My grandfather died on Saturday morning. He was 97, and he was beloved.

Within 36 hours of his passing, over 100 friends and family members gathered at his country club (my grandfather wasn’t religious—the golf course was his sanctuary) to remember him, console each other, and support my grandmother. We recalled his love of pickles and bialys, his decades as a jazz musician, and his commitment to early morning lake swims, regardless of the water temperature. Most of all, we remembered how much he loved his family, especially my grandmother, his wife of over 50 years.

I’m back home with my husband and daughters now, and I’m feeling foggy, sad, and exhausted. Rosh Hashanah starts tonight, and I’m not quite sure what to do with everything. Just last week I was buying crafts for the children’s services at our synagogue. I was thinking about my intentions for the new year, and wondering whether or not my preschooler will actually try the honey this year, and how I’ll get it out of my toddler’s hair. Now I’m worried about my grandmother and how she will weather this transition. Now I’m missing my grandfather, and remembering when he sang at my wedding almost 8 years ago—the dance floor was packed, the band loved him, and no one could believe he was 90 years old.

Two weeks ago I went to a class at our synagogue about the High Holidays. Our Rabbi spoke about traditional greetings for the new year, and she reminded us that while we may wish each other a sweet or good new year, we don’t usually offer greetings for a happy new year. She was only partially joking when she said that we all know it’s not going to be a happy year, so why even say it? Read the rest of this entry →

• Posted in Parenting
• Tags: death, Grandparents, mourning, rosh hashanah

I used to be really good at #5 but now that I'm a parent myself, not so much.

For years, the commandment to “Honor thy mother and father” always came ridiculously easily to me. I was the dorky kid in high school who, while I did my fair share of partying, never missed a curfew, and who always ran to tell my parents the details of every excellent grade or youth group accomplishment. In college I remained the nice Jewish girl, an overachiever who always wanted to please and impress my parents with tales of my academic successes and leadership activities. Sure, I had my wild frat party moments, but overall, I worked hard and made responsible decisions because I wanted to honor my parents’ unconditional love, generosity, and support.

Post-college, through jobs, grad school, and marriage, I remained the good Jewish girl, always wanting to obey, respect and please my parents. That is, until our baby Eliana was born three months ago.

All the sudden, there was a 7-pound, pink-clad, new boss in town.–and I stopped trying to please my parents. It wasn’t my hormone-ridden teenage years that initiated my rebellion and sense of independence, but my hormone-ridden early days of motherhood. All the sudden my new family of three became the priority.

It started the night she came home from the hospital, after an incredibly stressful five-day stay in the NICU. My husband, daughter, and I needed time to adjust to our new life at home. Pre-baby, when my parents used to visit, we’d all stay up late spending extra time with my mom and dad by watching old movies of my childhood. On that first night at home, I sent my parents back to their hotel room before 8 pm. And then every night after that for the remainder of their three-week visit. I was a new parent, and this was definitely new terrain. Read the rest of this entry →

• Posted in Baby & Toddler, Parenting
• Tags: 10 commandments, breaking rules, Grandparents, new baby

The tiny Jewish cemetery in the mountains looks a lot like this.

My husband’s mother died almost seven years ago, of a heart attack. One day she was teaching first grade, the next day she was gone. She’s buried at a beautiful, quiet cemetery up in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York. We drive to the Catskills every summer to visit family, and always stop at the cemetery along the way. The experience has changed over the years. First we were dating, then we were married. Then I was pregnant, then we brought our baby. But every year we stand by her grave, and tell the story of our lives over the past year.

So it didn’t occur to me that I should do anything differently this year. In the car on the way up, I decided that the best way to talk about things with my almost-2-year-old was to say, “This is where we go when we want to talk to Bubbe Sharry.” I was actually proud of this brilliant idea. And then we got out of the car.

Abigail was tired and a little bit cranky. Dan had her help him collect rocks to put on the gravestones (his grandparents and some cousins are buried there too). She liked finding rocks. And she liked putting the rocks in their places, and noticing the flowers and bugs in the grass. But then we started talking to Bubbe Sharry and that didn’t go over well. I started tearing up, and when I tried to explain that this is where we go to talk to Bubbe Sharry, Abigail said, “Want to see Bubbe Sharry!”

Then I really started to cry. (Of course seeing her mommy cry only made things worse for our 2-year-old!) Abigail, I want to see Bubbe Sharry too. I wish I’d really known my mother-in-law. We were lucky to have met twice. Rumor has it, she liked me. I liked her. It would have been nice to have been able to hear more about how she raised children. And I’m sure we wouldn’t agree on everything, but I would’ve liked to have known her.

