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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Graven Images Onscreen: Narrowing Our View?

By Ann Zivitz Kientz

You shall have no other gods beside Me. You shall not make for yourself any graven image, nor any manner of likeness, of any thing that is heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. (Exodus, Chapter 20, Verses 3-4)

I’m wondering about “graven images.” Specifically, I’m wondering if Steven Spielberg and Cecil B. DeMille have helped or hindered us with their images.

When I taught 5th grade religious school, at the end of every class I took about 15 minutes to tell the story of the Torah portion of the week. And when Exodus came around, I used one entire class time to tell the story of Moses from his birth through the giving of the 10 Commandments. Though I am not a master storyteller, I did get quite good at this story, and each year took great pride in the wide eyes looking back at me.

Then one year, as I explained my vision of the golden calf (“imagine all the women in your family and your classmates’ families taking off their rings and bracelets and necklaces and melting them down to make this idol, it must have been about this big…”), and held my hands about two feet apart to demonstrate the size of the idol, a child interrupted me to tell me that I was “wrong” about the size. It was large enough to ride on, he said, and he knew this because he had seen it in the movie The Prince of Egypt!

Needless to say, we spent a long time that day discussing the difference between faith, and film, a religious vision, or someone else’s artistic vision, and that any one person’s vision is not necessarily “the truth.” I realized it’s not just that student’s generation that sees something onscreen, and then associates the film image with the Biblical story represented. I thought about my parents’ generation, and their ingrained vision of Moses parting the Sea of Reeds, courtesy of Cecil B. DeMille.

The images of God as an old man in the sky, or Charlton Heston as Moses, or a golden calf of a certain size in a movie, are all very Hollywood, and also childlike. The problem comes when we outgrow those images and do not grow into our own adult visions of faith. I think the baby sometimes gets thrown out with the bath water. If you can’t believe anymore like you did as a kid, then for some it is hard to have faith in anything as Jewish adults.

So I ask you: are the images from Mr. Spielberg and Mr. DeMille “graven images”? And even if they are not technically “graven images,” are they helpful or hurtful?

Shabbat — The Marriage Cure

There are many things that make being Orthodox difficult. In fact, if I started a list right now I think I would be busy for hours, compiling all the challenging aspects of following halacha as I understand it. But no matter how frustrating it can be sometimes, no matter how many times a day I want to rip off my hair covering, as soon as Shabbat rolls around, I can’t imagine being anything but Orthodox. Shabbat is the reward for making it through the week.

Shabbat has always meant, to me, a stretch of uninterrupted relaxation. It’s enforced relaxation, in fact — just sleeping, eating, reading and hanging out with family and friends. As I grow older and my weeks became more stressful, I am more and more grateful for the blessing that is Shabbat, counting down the days until Friday as soon as Monday begins. It is a weekly mini vacation made all the more special by the infusion of spirituality that I’m certain I can feel almost tangibly. And now that I’m married, Shabbat means all that and more.

Instead of a personal blessing, Shabbat now feels like something created for couples to restore their relationships to their ideal states. After a week of work and school and distraction, of television and texting and typing, Shabbat is 25 hours where it’s just me and Jeremy and nothing in between us. Even if we wanted to avoid each other, all we have are books and magazines to distract us from one another.

Our friends told us that Friday would be stressful, a hectic day of rushing to prepare the food for Shabbat. Instead, the anticipation of Shabbat sets in on Thursday night, and Friday is, if not relaxing — I tend to go overboard with the cooking — a day of cheerful bustling, waiting for the moment to welcome Shabbat that week. It helps, of course, that this year Jeremy and I both have Friday off, and we’re not trying to fit all our preparations in around work and school. (That will go away eventually, for now we’re enjoying the perks.)

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Ryan Lochte’s Talmud Lesson

The Talmud tells parents to teach our kids to swim. The Olympic champ and reality TV star makes that easier.

 
By Malina Saval

The world was formally introduced to Ryan Lochte last summer, when the swimmer won two golds, two silvers, and one bronze medal at the 2012 Olympics in London. We vaguely remembered his blue eyes and shaggy hair from the 2008 games in Beijing, but neither he nor his collection of hip-hop-wannabe footwear had yet reached Jeah!-level popularity. Now the IQ-deficient Adonis was everywhere, posing on the blocks, peeing in the pool, and flashing a mouthful of bling. He was meant to be Michael Phelps’ successor, but instead he became a beefcake centerfold in a pink Speedo of his own design, his shirtless image plastered on the covers of Glamour and Vogue magazines.

Within hours of taking first in the 400-meter individual medley, Lochte (rap name “Reezy”) appeared on every imaginable media outlet expressing his longing to join the estimable tabloid-train-wreck-relationship club by becoming the new Bachelor. A YouTube video in which Lochte and teammate Matt Grevers “chillax” after practice while debating the etymological difference between shampoo and “cleansing rinse” went viral. Gawker dubbed him a “douchebag.” Lochte’s new reality show What Would Ryan Lochte Do?, which premiered last night on E!, looks so out of control—he plays drunk golf in one teaser—it’s bound to propel the dopey swimmer to even greater depths of fame.

