Socks and Roses

We are far from the land of pickles and popsicle-sticks, the city of sun-drenched beaches and dog shit. Very far. In the 6688 miles we have traveled, we have gone from pickles and popsicle-sticks to maple leaves and salmon; muddy buddies... and socks. 

The power struggles with Liliana over putting on socks before going outside over the last month have elicited that monstrous creature (that crazed me) that was the subject of a previous post. I yell “We’re in Canada now” to my toddler’s pointed declarations: “No, I only wear socks on airplanes.” I suspect that part of the reason that I get so mental during these recurring episodes is that I too am going through an adjustment period. Because I too want to wear socks only on airplanes. Sebastian and I play a game of “Rose and Thorn” every night at bedtime, recounting the best and worst parts of our day. Socks, quite frankly, are my thorn.

I’m working on the perspective thing. Got a pair of sexifying boots. And long sweater tunics. That helps. Mostly though, I think it’s a matter of time. Seeing my fabulous “wintry” reflection in the downtown store windows enough times. Or no longer noticing it at all.

Perspective and positive attitude are things I dish out liberally to my children (“socks are wonderful, they keep our feet warm, look at these flowers, and colorful stripes”), while trying hard to internalize them myself. 

A couple weeks ago, a week short of his fifth birthday, Sebastian had a bad fall. It was a running “face meets street curb” affair. Intense crying. Profuse bleeding.  A fire truck, ambulance, two teddy bears, hospital emergency room, and a balloon glove later, I was home tucking him in bed. I spoke of unexpected occurrences and pointed out both negative and positive varieties.  I introduced the idea of positive and negative within the same mix. 

We played our ritual game of Rose and Thorn. Through his lacerated lip and lacerated gum, Sebastian beamed, naming a string of roses: the nice women that helped us and called an ambulance, the teddy bear from the firemen, the teddy bear from the ambulance, the ride in the ambulance, the secret code to Emergency, the balloon glove from the doctor… And your thorn, I asked, anticipating the apparent answer. “That I fell”, he said. But a moment later he revised his version: “actually, that I fell was my rose!” My heart stirred: here was a kid, not yet 5, who was able to perceive the mixed bag that life hands you, the bitter along with the sweet. And to experience a sense of gratitude for the bitter – from which emerges the sweet (there is a Hebrew expression that intones: me’az yetze matok מעז יצא מתוק – from bitterness sweetness will emerge).  All the good stuff (the ambulance, fire truck, teddy bears etc), this child understood, would not have occurred had it not been for that awful fall. And that was enough to turn the fall on its head and make it into a good thing. A simple shift in perspective.

That same evening, hungry and too exhausted to prepare a meal, I had a fight with Lance over not having/planning/eating complete nutritious meals. He’d made himself a salad, I’d have been happy with a bowl of cereal but was too tired to even bother, yet hoped he would lovingly serve me his hale and hearty melange. It was one of those unsettling and unsettled arguments. Of the recurring sort. Each of us saying our part, not really meeting, duty-bound to come up with some sketch of an arrangement, acknowledging one another’s intent, but not probing the design, ok, let’s make an effort, work it out, can’t talk about this anymore, too tired, kind of episode.

A few days later, Sebastian’s energetic and buoyant voice floats across the kitchen table: “this is the best mac ‘n cheese EVER i the whole wide world” (הכי בעולם). I didn’t know if to laugh or cry. At that moment, I felt like the worst mom. And the best.  Worst wife? Best mom? Horrible both? Never mind. The final response was a twinge of gratitude. For my family. And a dose of perspective. I smiled through the tears. 

  

And began to think about smiles. And tears. Kids do a lot of that. Smiling and tearing. Their experience seems to be pointed, discrete, simple: hitting one another and sobbing one moment,  sharing and laughing the next. Liliana: “you’re annoying”(אתה מעצבן); Sebastian: “you’re crazy”(את משוגעת). Both quite accurate assessments, I concede. 

“I won’t be your friend ever ever ever ever”(אף אף אף אף פעם) turns, in the span of moments, into a train-ride in strung-together-boxes where conductor and passenger are in perfect harmony, charting out their itinerary to Israel, Russia, Mexico, Hawaii, Canada (that is Vancouver), Nanoose Bay and Victoria.