Explaining death to a 2-year-old is complicated. And perhaps close to impossible—they’re so young. But as luck would have it, they have selective little memories. Abigail seems to have forgotten the cemetery, but she certainly remembers the chicken nuggets she had for lunch that day. Us adults, on the other hand, have long memories, filled with the people who’ve come before us, who made us who we are, and whom we thank for giving us the gift of life. Ashkenazi Jews name our children after our ancestors who’ve passed away, both to honor their memories and in hopes that the child will have some of the traits of the deceased. We knew from day one that Abigail would take after her namesake Bubbe Sharry—after all, they both were multiple-sneezers. And we hope that she’ll take after her grandmother in many other ways: her kindness, her warmth, her hospitality, and her incredible love for family.

And if collecting rocks at the cemetery is part of helping our daughter take after her bubbe, well, I don’t think it’s such a bad plan after all.

• Posted in Baby & Toddler, Parenting
• Tags: Bubbe, cemetery, death, Grandparents, mother-in-law

Every time I see a blog post by Renee Septimus I take a deep breath and read with a nervous flutter in the pit of my stomach.  The same portion of my anatomy that has been newly ulcerated by the searing judgment of someone who thinks I’m doing it wrong or they did it better. Grandma Renee has told us to put down our breast pumps, stop talking on our cell phones, and not to let our child cry for more than 45 seconds for fear of permanent brain damage.  If that isn’t condescending, I’m not sure what is.

Much of the same started rolling my way less than a week after my son was born.  People were examining us as if we were auditioning to be parents. Watching us struggle with nursing, with sleeping, with balance.  Some did it quietly with odd glances and “helpful” comments to sing to him more, shhhsh him less, rock him more, swaddle him less, feed him more, bathe him more, while others laid it out there without a shred of finesse or tact. Three days before my first Mother’s Day I got an email from a family member outlining all of the ways in which I had failed my son in his first three months of life. The letter urged me to put down the books and “…start relying on common sense and advice from the people you love. You are supposed to be such an educated woman, start being a mother to this baby and take care of him properly” with a few jabs at the end about how my grandmother, of blessed memory, would be appalled at the mother I had become.  You would have thought I was putting cigarettes out on his arms while feeding him rat poison from my bloody nipples. That criticism burned like salt in my open wounds. I didn’t need to be told that I was being a terrible mother when I was already telling myself that very thing every minute of every day.

I’ve struggled a lot with this over the past year and all the therapy in the world can’t take away those comments. Most of my new-mama friends share similar stores, and while my family seems to have been more forward than most, I can tell you that Ms. Septimus isn’t the first grandma to classify cry-it-out as a form of child abuse.

I’ve narrowed it down to two things, grandparents forget and the vast majority of parenting literature was developed over the last 30 years.  For them, “parenting strategies”, “sleep solutions” and “attachment parenting” were things you learned through trial and error, not something you read about in a book. You didn’t use an electric gadget to suck milk out of your breasts or talk on your cell phone because they weren’t invented yet.  You couldn’t have read about Harvey Karp’s “Five S’s” because his findings weren’t published until after the new millennium.  You can’t remember what you had for lunch last week so don’t tell me your baby didn’t scream at night during his first week of life. I don’t want to sound disrespectful because advice and supportive words from family can be worth their weight in gold to a new mother, but organizations like La Leche League were founded because over the past 50 years, family systems have changed and new parents are looking to books and experts for support because they don’t have an elder lactating woman in the house to offer a breast while they figure it out.

Perhaps our new-fangled parenting methodologies are a slap in the face to the ways in which we were raised or maybe it seems disloyal to accept scientific theories over the advice of our own flesh and blood.  But in the end, that’s the license that comes with having a child of your own. You get to figure it out for yourself and slowly and dynamically turn into the parents you hope to be. My son is and has always been well fed, rested, healthy, and happy and at the end of the day we do what works best for our little family.

This mother’s day just tell your daughter, daughter-in-law, granddaughter that she is an amazing mom, because even if she doesn’t do it exactly the way you think she should, take a nice long look at your beautiful grandchild and know that she wakes up in the morning with a desire to do her best and goes to bed each night with a promise to do better tomorrow. Just like every Mama I know.

• Posted in Parenting
• Tags: grandmothers, Grandparents, sleep, Sleep training

Every once in a while, it hits me like a soft pillow. I am a matriarch!

This year, for the first time, we are going to my daughter’s house for the first days of Passover. She is exactly the same age I was when my parents first began coming to me and my sister who lived around the corner. Nearly a quarter century has passed since the day we told our parents that it was time to give up the seder in their home, where bodies slept all over the Upper West Side apartment in which I grew up, and come out to Queens where they, and my brother’s family, could be put up more comfortably.