And yet, I’m here to argue that it’s time we stop making fun of Lochte, at least long enough to focus on a career achievement that has thus far gone completely unnoticed in the Jewish community. Lochte, who isn’t Jewish but believes God has a “plain” for everyone, may not be a rabbinical scholar, but what he has done—and to a much larger degree than most swimmers in the history of the sport—is spread Talmudic wisdom to swim fans, Jewish and non-Jewish, all over the world. Let me explain.

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Overcoming My Eating Disorder & Raising a Healthy Daughter

I gave birth to my daughter six months ago, and, a few sleep-deprived weeks later, I realized it was right around the 10th “anniversary” of when I was admitted to a hospital for an eating disorders inpatient program.

When I try to reconcile the memory of my scared, enervated teen self with myself today, as a (somewhat) confident mother of two with visibly muscled biceps from lugging around a giant purse, a diaper bag, a breast pump, a baby, and sometimes a 38-pound 3-year-old, it’s difficult. But I still vividly remember the feelings of insecurity, self-doubt, and physical weakness. As it turns out, you can be too thin after all.

There were other factors involved, of course, but I first fixated on being skinny because I knew it would make me “someone” in a world where I wasn’t quite sure yet how I, as a nice Jewish girl, could make any kind of significant mark. What began as a diet veered into rigidity, ruling out hangouts with friends because food was usually involved and an early return from summer camp because, overwhelmed without my typical menu, I just decided to eat an apple and a cereal bar and call it a day. What turned into rigidity became a dangerous obsession when every new, lower number on the scale was a success and anything below that number was my new personal challenge.

Intellectually, I knew I was harming myself, but I couldn’t stop.
Weekly sessions with a therapist and numerous doctor appointments later, I finally realized I needed more intensive help and entered the hospital, where I met a lot of other sick women and several sick men. Perhaps not-so-coincidentally, they were almost all amazing, intelligent, funny, warmhearted people who had still fallen victim to the tangled webs woven by anorexia and bulimia. Some of them are still struggling, and some of them will probably never climb their way out.

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How I Pretty Much Raised My Brother

By Alina Adams 

I had my oldest son a few months before I turned 30. Not young in the majority of the world. Not even particularly young in the United States. On the Upper West Side of New York, however, when I asked my doctor if, at 36, I was too old to think about having a third child, he told me, “Most of my patients your age are still thinking about thinking about having their first baby.”

The thing is, even though I gave birth to my first child in 1999, I’d already been raising one for about two decades prior to that. My brother.

Eight years younger than me, he was born six months after my family immigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union. My parents had a lot to do, what with the whole settling in another country, learning English, looking for a job, trying to survive thing. So my brother became my responsibility. I took him for walks around the block in his baby carriage. I took him to the bathroom. On his first day of preschool, I stayed with him in the classroom to help him adjust. I taught him to tie his shoes. I bought him his first baseball glove because I knew he’d need it to fit in with the other, American boys at kindergarten. I regularly went to his parent/teacher conferences (most were cool with it; but one flat out refused to speak to me, even though I tried to explain I’d been doing this for years now. I was 12). And when, down the line, he became a competitive ice skater, I drove him to practice at dawn and dealt with his coaches and was his official chaperone at out-of-town competitions.

To me, it seemed normal. Most of the kids I grew up around, also Soviet immigrants with younger siblings born in the US, understood that the answer to “Am I my brother’s keeper?” was “Yes, you are. So anything he does wrong is your fault.”

To this day, when someone compliments my mother about my brother, her response is, “Tell Alina. He’s her child.”

Conversely, when my mother wants to know what my brother is thinking, she doesn’t ask him. She asks me.
The practice has a name, apparently. I learned it in The Sibling Effect, the book I reviewed here last summer. It’s called alloparenting, and it’s rather common around the world. Except in the West.

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My Autistic Daughter is Going Through Puberty

By Dana Meijler
 

While the world of autism is talking, blogging, and arguing about Autism Awareness Month, over here we have been dealing with another kind of awareness. One in which autism, like with a lot of other things, brings challenges, not just to Maya, but to me as her mom.

Puberty.
A few months ago I wrote a post about how I and everyone around me were noticing changes in my daughter and my fears about how to talk about it with her.

She’s still so much of a kid, a kid that plays with stuffed animals and likes to hold my hand. As hard as it is for any parent to acknowledge that their babies are growing up, I do think with an autistic or other special needs child, the regular bittersweet feelings and fears are also accompanied with big-fat-scary-fears. Fears that your child will not understand the changes going on physically and emotionally, fears that the social implications of puberty will leave them even more vulnerable and unprotected. Fears that the process of growing up will wreck her innocence and that she will end up hurt, confused, jaded, and withdraw back into a world of her own. Fears that the hormonal surges might manifest itself in behavioral challenges difficult to overcome.

Still, a few months on from my post, M is still developing. I spoke to our doctor about it and he told me that although she is young, she is still within the confines of normal development and that there is nothing to be concerned about. He told me that it was possible to slow down the process through hormone therapy but that generally he didn’t recommend interfering with the body’s natural rhythms. I thought it was good that he asked me how the kids in school and around her were reacting to the changes, whether there was any teasing or bullying going on because in that situation, we may want to consider whether to slow things down a little. He did tell me to be on the lookout for changes in Maya’s behavior; if she withdraws or starts acting out a lot it might be a sign that all is not well in her social world.

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