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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Surviving the Alien Apocalypse—and a 26-Hour Road Trip with Four Kids

By Michelle Tauber for Raising Kvell

It happened two miles from our house, six minutes into our drive, moments before we’d even merged onto the highway.

“Are we there yet?”

Oh, but I was ready. A decade and four children into my parenting career, I’d honed my car-trip tactics with exacting preparedness: individually packed snack tubs; new markers with ready-to-be-filled blank journals; puzzle books; a bribe bag of marshmallows; kid-sized neck pillows for comfortable napping. (No movies. Our one old-school road rule.)

“Are we there yet?”

The puzzles were boring, the markers lost their caps, the marshmallows underwhelmed and no one felt like napping. The minivan was restless, and we had 13 more hours to go.

I looked at my Kindle, desperately wishing I could disappear into the buzzy new YA bestseller I’d downloaded just before we left.

“Who wants to hear a story about aliens taking over the earth?”

It turns out, everyone did. I started reading aloud Rick Yancey’s The Fifth Wave, and before I’d finished the first page, the car had fallen silent. Even the 4-year-old was rapt. In the driver’s seat, so was my husband.

I’m a dedicated read-alouder, having attempted a British accent through all 4,100 pages of all seven Harry Potter books—twice, to my two oldest sons. I’ve read Charlotte’s Web in Starbucks, Ramona Quimby, Age 8 in line at the post office and Percy Jackson at the dentist’s office. But my favorite place to read aloud is in the car. Everyone’s captive.

Still, I hadn’t planned on reading this book. On page 10, the teenage heroine, Cassie, encounters a dying man and refuses to save him. “Blood dribbled over his bottom lip and hung quivering from his stubbly chin,” Yancey writes. “His teeth shone with blood.” I winced as I read it, watching my 5-year-old son’s eyes grow wide in the rearview mirror.

“Guys, this is creepy. Why don’t we stop?”

“Nooooooooooooooooooo!”

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I Cheated My Sons Out of a Jewish Education

By Alina Adams

My oldest son graduated from the 8th grade last week. His father and I picked this particular school for its academic rigor. By the time his nine years there were up, my son had visited England, passed Algebra 2, read Virgil (in Latin), played Katherine in a full staging of Shakespeare’s Henry V, and drawn a map of Europe freehand, including mountain ranges and bodies of water, with only the latitude and longitude as guidelines.

We were ecstatic about his education and how well it prepared him for the future.

Though the school is ostensibly non-denominational, their crest does feature a cross. When my son inquired about it, he was informed that the cross represents all religions. (He thus proceeded to refer to it as The Cross of All Religions for the past several years. It was funny the first time. Not so much the 74th.)

Up through 6th grade, in addition to regular school, I also sent my son to Hebrew School twice a week for two hours each. It made for a long day–almost 12 hours in total, but I felt it was necessary. By the 7th grade, however, his schedule became so full with secular academics that we ended up dropping Hebrew School, trying to make up for it with weekly Shabbat services at our temple, instead.

Because we were so happy with the school for our older son, we sent our younger one there, as well. However, as it’s an all-boy school, that wasn’t an option for our daughter. Based on my experience with the cross-town rush from one site to another, I insisted to my husband that we send her to a Jewish Day School, so she could get everything in one place. (Of course, this being New York City, my wanting her to attend a Jewish Day School did not necessarily mean we’d be accepted to one; so we did look broadly, just in case.)

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How Many Shabbat Candles Does a Divorced Woman Light?

 By Mayim Bialik for Kveller

This post is the last entry in Mayim’s month-long series about the Jewish aspects of divorce.

As a child, I lit two Shabbat candles with my mother every time she lit Shabbat candles. I felt like a little Ima (mother), like they make you pretend in preschool or kindergarten Hebrew school. It’s practice, you know. For when you are a “real” Ima. Imas light two candles.

When I got married, I had not been consistently lighting Shabbat candles for years. After leaving my parents’ home and going to college, I stopped, but I would light them with the other girls at Hillel when I attended services there and looked forward to a day when I would light them as a married woman.

I bought antique Victorian candlesticks for my wedding. I was not the typical Jewish girl so I didn’t buy the typical expensive silver kind that many religious girls dream of.

Lighting candles as a married woman was very nice and gratifying. I felt I was creating light for me and my partner in a sacred space. When my first son was born two years after I was married, I added a small candle for him, as is the custom; one for each additional child. That first time I lit that little candle for my son was a very special Shabbat. My husband and I blessed him so that he be like “Menasseh and Ephraim,” and we stumbled over the Hebrew, so new to both of our lips.

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