Us big people have our own version of tears and smiles, fighting and making up/out. We have our own flow. But its variety is different. Ours is more muddled, more nuanced, more complex. Protracted. And still, the wonder of time’s flow is absorbing.

A couple evenings ago Sebastian turned to me and asked (over a good balanced meal!): “Does air die?” Um, no, air doesn’t die. “Then I want to be air and not Sebastian, because then I’ll never die”. But air doesn’t have a family and thoughts and feelings and a girlfriend named Luka. That appeased him for a while. Maybe our rose is that our days our numbered and that our relationships are precious.

They are what we must take the time for. And when they get out of whack, time will traverse the distance with us. Whether it appears to be compressed or extended – time I suppose -- does its thing. And we wait it out. Because we need to believe that from the bitter, sweet will emerge: that the thorn will expose a rose. 

On Servanthood and Satisfaction

“Ima, how do you say ‘tova’ in English?” ‘Favor’, I offer graciously, secretly thrilled that this time the request for the “favor” is to be directed at the English speaker in the household.

“OK”, Sebastian utters, as he runs off. “Aba, can you do me a favor?” “Can you save this playdoh for me? But put the blue one here on the table, and the rest of it up high on top of the piano. And then color this heart with the purple marker and cut it out.

Favors, around here, are plentiful these days. But they seem to be conspicuously unilateral.

Afternoons at the park yield an interesting and very hands-on variety.

“Ima, at yechola laasot li tova?” Yes sir. “Fill the bucket with sand, half-dry half-wet sand, and then smooth it out like this and then bring it to me.”

Yes sir.

Ima, at yechola laasot li tova? Of course. Find me big stones and little stones. And then put the big ones here, but take out the most beautiful ones and put those in a separate pile here…

Yes sir.

Ima, can you bring me my toys and then put one pile here and one pile there?

Yes sir.

Then there’s of course the ubiquitous demands that are less, well, ‘favor’able: I’m thirsty, I’m hungry. I want this, I want that. Right at the moment I’ve sat my tired ass down.

I stand to command.

I recall an entertaining and boisterous dinner theatre show I once saw called Angry Housewives. It had an atonal and very resonant bit that droned, in a whiny sing-songy timbre: “you think I am your slave, you think I am your servant” ad nauseum. It was funny back then.

Sometimes it gets to me: the demands, the negotiations, the dawdling, the whining, the yelling, the clinging, the slave-ing, the servant-ing.

There are moments when I am driven to rocking out another hit tune from “Angry Housewives” – this one intoned in an unruly shriek: “eat your fucking cornflakes!”

Sometimes the violent and furious monster inside of me rips loose. And it scares even me. [Up side is I get lots of opportunities to model apologies once my boiling blood wanes to a simmer.)

And sometimes I turn around to hear Liliana laughing hysterically while Sebastian is animatedly gesturing and singing an improvised song to her. He’s cracking up at his brilliant lyrics (key words include tusik shamen (fat butt), and kaki (poop)). She’s cracking up at him. He feeds off of her, she off of him, in a spiral of unbridled joy and laughter. And I sit satiated, a happy haze filling my chest.

It struck me some days ago that my kids really like one another.  Sebastian will lift Liliana up as he balances her clumsily and precariously. The sight of it is so darn cute, I don’t even brace myself for potential falls.  She’ll address him with her most searching queries: “Sebastian, are these bubbles yours? Here chamudi (“cutie”). (Surely, if the object at hand were HIS CANDY, her sweet face and her twinkling eyes would betray a rather un-sweet personality). In this case, he’ll oblige, and confide delicately, “yes Liliana,” quickly adding, “but put it here – so Ima doesn’t see”.

I smile to myself. What I hear and don’t see won’t hurt me. The opposite, come to think of it, is also true; seeing and not hearing would be a welcome boon on many occasions. But the point is: the green-eyed monster is put to rest. For a while.

Things are cyclical. Transitory. Temporary. And that’s good. Tomorrow is only and always a day away. Even when it feels like the day is endless, like the fiery monster is about to combust, tomorrow is still only- a day- away.

And when I lay in bed at night (Lance assured me once that “they eventually HAVE to sleep”), I close my eyes and try to recall the hugs and the giggles – to see them, and to hear them. Because the days may be long; But the years are short.

