What will you do differently this year?

Kveller asked its readers this very question.  Here's what they had to say.  What about you?

I’ve been thinking about this for weeks. I almost decided I couldn’t write a resolution for this Rosh Hashanah because there are too many things I want to do differently, too much I want to change. I wasn’t sure how to write something short and sweet and meaningful when what I need is a gansa megillah to explain all the ways in which I hope 5774 is so, so different from my 5773.

Then this picture was taken on a family vacation last week, and I decided to let it dictate my resolution and remind me of what matters: more laughing, more love, more wine.


I’ve got big plans for 5774: read a book, go to yoga, see a movie with my husband, give more money to tzedakah, and WEAN my little girl. Also, maybe get pregnant.




This year I’ve decided to like myself. I just turned 33 and it occurred to me that I have spent most of those 33 years trying to become something, change something, aspire to something, and it has left me with a constant feeling of never being happy with who I am. So this year I’ve decided to find the things I *do* like about myself and to honor them. To find a way to be in the moment with myself.

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Three Years of Trying & Still No Baby

By Sharon McKellar for Raising Kvell

That I will be a mom someday has always been a given, and like all other things in my life, I have always known that if I plan and try, I will achieve my goals. This is what my own mom taught me. She is the quintessential mother, who gave up a career to raise us not because she was supposed to, but because it was what made her the happiest.

When my husband and I first talked about building a life together, we decided on an order for things. First, we would travel. Then, we would have babies. At 32 we were married, at 33 we traveled the world for a year, and at 34 we returned to have babies. As a librarian, I am an information seeker, so we did it correctly, right from the start. With the fanciest ovulation monitor, and the will of two people who are used to getting their way, we wasted no time. At the six-month no-success meeting with my doctor she told us that this is the meeting where she just makes sure people are doing it right. You two, she told us, are doing it right.

Well, here we are, three years later, and a year into assisted reproductive technology (IUI and IVF) still doing it right, and still child-free. We have watched friends and family get pregnant, have children, have first birthday parties and have second children, while still we wait, feeling like our life is passing us by.

The word “infertility” has a lot of baggage. Getting pregnant and having a child is meant to be a joyful and uncomplicated part of life. I remember in Torah School learning about the life cycle, and while I can now see a multitude of issues that might come with teaching life in such a simplified way, the one I fixate on is this one: starting a family. Starting a family. When it goes wrong, it can feel like you have failed at being a woman, a wife, a daughter, a sister.

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Rosh Hashanah Resolutions: My Cancer New Year

By Kveller

 When we asked our readers to send in their Rosh Hashanah Resolutions, we certainly weren’t expecting anything like the following, sent to us from Rebecca Faulkner Branum of Edmond, Oklahoma.

A New Year sometimes sneaks into a life, changing a family’s calendar forever. Five years ago I was unable to eat apples or honey because I was neutropenic from cancer chemotherapy. The bacteria from uncooked food could have sickened or even killed me, so the Rosh Hashanah that snuck into my life that fall might have been hard to recognize, but it was there all the same.

Cancer appeared as a terrible phone call in September, one week after my only child’s 1st birthday, a day that became Day #1 of a new life. The year that followed was one of loss. Of course the usual cancer losses–my breasts, my hair, and a lot of lost lunches–but I also lost my job as a health care provider (because I couldn’t work with ill patients). Then I lost my savings, my car, my house, and finally my husband, who walked away from the stress.
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Friday Night: A Love Letter to My Old Friends

By Adina Kay-Gross for Kveller.com

When you become a new mother, you spend a lot of time talking about making mom friends. I’ve written about it, as have countless others. We’ve thought it about it honestly, earnestly, and some times desperately. It’s as awkward as dating, it’s a necessary evil, and sometimes, in lucky circumstances, lifelong relationships are formed, relationships that can save us.

But when we become new mothers, we don’t often talk about old friends.

These are the friends who are very well having children in step with you, friends who remember when you, yourself, were a child. Friends who know your parents and know your siblings and slept on the floor in your childhood bedroom and slept on the floor in your college dorm room and saw you with the hair-sprayed bangs and the bad skin and the skinned knees and the broken heart.

Yet, these friends now live in San Francisco and London and Chicago and New Jersey and Texas and Philadelphia and Colorado and Detroit. You are in New York and you are so overwhelmed you can’t pick up the phone to tell them that you’re overwhelmed but you love them. These friends have lives that in some ways resemble yours, but in many ways, don’t. Maybe these friends read different books or blogs. Maybe these friends aren’t readers at all. Maybe these friends don’t think about organic mosquito repellent. Maybe they do. Maybe these friends have spouses who aren’t Jewish. Maybe these friends have spouses who are way more Jewish. Maybe these friends have divorced. Maybe these friends don’t work, or maybe they do work, but you aren’t interested in their work, nor are they in yours. Maybe these friends let their kids watch TV. If you actually get to talking you’ll reveal that you sometimes do, too.

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An Unexpected Family Reunion, Seven Decades After the Holocaust

My husband’s grandmother’s family was decimated by the Nazis. But at 95, she discovered relatives she never knew.

