It’s a bit embarrassing. I didn’t even tell my friends. But now that it’s over, I confess: my new year’s resolution for 2013 was to take driving lessons.

Yes, I already had a driver’s license. I’ve had a license since I was 17 and living in the New York suburbs. But I left for college in Boston shortly before my 18^th birthday, and ever since, I’ve lived within walking distance of Boston’s T or Washington’s Metro system. I never owned a car and never really needed one. I took the train or a bus nearly everywhere. Read the rest of this entry →

• Posted in Parenting
• Tags: driving, fear, resolutions

The fear can sometimes be so intense that it feels nearly unbearable.

True, being a parent brings with it unparalleled joy, fulfillment and, of course, exhaustion, but the knowledge that our primary responsibility in this world is to keep our children safe is almost too much to handle; it is both an incomparable responsibility and incomparably fear-inducing.

We need to keep our kids safe from choking while nibbling their first soggy Cheerio. We need to keep them safe in the bath, even when the water is no higher than their chubby thighs. In the car we strap them in. On the playground we call out “slow down!” We try to protect them from the wind on their chapped cheeks, from the rash on their tush, from the concrete as they learn to walk, and run, and bike. Read the rest of this entry →

• Posted in Parenting
• Tags: empathy, fear, protection, sandy hook

I remember a conversation I had with my grandmother not long before she died. She was in a hospital bed that had been set up in the dining room; she hadn’t been able to climb the stairs to the second floor of her house for years. I pulled a chair close, and asked her if she used to light candles on Friday night back when she was a little girl in Northern Italy.

The question had been chosen carefully, and with great intention. I knew that if I asked her if she was Jewish, if we were Jewish, she would vehemently deny it. But when I asked her about the candles, my grandmother smiled and told me about cleaning the house every Friday, about cooking all afternoon, and yes, she told me, of course they lit candles.  Read the rest of this entry →

• Posted in Parenting
• Tags: anti-semitism, fear, Israel, thanksgiving

Three weeks after Jared was born, he started spitting up. At first it was normal baby barf, but it became heavier and more frequent.

By his 4-week birthday, Scott and I were living out of the washing machine. We left it full of soap and water, dumping soiled onesies, footies, burp cloths, bibs, and our own vomit-soaked clothes into it throughout the day. We ran the washer at night and as we needed new clothes for ourselves or our son, we pulled them out of the dryer. At the height of the worst, Scott changed Jared’s clothes five times in one hour. The footies were soaked from head to toe and front to back. Read the rest of this entry →

• Posted in Parenting
• Tags: emergencies, fear, health, Hospital

“Mommy, who’s going to take care of me when you and Daddy die?”

This from the mouth of a child who is not yet 4 years old. My child. My first born, my daughter who has a tender, anxious soul and wisdom beyond her years. She made me a mother and challenges me every day to question my beliefs and face my fears.

She’s been curious about death lately. I’m not sure where she heard the word, but she seems to have grasped the concept. She understands that death means someone is gone and that they’re not coming back. She’s still struggling with the details; she recently asked “where we fall” when we die, or if we “pop.” I can handle those questions–even if I don’t have the right answers, I’m ok muddling through until I find something good enough that seems to work for her little brain. (We finally settled on “you just stop” as the answer to what happens, and that seemed to work for her.) Read the rest of this entry →

• Posted in Parenting
• Tags: death, fear, featured

Will Sarah's kids stop to smell the Jasmine?

About a year ago, I started highlighting my hair, wearing skinny jeans, and painting my nails black.

“What, you think you’re Ke$ha all of a sudden?” B. asked while he watched me zip up my high heel hooker boots–the ones with the gun metal grey studs on the sides.

I feigned indignation. But as visions of brushing my teeth with a bottle of jack flitted through my mind, I was secretly thrilled. Read the rest of this entry →

• Posted in Parenting
• Tags: fear, kibbutz

The 10^th anniversary of the September 11^th attacks is this Sunday. Although Jews don’t usually acknowledge tenth anniversaries any differently from others, this one will be different, if for no other reason than the media is giving it a lot of press. Needless to say, it’s on my mind.

If I didn’t have children, I would probably spend some time this year remembering the attacks, mourning the many, many losses our country sustained on that terrible day, and feeling angry—mostly at those who would perpetrate such terror, but also at those who use this tragedy as an excuse for further acts of hatred and discrimination.

But I do have kids now, so my focus has shifted away from my own reactions. The girls are still young, so I’m not yet worried about how I will talk to them about what happened that day, and how our country has changed since then. But this anniversary has made me think about how terrorism (both the events of 9/11 and the resulting war on terror) has impacted me, both as a person and as a parent.  It’s difficult to put words to it, though. In fact, it’s hard for me to remember the tone of our national discourse before the fall of 2001. I was living in Albuquerque, starting my graduate degree in social work. I had just begun dating the man who is now my husband. I was just figuring out who I was, and who I would become, and the aftermath of 9/11 is so deeply intertwined with my growth in adulthood that I can’t disentangle the two.