NOs: Between Passion and Reason

NOOOOOOO!!!!

I am not talking about the reaction to a four-year old running onto the street to chase a ball god forbid, or to a dizzy two-year old spinning frighteningly close to the edge of the coffee table. No, this booming appeal that issues from my gut nearly every morning comes as a response to a simple, innocent, even estimable plea.

“I don’t need help”, I mutter under my breath as I make room for Liliana while she pushes the bulky dining room chair over to the kitchen counter, amiably entreats me to budge a little, ushers me aside, and blithely hops up grinning, “here we go”. The tuneful “Can I help you” chorus drives me batty. We’re not talking coq au vin or mac ‘n’ cheese. We’re talking cereal and milk, raspberry syrup and water. Something that normally takes two minutes that will now take three and a half… plus another two and a half for cleanup of spills.

Groan.

Then there’s the No that winds its way out, almost pleading, whimpering. It is extended, drawn, muffled, and sits in the chest, in a low weary register. It is the No that cries out as Sebastian takes out the green plastic mixing bowl, stacks the rainbow colored cupcake rammikins, and declares that it’s Kelev’s (stuffed animal dog's) birthday (again!) while calling out for the requisite ingredients – cocoa powder, syrup, icing sugar. He is serious and impassioned, and notices my trepidation.  “No it’s ok, I just need to make a cake for the party. There won’t be a mess.” I moan and accommodate, trying to be encouraging, trying to set limits. But we want to go out soon, better not start it now, we’ll do it later; Just wait till we go to Tata’s house in Vancouver, you’ll get to REALLY bake with her over there; OK, but you need to be very careful, I don’t want any spills or any mess, you know that part of a chef’s job is to also clean up.

There is a vast continent amidst the hilly terrain of parenthood that compels exacting negotiations between nurturing passions on the one hand, and setting limits on the other. Certainly, the fiery thrill that a child exhibits in pursuit of creative activities is rousing. I want to clasp that exuberant smile, to draw it out, to nourish it, to stretch it, to feel it. I want to go there -- be it baking, gardening, or finger-painting -- with abandon. But these pants just came out of the laundry; I just mopped the floor this morning; no-one’s going to be able to eat/use it, what a waste: The little nagging everyday pieces of order and composure that give us a framework, a margin, and very often, a certain peace, get in the way of messy creation.

There are urges, and there are mores.

Apropos: Liliana yanks on Sebastian’s penis, pronouncing delightedly, “ze kmo nadned” (“it’s like a swing”.)

Sebastian responds with a push, she with a pinch.

Lance tells me to let them punch and pinch and pull and learn to work things out on their own. I sit there and boil. I can’t do it. I need to intervene.

STOP IT!!!

Sebastian, for his part has devised a new tactic for dealing with his sweet and devilish sister. Little Mr. Canada is, for better or worse, becoming Israelicized. His latest approach is dreadfully effective and has me, frankly, at a loss as to how/whether to respond:  “Liliana, do you want me: to hit you/ to take it away from you? No, well then give it to me.” I’ve recently overheard him try out, to certain success, a positive twist on his fine-tuned line of attack: “Liliana, do you want a candy? Yes, well then…” The other day he methodically and thoughtfully (?) enlisted his technique for my benefit: “Liliana, do you want me to hit you? No, well then help Ima”. It was oddly sweet and disturbing, and I for my part, was bemusedly amused. When I tried to broach the subject, suggesting that this might not be the nicest way to ask for something, he plainly stated: “But it’s the only way she understands”. End of story: What can I say to such clear and effectual logic?

Yesterday, at a book sale, I came upon a book titled “The Book of Questions” with the subtitle Kids. I grabbed it and brusquely flipped through it, keenly hoping to discover among its pages some gems, some resources, some answers. But the book was deceptively faithful to its title. It was very simply, a book of questions, not answers. Stupid, I thought. What’s the big deal? I can write a book of questions. I want the answers.

But perhaps the answers cannot be clearly delineated. Perhaps the answers need to be navigated and negotiated, individually. Perhaps they can be glimpsed in the smile that gleams over the sticky, dusty kitchen counter. Or in that mystifying moment where a nudge or a shove triggers babbling laughs instead of shrieks.