In our house, we had put in a small Pesach kitchen in the basement where I cooked for days, enlisting the kids as “helpers.” Yes, sometimes it was the kind of help you could do without. But we had lots of fun–daughter #1 dipped chicken cutlets in egg and matzah meal, son #1 de-bugged the maror lettuce, daughter #2 made knaidlach (matzah balls) and son #2 played in the chopped meat trying to form meatballs. We all grated the horseradish and mixed the haroset together. Invariably, the smoke detector let out a piercing screech in the middle of all the hoopla and I had to climb up to disconnect it. Our ears rang for a while. As I said, it was a small kitchen.

It was a lot of work and I did get crabby. I always say that if you prepare for Pesach you get an inside look at slavery. But the excitement and togetherness of the preparations were not only educational, they created enthusiasm for, and pride in, the finished project. We’d set the table together and the kids would put out their hand-made place cards. Each seder would begin with my acknowledgment of, and thanks to, each child for her/his particular contribution.

Since my grandsons were 2, they have come over the day before the holiday to help me prepare the ritual foods. We talk about the story of the Exodus and I reminisce about the seders I had with my own grandparents. According to custom, I acknowledge and thank the kids for their help (again, the kind of help you could, under other circumstances, do without.)

This year, I will cook at home and go to my daughter’s on Sunday night. Monday, I will repeat the ritual with my two boys and, for the first time, with their 20-month old sister in their kitchen. We’ll set the table together and put out hand-made place cards and  discuss the Exodus story. And they will again listen raptly to my reminiscences about seders with my Nana and Poppa, my Grandma and Grandpa. (I am a compelling storyteller, if I do say so myself.)

I have asked my children to work out among themselves that my husband and I are not alone on a holiday. So we are off to New Jersey while two of our kids go to Israel and one to Brooklyn with their respective in-laws. It will be a smaller seder than usual for us, but I am anticipating it happily.

My husband and I will sit at a different table this year. But, as in the past, I will look at the precious faces around the table and my eyes will fill with tears of joy and gratitude. I will be thinking of the unique confluence of past, present, and future the seder represents to me. I will remember when my grandmothers were the matriarchs and then my mother. I will be mildly astonished, yet again, that I now fill that role. And I will look forward to other holidays, other tables, other faces joining us as our family expands.

One day, I’ll be missing. But I am pretty sure that my grandchildren will make the ritual foods and reminisce about the seders they spent with their Savta and Zaidie. And maybe they’ll even recall the proud smile and teary eyes that Savta always seemed to have as she looked around the table.

Because then, you see, I will be there, no matter where they are, no matter which table they are sitting at.

• Posted in Parenting
• Tags: Grandparents, Passover, seder

Did you see the article in the New York Times about the Upper Breast Side? I went to that store with my daughters and I just loved it! It was the only time I felt understood and appreciated when I said that I wanted to re-lactate so I could nurse my soon-to-be-born twin grandsons. I got nods of approval and appreciation. My daughter was mortified.

I’m sure that in the old days when moms had children at a younger age, they and their daughters often had babies at the same time. And it would have made perfect sense, when a baby cried, to have had the nearest nursing mom pick up the baby and feed it even if it was the grandmother, not the mother. After all, wet nurses weren’t even related.

Back to the article. What caught my eye was that the owner does not carry “nursing covers” because, she said, “Have you ever tried eating while covering yourself with a shower curtain?”

I don’t like those covers either but for a different reason. They seem to symbolize the difference of how my generation of moms and that of today view nursing. As I’ve written before, for us it was not so much about the milk, but about the baby.

When I nursed, I sat in a comfortable chair with my feet up or lay in bed and immersed myself in the feel and sound of the baby sucking, her smell and the smell of my milk, the silky hair I stroked and the miracle I beheld. All those sensations contributed to making each (most) episode(s) of nursing a profoundly sensual and spiritual experience. (Which, by the way, I believe can be replicated with a bottle.) My older children (two were 2 ½ and one was 5 when their next younger siblings were born) knew that it was mommy and baby’s special time. They could play, read or lie near me and after the nursing, they, too would get my undivided attention. (I must admit that occasionally I had to get up and wipe a tush with my free hand.)

