The Start of a Resolution

I’ve never been one for resolutions, mostly because I’ve never been one to keep them. But for 2016, having missed the boat for the start of 5776, I decided to give the resolution thing another try.

Resolutions are about change, about pausing to steer our mindset and our behavior in a new direction. They are not about altering our personality, which would be impossible, or taking on something so unrealistic that we set ourselves up for failure. My previous attempts at sticking to them tanked for this reason exactly – well, that and the fact that my heart wasn’t in the enterprise from the outset.

This time, I’m going to tackle it another way.

I devoted a lot of energy in 2015 to decluttering our house, a daunting campaign to rid ourselves of the stuff that weighed us down. Our home now feels lighter, and I know I got there only because I cut the project into little tasks that I then accomplished one at a time. I’m thinking that by applying that same approach to a resolution, I stand a far better chance of success.

But which resolution should I start with and how should I divide it into smaller, manageable pieces?

Life, as it does, soon pointed me in the right direction, because when you’re looking, the blessings are often right in front of you. I attended a lecture about giving thanks, and within days stumbled upon numerous articles covering the same theme. The importance of appreciation – feeling it, expressing it, letting it warm and fill us until it alters our worldview and our approach to daily life – wasn’t a new concept, though the reminder was exactly what I needed.

One thing I read deeply moved me. Though a generic thanks is nice, a specific one is better. Essentially, this: Break gratitude down into parts. Express appreciation individually – to G-d, spouse, children, extended family, friends, and other people we know, as well as total strangers, like the ones who offer an unsolicited kindness when we’re having a rough moment. And say exactly what we’re grateful for, noting both the sublime and the everyday, from the splendor of spring-in-December weather to the fact that my boys put 80s music on my iPhone.

Armed with a plan, I picked up a notebook that I won’t call a gratitude journal for fear it will jinx me before I get started. But I hope, come January 1, to start each day by jotting down one thing, maybe two, that I’m grateful for. I know there will be times when it will be hard to see the forest for the trees. Still, this is a resolution I think I can own. After all, there’s so much to be thankful for once we decide to take notice.

The Happy Weight of Marriage

On a recent Thursday, Kveller kindly published my blog post about how we are a changed household since I began setting the Shabbos table on Thursday night, rather than leaving the task to the last moment on Friday. It was my husband’s idea, inspired by Rabbi Paysach Krohn, and it’s true that his suggestion that “we” take it on really meant I’d be the one doing it.

I loved hearing from people who said that setting their tables that Thursday night had made their Friday more peaceful. Others made me smile by telling me it’s what they aspire to for their Shabbos future. Yet a number of commenters challenged me as to why the task had landed in my lap when it was my husband’s big idea. If it means so much to him, they asked, why does he not just do it himself?

A writer needs thick skin. Not everyone is going to agree with you or like what you write – not all the time and maybe not ever. But for some reason, this question got to me and I couldn’t shake it off, though I took the advice of a media savvy writer friend and refrained from getting into an extensive online discussion about it.

Still, I wanted to shout that the job had always been mine, that I’d only agreed to set the table a day early. My next inclination was to explain the intricacies of our lives, how my husband gets home very late on Thursday nights, then leaves at dawn on Friday before sliding into home plate at candle lighting. If we left it to him to set the table or cook for Shabbos, we’d be eating takeout off the paper piles on the dining room table every week – and I’d the one picking up the takeout.

I longed to add that he does do a lot of other things around here, including some of the jobs I don’t love very much, like snaking the toilet and going to Costco and taking out the garbage, not to mention all the electro-technical matters I can’t wrap my brain around and putting the cover on the grill, which I can never seem to get right. Plus, he’s handy. He fixes things.

After all of that, he’s never once said to me, “Well, if you want the deer poop out of the backyard, you should get rid of it yourself.” He just puts on gloves and makes it go away because I’ve asked him nicely (and frequently, because deer are a problem here), or more likely because he knows I’ll be much happier when the deer poop is gone.

Long ago, we sketched out team jobs that work for us, roles that shape-shift over time as we adapt to changes in our lives, our health, our children’s needs, and our careers. Without a doubt, there are growing pains that come with these modifications, just as we might feel overwhelmed when bumps in the road mean one of us has to schlepp some, or a lot of, extra weight.