In these moments, in the light that these glimpses reveal, I decide that I want to turn the impassioned no and the reasoned yes on their heads: To shout Yes, with an instructive measure of No, rather than to shout No, and concede Yes.

Post-script: I registered Sebastian for Chef Camp in Vancouver. Feeling very good about encouraging his passion for sifting, measuring, and mixing -- in someone else’s kitchen.

Sad and feel-good; blue and white; dark and light.

Yom Hashoah’s (Holocaust remembrance day) siren is something I look forward to: it heralds a portent of accord in a turbulent sea. I stand on Dizengoff street at 11 am as the nation-wide siren is sounded and watch a girl dismount her bicycle and stand next to it, a seated man get up off of the bench he’d been sitting on, drivers halt to a stop and get out of their vehicles, standing still next to their car doors. In the midst of chaos, insanity, balagan – the nation comes to a standstill and a sense of unity, togetherness, composure, sweeps the air. I take in the emotional gravity as my mind revisits an intensely emotional improvised scene set in the concentration camps from an acting class of the night before and brackish tears well up in my eyes.

The siren; and the sad songs on the radio… These are the days of sad quiet songs on the radio, the songs I love. The songs that everyone knows, that everyone sings along to. The songs that reflect the sadness and the achiness that we find ourselves embracing, relishing even; the songs that expose the slow lulling gloom that provides a welcome relief from the day-to-day motion and commotion. The songs that I look forward to savoring once again the following week, on Yom Hazikaron (Remembrance day for Israel’s fallen soldiers)…

Yom Hazikaron comes a week after Yom Hashoah, and on the heels of Yom Hazikaron (the very next day) rises Yom Ha’atzma’ut (Israel’s Independence Day). One sunny morning in the week between Yom Hashoah and Yom Hazikaron, Sebastian exclaims proudly, as I drop him off, “Ima, look at our new gan!” I look around me and observe a yizkor (memorial) candle placed in the middle of the room and Israel flags adorning the four walls.

Yom Hazikaron gets two sirens. The second, at 8 pm, comes as we are gathered with thousands of Tel Avivians in Rabin Square to participate in the Yom Hazikaron “Song Ceremony”. The siren sounds as I stand there and watch both my children standing still – no itching, no questioning, no fidgeting. We’re talking Liliana! Standing still. No questions. No answers. I watch her, the child I dub “Israel” because she exhibits the noise, the chaos, the craziness, the chutzpah, that bold inner confidence. 

She stands: Quietly. Respectfully. In unison with the motionless nation. What does she understand? Since when does she halt her activities and go with the flow? Is there no learning curve at the toddler/preschool age? Or is the weight of the collective so thick that it sticks to us, immobilizes us? The power of the unity, in these moments, it seems, is equal in its immensity to that of the chaos.

I watch with tears as the smiling faces of the nineteen, twenty-year old soldiers who are with us but are no longer grace the screen, as the bereaved faces of the parents tell their stories of loss, of breakdown, of resignation, and of resolve. And I listen with tears to the poems that these parents need to write in order to process their unfathomable pain, their immeasurable loss.

Poetry? In today’s world? Where is it still relevant? Here, in this small, hardened and vulnerable place, poetry is written, recited, read, and heard. There is something, I suppose, in poetry’s compact, pithy, and direct nature, in its open-endedness -- that is well suited to the painful and difficult experiences that make up life in a nation under siege.

This was a late night for the kids. The usual draining mess of a bedtime ritual had been aborted. No bath, splashes, giggles, pajamas, running, chasing, teeth brushing, a book, another, another, a song, a hug, water, a kiss, another kiss, GOOD NIGHT. Still, because of the late hour, I could feel myself pulling towards the door in an anticipated hasty escape as I was tucking Sebastian in. Layla tov chamudi (good night sweetie), I whispered, turning to the door. And at that moment: “Ima, what is Yom Hazikaron?” I relinquished my efforts to get to the dishes, the computer, the tv, and sat down. It’s when we remember people, Lance offers. “Why do we remember people?” We remember people who died, who are no longer with us. “Why do we stand in order to remember them?” We stop what we’re doing and stand in order to honor them. “Who was that bad man who wanted to kill everyone?” Hitler or Bin Laden? “Why was he bad?”  It’s like we sometimes have quarrels or arguments but we don’t make up, it’s always good to make up and reconcile, I rattled on, trying to turn a negative into a positive lesson, to find the teachable moment etcetera etcetera. Suddenly, Sebastian promptly and assuredly concluded: “I will not die. Even when I’ll be 100 years old, I won’t die.” I smiled a sad smile, said good night again, gave him another kiss, and left the room.

