everyday lives. My mother continued to raise us Jewish in a traditional, though not Orthodox, home, and her Jewish parents played an integral role in our childhood.

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