What I carry around in my head, though, is the message from a lecture I attended around the time we got married. The speaker, for the life of me I can’t remember who it was, said that if both partners focus on doing what will make the other happy, the marriage will be doubly blessed, the extra blessing coming from the high we get in lifting the spirits of someone we love, a happiness that ultimately trickles down to us, too.

In the midst of the rest of the chaos of our lives, it’s what makes me rise early every morning, no matter how little sleep I get the night before, to make my husband coffee and breakfast for the road, and what motivates him to stop at the Dunkin Donuts drive-through every Friday, returning home to tell me how delicious the Shabbos food smells and how beautiful the table looks while handing me an iced latte.

Silly rituals, perhaps, but they take the edge off some of the everyday pressures that plague us all, by reminding us that behind the chores and responsibilities, we are building a life together. It’s not about the quid pro quo. It’s about love.

Owning Less, But Still Loving Plenty

My grandparents’ apartment had a maximalist décor, which is a fancy way of saying they had plenty of stuff, all of it neatly displayed. Though the quantity of those belongings outsized their book value, together they possessed a priceless beauty I’ll never forget. Most importantly, the tchotchkes were both an extension of who they were and solid evidence that they’d lived their lives as fully as their circumstances permitted.

So it was a traumatic amputation, wrought teacup by porcelain teacup, when we packed up that apartment for my grandmother’s move, years after my grandfather passed away, to one room in an assisted living. What mattered, of course, was how she had lived and loved. We knew she couldn’t take the Rosenthal cake stand with her, not to the home and not into the World to Come. But the pain came anyway when we divided up the little that remained after she followed him.

We say over and over that our possessions are ultimately meaningless, yet I believe they still hold a mirror up to our soul. What we collect and curate speaks volumes about who we are. With one glance around someone’s home, we know if she is sentimental and spiritual, and if she possesses a quirky sense of humor. We get a feel for what warms her heart and what she values, whether she travels often, and if she likes to dust.

These thoughts have been on my mind a lot the past six months. It began when I read a review of yet another decluttering book on a night I could not fall asleep. I decided to take its philosophy to heart, and to follow the steps to minimalist Zen I could glean from the article.

First, I made my way through our everyday objects, sorting and distributing and donating what we no longer use. It wasn’t easy to let go, but I even found new homes for books I know I’ll never read again. We recycled reams of documents that held no meaning or purpose, and gave away several wardrobes’ worth of clothing.

Once all of that was gone and our surfaces were clear, I could breathe easier. We had more elbow room. I was able to find whatever it was I needed in a cabinet without removing its entire contents. I even located all the little keys to a stash of padlocks we were ready to toss.

Then the time came to look at the other things in abundance here – the mementoes, the souvenirs, the treasures inherited from family, the ephemera, the silly objects that once meant something to me and, to be honest, looking at them now, still do. What belongs to my husband I will let him reckon with one day when he’s ready.

In our den, scattered among the books on the shelves, are decorative wooden boxes filled with items whose bounty well exceeds their book value. The plastic boots worn by my Barbie dolls. The mold of my teeth made by my orthodontist. Miniature musical instruments and a cache of ticket stubs. Wooden nickels. The keychain my husband gave me in lieu of a ring when he proposed, the one that still makes my heart thump when I hold it in the palm of my hand.

It is unlikely any of it will ever mean much to anyone else, but I can’t help worry that our boys will one day toss it all willy-nilly, cursing me under their breath for having saved such a useless quantity of the past. I would like them to choose a few things to hang onto, if only to remember me by. But my deepest hope is that they will take some time to sort through the whole lot, and to consider the stories behind each item, or at least the story they come together to tell about me.

For now, though, it is neat and self-contained. Besides, I do the dusting, so who is going to say boo? None of it is bothering anyone. I’ve already de-owned plenty, but I’ve resolved to hang on to what’s left for as long as I can. If the decluttering books advise that we keep only what we use and love, then I’m guilty only of loving more.