The transition from Yom Hazikaron to Yom Ha’atzmaut is stark. It moves from darkness to light: there is no gray. The following night was Yom Ha’atzma’ut and Sebastian went to sleep to the merry sounds of fireworks. Lance and I sang and danced wildly in the streets. With a few thousand of our fellow citizens.

On Acting and National Reverberations

The eve of Yom Hashoah (Holocaust Remembrance Day) fell on a Sunday this year. Sunday evenings I have my acting classes. They are my weekly staple, my feel-good constant. True to its nature, the class, like the show, must go on. But in this part of the world – it goes on, modifying and adjusting itself, week after week, in light of the national hues that impart to it their color, their darkness and light. On Purim, appropriately, we worked with costumes and masks. But on this day, a few weeks back -- on the eve of Yom Hashoah – the atmosphere that was generated in service of the work at hand was especially poignant. A series of exercises designed to guide us through an “inner journey” focused on intimacy and parting and yielded powerful emotional responses. The last hour of the class is always dedicated to improvised scenes.  I paired up with my friend Romina and when I turned to my partner with my usual “so what are we gonna do? what’s our relationship? conflict? etc.” she offered, in her typically direct manner, “hey it’s yom hashoah, let’s go with it, all the way.” And so we did. Here is the story we created: We were two friends, together in the camps. The shared history that brought us together is that we were standing next to each other during the transport and watched our children ripped from us, get on the train together. My Sebastian and her Ariel were holding hands. They were laughing and singing. This was the last we saw them. We began the scene with Romina offering me a morsel of bread that she had saved for me, and announcing that she has been “selected” to go to work at the place wherefrom I knew, no one had ever returned. I could not let her go. “Maybe I’ll see them again,” she uttered longingly, as we inhabited our respective characters. “I can hear them singing…” And I rejoined, laughing, “Remember them, my Sebastian and your Ariel holding hands and singing and laughing as they got on board the transport car? Hineh ma tov u-ma-na’im, saba nafal la-mayim…” (here the classic song that begins with how sweet and pleasant it is, is rascally upended when to sit together in brotherhood  is replaced with the playful kid-version rhyme grandpa fell in the water) As I hummed, in character, this amusing roguish version of the song that I had heard my real-life Sebastian sing gleefully, an impish sparkle catching his eye, just the other day, laughter turned into sobs, and in that moment, where laughter and tears mingled, I felt exposed, pure, and entirely whole. The realness of this made-up scene was extraordinary. I realized: not only does the nation wield herself upon the individual, but the individual too, can impinge on the national. Not only did yom hashoah permeate the art of acting, the art of acting also gave shape to the experience of yom hashoah.

I rode my bicycle home that night thinking: only in Israel.  This deeply emotional experience could not have happened in an acting class anywhere else in the world. It is a function of being in a place where everyone shares a common sense of history and destiny. Our acting teacher encourages us to bring in stuff we’ve written to share with the group. On several occasions I have found myself engrossed by my classmates’ readings, processing the political sensibility of some of their very personal writings. National moments here are excavated through the individual lens. 

Racheli once read a piece she had written on the eve of her son’s induction to the army, a visceral response to driving by a memorial site with the name Uri on it, her son’s name, and wondering how the young man with the epitaph had died. Rosie read a piece about her personal and emotional response to the evacuation of the settlements in the West Bank. The inextricable link between the private and the collective in this blistering piece of land is potent. As the nerves and the tensions are pared through the individual lens, and shared, a sense of unity and accord, of intimacy and familiarity, sets in. In these moments, this country, where there are three opinions for every two people, seems to stop, and listen -- before rejoining in opposition. To me, the enthrallment is in the listening – and in the arguing. It lies in the vibrations of both behaviors, in what I believe, can be summed up in a word: אכפתיות echpatiut –– caring.