By Jennifer Mendelsohn for Tablet Magazine

I hardly thought it was a life-changing question.

We were driving home from a family gathering one evening this past May with my husband’s 95-year-old grandmother, Frieda, a Holocaust survivor from a small town outside Warsaw. I told her I’d been spending a lot of time on genealogy websites, immersed in tracing the trajectories of my immigrant relatives, most of whom—lured by the promise of America—had left Eastern Europe long before World War II. I had always thought Frieda’s family’s story was not as flush with immigrant tales; most of her relatives had stayed in Poland, which is precisely why Frieda had so few relatives. She and her late husband Chaim had survived the war by fleeing to Russia in November of 1939. They spent the next six years doing forced labor under increasingly dismal and treacherous conditions. They were the only members of their immediate families to have lived.

And so I asked Frieda what she had heard about America as a child. Did people talk about wanting to go there?

“I didn’t know very much. We didn’t talk about it,” she said. She shrugged dismissively.

And then, almost as an afterthought, she added: “My mother’s two older sisters went there. She was supposed to go, too, but the First World War broke out.”

My pulse quickened. In the 14 years I had known her, I had heard numerous stories about Frieda’s past recounted in vivid detail. But I couldn’t recall her ever once mentioning two aunts in America. And Frieda wasn’t someone who could afford to have two aunts unaccounted for.

“Mumma!” I said excitedly. “They must have had children and grandchildren here. We can find them! We have to!”

Frieda seemed skeptical. Her mother, Chaya Rojza, had somehow lost touch with her sisters before Frieda was even born; Frieda remembers her crying over the one photograph they’d sent back from America, a formal studio shot in which they wore long black skirts. Find them? It seemed preposterous. She didn’t even know their last names. All Frieda knew was that her aunts once lived in Chicago and that one had a husband named Avram. One aunt, she said, had died of cholera. When Frieda arrived in Baltimore in 1958, she’d tried to track them down using the meager methods at her disposal, to no avail.

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We Need Better, Affordable Jewish Day Care Options

By Adina Kay-Gross

When my husband and I moved our family from Brooklyn to the wilds of the Long Island suburbs eight months ago, our chief concern was securing great childcare for our twin toddlers. In Brooklyn, from the time they were 3 months old, Avi and Maya had been cared for part-time by Charlotte, a superhero dressed as a 25-year-old aspiring opera singer. Charlotte (Sha-Sha, to everyone in our family who loved her, which was everyone) could do anything our two babies needed, including arrive at our apartment at 8 a.m. so that I could hop the subway to Manhattan while the girls splatter-painted the walls with oatmeal. Charlotte glided into our lives and made it infinitely better. Alas, Sha-Sha wasn’t interested in moving to the ‘burbs with us. Go figure.

And so, when we landed on the (north) shores of this island, we weighed our options. I would still be working part-time, but really, it was more like three quarters when you considered the longer commute. We didn’t know many people in our new town and worried that a nanny wouldn’t have much to do with the girls, what with the whole everyone-needs-a-car-to-get-anywhere culture. We didn’t like the idea of the girls sitting in the house all day. In addition, at 18 months, Avi and Maya were starting to pick things up, and it seemed like they might just benefit from being in a Jewish environment. 
Ideally, we wanted to enroll the girls in a synagogue preschool program. We liked the idea that through nursery school, we’d find a relatively organic and low-stress opportunity to meet other young families in our town. And we liked the idea that Avi and Maya would begin experiencing Shabbat, Hebrew, and the Jewish holidays, in a structured, accessible way.

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Summer Vacation is No Picnic for a Child with Autism

By Dana Meijler for Kveller

Summer vacation is upon us.

All over Facebook I see statuses of parents dealing with school being out. Grateful posts about not having to pack lunches quickly turn into posts about the hassles of shlepping kids to baseball practice or kids being underfoot saying, “I’m bored” 600 times a day and in between happy vacation photos and day trips and amusements parks.

In other words, the stuff of life. Or at least the stuff of life when you are a parent.

As the parent of a special needs child, I recognize these irritations but honestly, I also do my share of eye rolling when I read stuff like this. It’s tough not to shake my head when some parents’ biggest problems are that they cannot decide how many pairs of flowered underpants their kids need to pack to go to Jewish sleep-away camp for two weeks. It sometimes makes me cringe when I read stuff like this, not just because I think of friends who struggle financially and aren’t in the position to be able to pay to send their child to be cared for by others for two weeks. Or those, like me, whose kids just can’t participate in things like summer camp, because their needs are so specialized and they just need more attention and care than they can get in most summer programs.

Look, it would be great if I could be a bigger person. I don’t begrudge anyone anything but when I read that someone’s biggest challenge is whether to buy the BMW SUV or the Escalade and this is presented like Sophie’s Choice in the blogosphere, without one word of gratitude for the position they’re in, it’s hard to take what they have to say seriously.

I suppose this means I am not a bigger person, okay. Well, I can live with that.

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