Worry Is Belief

When I can’t clear my head or something heavy weighs on my heart, I try to go out for a walk around town. I steadily pick up the pace while singing to an upbeat 80s soundtrack, and find it helps to flush out what’s clogging my mental and spiritual pipes. I return home a calmer, more peaceful person for the exercise.

Yesterday was one of those days that called for a walk. But I rushed out the door without my headphones, an oversight I realized once I was already too far from home to turn back. I had to come up with another way to pass the time, so I began sorting everything on my mind into folders.

I made files and sub-files, and filled them until they were teeming with what I need to take care of and what I wish I’d done differently and what I fear I may never accomplish and the fact that the world seems to be nearing its end and questions about whether I eat sufficient greens and drink too much coffee and if I remembered to put the whites from the washer into the dryer before I left the house. Then it dawned on me, as I grouped them into broader categories, that there was really only one: Things I Worry About.

There’s no point in itemizing them all here, lest you think I’m a frantic worrywart. But tell me, please, which worries I should drop from the list. The big ones, or the little ones that add up to far more than the sum of their parts? The ones about health or peace of mind? Concern for my son in yeshiva in Israel or for my other boys, stateside? Fret about my immediate family or the trials and tribulations of our people?

Sheesh, the list goes on and on.

To worry, one might say, is to lack faith, and there are grounds for that argument. Yet I don’t debate G-d’s master plan, whose wisdom exceeds my capacity for understanding. Nor do I doubt His thinking, though sometimes, when this mere mortal cannot wrap her head around some of the craziness going on out there, I respectfully request a little insight, though I wonder what stops me from pounding my fist and demanding a full explanation.

It is precisely because of my faith that I worry. Tradition teaches us that our human purpose is to partner with the Divine in Tikkun Olam, in making our broken world whole. Looking around, how could we not notice how fractured our world is? And yet, contrary to the cutesy home décor signs at Marshall’s, worrying isn’t necessarily a waste of time. It can be a motivational kick in the rump, getting us off the spiritual couch and empowering us to take what’s in pieces and puzzle it back together.

At least we – worriers and non-worriers alike – can try, chipping in something to the effort. A few words of prayer. A small act of loving kindness. A handful of coins for charity. Exhibiting patience where we usually lack it, like biting our lip when a relative insults what we’re wearing.

None of it is a guarantee that we’ll swing the pendulum away from what we fear or what pains us, nor will it assure us global or inner peace. I know, too, that it will not make my worries disappear, nor obviate the need for my frequent walks. It will, however, bring positive energy into our lives and into our world.

And that can’t hurt.

First, Take Care of Your Feet

On the eve of Shemini Atzeret, I surveyed the disarray in our kitchen and panicked as the clock raced towards candle lighting. Chicken soup sputtered on the stovetop. Challah dough rose on the counter. It looked like yom tov and it smelled like yom tov, but I’d been shaken to distraction by the terrible news out of Israel and had only just begun to prepare.

I was considering whether to order takeout when I glanced down at my tired, bedraggled feet. For a full month of Jewish holidays, I shopped, cooked, baked, and cleaned in an upright position, and my less than lovely paws – bunions, calluses and all – were the worse for wear.

I desperately needed a pedicure. The brisket and kugel would have to wait.

The funny thing is that pedicures are an indulgence I’ve never enjoyed, one I avoided for years. But because I insist on wearing flip flops everywhere, my husband began nudging me to take better care of my feet. When I ignored his subtler hints, he bought me gift certificates to a nail salon and I’ve gone regularly ever since.

I have yet to fall in love with the experience – I’m too ticklish for the buffing process, find the massage chair a kind of torture, and hate sitting idle for so long – but I’ll admit, finally, I’m happy with the results. And yet, I easily pushed off last month’s appointment, claiming I needed the time in the kitchen to prepare for the holidays.

Why then, I wondered as I drove to the salon, did I insist on going on the very eve of the festival, when the day was short and the work still long?