As I remember September 11, the first thing that comes to mind, of course, is the fear—the fear that flooded our country that day and the days that followed, the fear for our physical safety, for the future of our country, and for the Jewish people. Of course, we Jews are no strangers to fear, even from an early age. I remember a childhood conversation with my grandmother (who lived through World War II in Italy) about our Jewish heritage, and her response was a worried plea to “Never tell anyone.” Perhaps the most notable part of the conversation was that her words didn’t surprise me, and I didn’t wonder why she felt that way. Read the rest of this entry →

• Posted in Parenting
• Tags: fear, september 11

I think that when you become a parent you discover an entire new set of fears.  It can include, but is not limited to: germs, food additives, antibiotics, vaccines…<insert fear-of-the-month here>.  My husband and I, well, we are afraid of dying.  Not the fear of slowly wasting away in a nursing home, but of dying young, soon, perhaps tomorrow.  Alex’s mother died without warning when he was seven years old and my father died when I was four.  This shared experience bonded us together from the night we met.

I often wonder how this will affect the way we raise our son.  I suppose it will take time to see how our neuroses manifest themselves.  I can recognize two ways so far.

The first way is none too detrimental, I think.  It’s just that I take pictures.  Hundreds of them.  I update my Picasa albums and YouTube channel obsessively, and I pounce on every online deal for canvas prints, photography sessions, and photo albums.  I have spent countless hours working on these photo albums.  At first my husband couldn’t understand why they were so important to me.  I asked him if he wouldn’t pay any amount of money to have something like this of his mother.  If something should happen to either of us, Aiven could put a story together from the pictures, videos, albums, and blog postings.  Alex and I would do anything to have the story of our deceased parents, so now I find myself documenting everything about our own lives.

The second way our fear of death manifests itself is that Alex and I try to live for today more than worrying about the future.  Thus, we take more risks than our peers and more than our families are comfortable with.  We strive to keep our eyes open to the extraordinary moments, opportunities, and memories unfolding before us.

Alex and I decided a few months ago to leave New York City.  We love it here but it is too expensive; we did not want to both work crazy hours just to pay the rent and childcare.  At the moment, we are both unemployed, lacking health insurance (COBRA wanted $2500 a month–hiss!), and packing up our things to go into storage.  Most people would be scrambling to find jobs.  Instead, we are about to embark on a journey for 82 days to Ireland, Scotland, England, France, and Spain.  We figured that before we reboot the daily grind, we should take an extended vacation.  Unplug.  See the stars.  Most importantly, bond with Aiven, as a couple, and as a family.

After this adventure we are relocating to Austin, Texas.  My husband may have a job when he arrives there, or he may not.  We don’t even have a place to live.  To top it all off, I cashed in my 401K.  It wasn’t a significant sum, but it will pay for the summer.  I could have waited until I was 65 to use it, but who says I am going to be around then?  I would rather spend the money now.  The most important consideration for us was that we may not have this opportunity again for many, many years…if ever.

Some might accuse us of being irresponsible, unstable, or gambling with our child’s future.  We call it not living with regrets.  I just hope that we do not live to regret it.

• Posted in Parenting
• Tags: death, fear, featured

The Torah commands us to “fear your mother and your father.”  When I came across this verse, I had to laugh. I don’t think it’s even entered my son’s head to fear us. And yet, it’s the foundation of all morality according to the Torah and the rabbinic tradition. If you don’t learn to fear and respect your parents, you don’t learn to fear and respect God. Or so they say.

But how to command respect? Turns out that it’s not won through amazing negotiation skills. Or kindness and understanding in the face of total preschooler meltdown. Nope, it’s all about the fear factor.

We don’t hit. My husband and I have long been in agreement about not using corporal punishment with our children. It’s not that I think that spanking is horrible, per se, I just find that the moments that I really WANT to hit my child are precisely the moments that I should not. Hitting a child out of anger is not about discipline—it’s about losing control. And I fear that once I gave myself permission to solve problems this way, it would be far too easy to lash out when the going got tough.

And yet it’s REALLY hard to keep a child in line without the element of fear. “Spare the rod, spoil the child?” Hell yeah. There’s only so many “natural consequences” you can come up with—on the spot, no less–for some of the crazy things that four-year-olds do.

We recently discussed this with close friends of ours and learned that their approach was surprisingly old-school. Like, wash your mouth out with soap for bad language old-school. And it made me realize that perhaps my belief that upper-middle-class parents “don’t do that” was completely delusional. I’d like to think that everyone’s as soft as we are—that we’re all stuck in this post-modern parenting trap together. But that might just be wishful thinking.

All of this talk of fear and respect has finally emboldened me to start demanding a little more from our 4-year-old. For now we’re focusing on the use of time out. Once reserved for clocking other children on the head type infractions, it’s now being used for things that were never time-out worthy before, like raising your voice at a parent. Things that are not about hurting someone, or breaking something, but simply a matter of respect.

More than anything, we want our son to be a mentsch, a good person. And we see so much good in him. But we also see so much 4-year-old boy selfishness and disobedience.  So it’s our job to show him how to love others, respect authority–human and divine–and be a positive force in the world. Rod or no rod, it’s messy work.

• Posted in Parenting
• Tags: Discipline, fear