My contemporaries did not nurse in public because we knew it made people feel uncomfortable. (The fact that women do now, regardless, is the subject of another whole article but, in my opinion, probably has to do with the blurring of public and private space due to cell phones and social networking, as well as a sense of entitlement….) We knew we would not be going to certain places and events because we had to stay home with nursing infants and that we would have to excuse ourselves from interesting conversations to breastfeed. It was a given that nursing meant we would exclude ourselves from many social situations and public places. And if we absolutely had to go somewhere, or didn’t want to miss out on something in particular, most of us left a relief bottle of formula with no sense of guilt.

We did not have breast pumps and certainly never considered freezing milk. We expressed milk in the shower to relieve engorgement and didn’t worry much about whether the baby was getting enough milk unless she wasn’t gaining weight. We just seemed more relaxed than today’s nursing mothers. (And, I might add, we were not hard on moms who chose not to breast-feed the way many Kveller readers and bloggers seem to be. We respected that women make their own informed decisions.) The women I’ve observed nursing often look physically uncomfortable and don’t seem to be enjoying themselves. I think, again, that it’s because when we nursed, it was about the baby, not the milk. Using a nursing cover was unthinkable–not only because we didn’t nurse in public, but because we wanted, we needed to see the baby we were feeding.

As a young friend (who is a mother of a small child, is now pregnant and has a career) suggested to me recently, perhaps the emphasis on the milk has to do with the fact that so many women are working outside the home and feel that if they can’t have the full experience of nursing frequently throughout the day, at least the baby has their milk in a bottle. That may be so.

But I do hope that, 20 or 30 years from now, when today’s young mothers look back, they won’t regret that they did not make the most of the time when their babies were at their breasts.

Want to read more about breastfeeding? Mayim Bialik certainly believes that breast is best.  Kveller gets the scoop on a formula shortage in Brooklyn. And one dad on why breastfeeding sucks.

• Posted in Parenting
• Tags: breastfeeding, Grandparents

Maybe every generation needs it own story.

We had the film “Kramer vs. Kramer” (and the Avery Corman novel upon which it was based) in which Meryl Streep walked out on her adorable son and husband, Dustin Hoffman, to “find herself.” You young parents have the more shocking Hiroshima in the Morning. More shocking because it’s true.

I somehow missed hearing about this book until last week. I have not yet read it I but understand, from the reviews I have read, and an interview with author Rahna Reiko Rizzuto which I caught on TV,  that it describes the mother of two young sons (age 3 and 5) going off to Japan for several months for a professional assignment with her husband’s blessing. While there she comes to terms with the feeling that she never wanted children and does not want to be a wife and mother. She ends up divorcing, moving out of the family home but living close by, leaving the children with, she assures us, her most competent husband.

First of all, the guy must be a saint.

Second of all, it seems a little late for her to wake up and realize she didn’t want kids.

Third of all, I bet there’s not a mother in the world who hasn’t felt like fleeing marriage and motherhood at least once in her life. I still feel like that occasionally and my kids are married!

I do think that if a mother is not happy, her kids won’t be happy. Which is why I think every woman must, for herself, figure out the best balance of home and work and should consider very, very carefully, if and when she wants to be a mother.

It seems reasonable to take at least as much time deciding if you want kids before you have them, as you do deciding which college to attend, whether and where to study abroad, which profession to pursue and which man to marry.

But one wonders how many people actually think about whether to have children, and if so, how many children. Do they consider what a child needs from her/his parent and if the parent is able to provide that, especially while dedicating a lot of time to a satisfying profession or anything else which requires physical and emotional energy? And despite the pressure in society (and Jewish society in particular) to have children, the expectation that it’s just what one does after getting married, some people just should not have kids.

It seems to me that Rizzuto was pretty slow figuring out what she wanted. And there is not a doubt in my mind that her abdication of her family makes her kids unhappy. I don’t believe her when she insists that they “were not traumatized.” (And I would say the same thing if I was talking about the father in the family.) Especially because, no matter how much she loves them, those kids, now teenagers, know that their mom feels she would have been happier without them. Not only do the kids know it, but their friends and acquaintances, not to mention the rest of us, now know it, too.

In my opinion, Rizzutto should not have written this book. It’s one thing to get divorced. It’s another thing to let your kids, and the world, know that you think you would have been better off without them and you didn’t want to be a mother.

For her children’s sake, I really think she should have kept those little details a deep, dark secret.

Check out what Kveller blogger Carla Naumburg has to say about the book.

• Posted in Parenting
• Tags: Grandparents

Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex playing at the Varsity Theater in 1973.

My daughter has a friend who is a single mother by choice. The other day, she braced herself for a conversation she was not yet ready to have when her son asked,

“Does Avi have a father? Does Donna have a husband?”  My daughter matter-of-factly replied, “No.” “Well then,” my grandson continued with a pause,” who does things for her?”