Moments after I slid my feet into the warm, soapy water, a very tall man in possession of the answer sat down in the chair next to me. Judging from external appearances, we had little in common – we hailed from different backgrounds, for starters, and he hadn’t left any unfinished yom tov cooking at home. But when he kicked off his shoes, he revealed an enormous pair of worn-out feet that mirrored my own, the size differential notwithstanding. I stared at our separate sets of soaking toes and knew they were cut from the same cloth.

I smiled at him. He grinned back.

“You gotta take care of your feet,” he said to me, “whatever else you’ve got going on.”

More enthusiastically than I would have expected, I told him I couldn’t agree more.
“Sometimes,” I added, like a sheep newly returned to the flock, “the feet get to go first.”

He nodded before putting on his headphones. I rested my head on the back of the chair, forgetting about what had to be done at home, glad that my son in Israel was safe in his yeshiva for the holiday, not out meeting friends in town. I even dozed for a spell, awaking to the thought that I’d done well coming to the salon that afternoon and letting the potato kugel wait until later. After all, these feet are the pedestals that keep me upright, even on days when the news makes it hard to breathe, let alone stand.

Back home, I put the brisket in the oven and set to grating the potatoes. My feet, I noticed, looked healthy, pretty even, in my flip flops. Meanwhile, a silly refrain ran through my head – healing soles, healing souls – even as the worry retook its place beneath my skin.

The Sukkah and the Unicycle

Soon after my husband and son #2 spent the day putting up our sukkah, I turned to my youngest and asked for his help with the decorating. His reply was one of the craziest excuses I’ve ever heard, and that’s saying a lot. The boy has cooked up a few doozies in his day.

“I can’t. I have to build a unicycle,” he said, half listening to me because he was busy making plans.

Though I should have known better, I assumed he was pulling my leg. I mumbled thank you very much without bothering to suppress my sarcasm and went off to hang the decorations alone. But the distinct buzz of power tools, followed by the smell of smoke, interrupted my draping of faux greenery around our little hut. Wonder Woman-like, I flew down off the ladder in search of the source.

I found the garage door wide open, my son kneeling on the driveway while he dismantled his old, broken bicycle with his father’s Dremel.

“What are you doing?” I asked in the way I do when I’m not sure I want to know.

“I told you. I’m building a unicycle.”

“Oh, yeah. That.”

“Believe in me, Ma,” he said, giving me his signature earnest look.

Of course I do, and I reminded him as much. Because this wasn’t the first encounter of its kind, I was also able to maintain calm, gently cautioning him to do his best to keep out of the ER. He grinned, pointing to his safety glasses before sending me back to the sukkah, where I thought less about the decorations I was duct-taping to the walls and more about my son’s sense of purpose. I admit, too, I was happy he wasn’t playing games on the computer.

For him, there will be only the success or failure to transform his defunct bicycle into a functional unicycle. He will likely not recognize the inherent meaning in the process or the bravery at the heart of creative gumption, or even the risk to his self-confidence. I, however, have witnessed all of those things and it’s been remarkable to see the elbow grease he’s devoted to this challenge nonetheless. If he succeeds, I’ll cheer the loudest. If he fails, I’ll console him with complete attention, but failure will not diminish the value in his mother’s eyes of the undertaking itself, nor will it convince me to order a unicycle for him from Amazon, because that is miles away from the point.

There is cause for optimism in his progress. He labored for hours the first day, until black grease stained all the creases on his hands. Though he has caved to occasional moments of frustration since, rubbing his brow in fear of defeat, he has found the courage to keep at it with new wisdom from YouTube and tools borrowed from our friends. He’s now in the home stretch, with plans to bring the almost-unicycle to a friend who owns an auto body shop, where he will weld the final bits together under the owner’s supervision. Until it’s done, we will not know the verdict, but I will join him in believing until the last moment. After all, both the sukkah and his unicycle are constructs of faith, requiring us to notice the complicated nuances and the wonder in the simplest of things.

We have a hurricane coming, so I stole peeks through the slats of our sukkah’s roof as often as I could today, when there were still pockets of dry on a calm, but wet day. Against the darkening sky, I listed what worries me, and what I fear in the world: the disappointments, the possibilities for disaster, the dangers we cannot see. As the slimmest rays of light beamed their way in, I was reminded, too, of what can go right, of how each of us can shine our own way, and of how much of life is devastatingly beautiful.

And I thought to myself: You know what? Putting up a sukkah every fall may be among the highlights of our year, but once in a lifetime, everyone should build a unicycle.

In the Driveway of Childhood

It’s funny what makes me cry. This week’s trigger was a stack of neatly folded polo shirts. And a travel iron. The travel iron really did me in.

My son kept looking up from the clothing labels with his name on them, offering me his warm, quirky smile before telling me to stop being weird. That no other mothers get like this, that none of them cries when their children leave for a year in Israel.

I texted the mother of a friend of his, and asked her how the packing was coming, and how she herself was holding up. The response was what I expected: She’s sobbing in her cubicle at work. Her officemates are concerned.

I got a text from a friend cautioning me about the scene at the airport, with moms bawling and fathers blessing the offspring who won’t be at the Shabbos table with them for a year. That made me cry even more.

My son finally said I should do what I’ve got to do, and left me to my tears.

While we were shopping, ticking off the last items on his packing list, I caught a glimpse of him when he didn’t notice. I thought of the driveway at the house we lived in when we relocated to Massachusetts during the year I was in the third grade. It was the second to last one on the block of a growing development, after which were only grassy fields and dirt road. We faced a beautiful, tree-shaded lake and picked wild blueberries from the bushes that grew among the birch woods filling our half-acre backyard. But what I remember most is the driveway.

In my eight-year-old mind, its stretch of blacktop went on forever, inclining up from the curb before turning like a bent elbow, levelling off as it approached the garage. I found paradise racing my bicycle around its expanse in fair weather and sledding down its long hill in the winter. When we returned to New Jersey, the driveway of my memory dwarfed – in both length and gravitas -- the one at our new house.

I drove to the Massachusetts house decades later on a whim. It looked exactly as I remembered it, though the development carried on as far as my eye could see. What struck me, though, was the ordinariness of the driveway. It wasn’t particular lengthy or steep, its curve equally unimpressive. But the reality did not diminish how much pleasure I took in the extraordinariness I saw in it as a child, though I had a good laugh at the trick time and perspective had played on me.

Apparently, they play the same one on mothers. I am looking at my son, now old enough and responsible enough to spend a year abroad without me, yet what I see is an infant so small he surely just arrived in the world.

I rarely think of the hard moments that have come since his birth, the unpleasantries that once appeared outsized enough to consume me, but have since faded into brief anecdotes, either humorous or harrowing. Watching him pack, I’m not thinking about his croup or his meningitis scare or the day he escaped from his car seat while we were driving on the New Jersey Turnpike, or the time he refused to get into it outside the La-z-Boy store and we sat in the parking lot for over an hour until he screamed himself to sleep on the curb, or the early teenage years, every minute of them.

I list my parenting regrets in my head, then brush them off because they are a waste of time without the possibility of time travel. Grateful that our battles have been minor ones, I decide most of them come down to me having been too strict about things I now know don’t really matter. Yet there’s something I recall so vividly, it remains unaltered by time and perspective. It’s a what-if-I’d-done-things-differently too loud to ignore.

On maternity leave after a full trimester on bed rest, I couldn’t wait to get out of the house at night when my husband returned home from his pediatric residency shifts every 72 hours. I’d throw a winter coat over my pajamas, hand my first-born to his father, and head out to the two nearby establishments open late at night: a CVS, where I’d buy a Diet Dr. Pepper, and the laundromat, the only warm place with a bench to sit on while I cleared my head.

In retrospect, it sounds pathetic, possibility a bit nuts, but those nighttime outings taught me a lot about myself. As much as I love my children, I realized early on that I need time to breathe by myself, to find space beyond career and home and parenting in order to survive. When I returned to work, however, guilt consumed me and I forgot all about oxygen. Nothing to regret, but something to rectify.

As we weigh my son’s duffels to ensure they do not exceed 50 lbs., I’m thinking it’s time to weigh what I should do next. As he spreads his wings, I’m ready to do the same, to open myself up to long-forgotten possibilities while I continue to raise the two ducks still at home, and to envision what my life will look like when they, too, leave the driveway of their childhood behind.