I just heard about several unmarried sisters who bought a house together and adopted children to create a new family. Our gay friends recently had a daughter through an egg donor and a surrogate. All this within the observant Modern Orthodox world of which we are a part.

When I was raising kids, things were simpler, but not better. The “modern families” enrich the community. But the “birds and bees” conversation has gotten a lot longer.

I am of the opinion that kids can accept things pretty easily if explanations are age-appropriate, honest and given clearly in language they understand. Most important is that the explanations be given within the value system of the parents, consistent with other beliefs previously taught. Information needs context.

It seems to me that the easy part is Introduction to Sex for the little kids because procreative sex isn’t so hard to explain although, admittedly, it certainly does sound strange (especially when you really think about it). I remember that the morning after I had explained it to my own 7-year-old daughter and cautioned her not to discuss it with her friends (that was all I needed), she urgently called me into the bathroom for a private conference. “Mommy, if it doesn’t work (the egg and sperm getting together to make a baby), do you have to do it again?”

It’s recreational sex that is the challenge.

My son was in sixth grade when I nominated and elected myself to have a “teen-age” conversation with him about sex. It was taboo in my husband’s home growing up so he couldn’t handle it (the conversation, I mean!) but I came into my son’s room relaxed and confident. I just started talking. The first pink blush started right away, at the base of his throat. By the time I was up to “erection,” the blush was all over his face. When I got up to “masturbation,” he was bright red. I thought I was doing a great job, so I asked with some exasperation, “What’s the matter? Why are you so embarrassed?” “Most moms don’t talk to their kids like this,” he said.

Well that’s a problem. In the same way kids learn about other things from their parents, by what they say and what they do, and by inserting their value system as context, they need to learn about sex, too. And the generation that is now being born and raised, is learning way too much, too early and from the wrong sources. I am stymied by the challenge young parents will have. How do you teach respect for women when the sexualization of female bodies appears all over–on large posters, store windows, books, magazines and movies? How do you teach respect for the sexual act when it is promoted only as feel-good fun without consequences? How do you teach respect for life itself when casual sex is accessible and acceptable but can be a matter of life and death?

My next “sex” conversation with my son was right before college. That time he didn’t blush. We discussed some particulars but the main message I wanted to emphasize was that going away to college involved personal maturity, a high level of personal responsibility, and respect for others and oneself.

So, good luck. Maybe you’ll be lucky and by the time your kids are teenagers,  chastity belts, for girls and boys, will be as cool as iPads are now. Maybe they’ll even be remote controlled.

For more advice from this grandmother, check out what she has to say about discipline and breastfeeding.

• Posted in Parenting
• Tags: Grandparents, sex

• Posted in Parenting
• Tags: Grandparents

As the first grandchild on my maternal side, I had the task of inventing a name for my grandmother, who felt she was too young, at 50, for a traditional title (Grandma, Nana, Grammy or Granny). At the time, the all-powerful name Bubbe was spoken for by my great grandmother, who reigned over our New England family with her bobye-mase, blintz and babushkas until my sophomore year at Connecticut College. Even if the old world reference had been available, I know the woman I dubbed Gammi, would never have gone for it.

In this new generation of assimilated Jews with very little tying them to their Eastern European heritage, I’m concerned about what will happen to the Bubbe? Will the Bubbe become extinct?

I’m not talking about preserving the orthopedic shoes or the gray hair that Renee Septimus writes about in Grandma Wears Heels and Doesn’t Bake Cakes. Gray Hair? No way. I don’t expect modern Jewish grandmothers to overfeed their little ones chicken fat and tongue sandwiches. And I understand if they want to plump up their pores with Botox, now and then. I like the idea of a beautiful Bubbe. But the person who carries that title—Bubbe—holds the responsibility of passing on tradition (religious, cultural, and familial) from generation to generation.

So with just 10 months to go until I walk down the aisle and under the chupah to marry my true love—who thankfully still has his wonderful Bubbe—I asked my beautiful blonde mother, what she thought about taking on the title role of Bubbe, one day in the future, when we are ready to start a family. I mean she already makes a killer mandle bread and has a Miriam cup at her Seder—she’s basically bridging the gap. “Bubbe was the head of our family,” my mother said, “She was our strength. I would be honored to follow in her footsteps.”

I know for sure my mother will never wear a schmate on her head or a pastel tracksuit, but that’s not what makes a Bubbe. It’s tradition. So, to future grandmothers out there, I ask you to consider it, bring the name Bubbe back.

• Posted in Parenting
• Tags: Grandparents