love

the in between space

/ gal / Leave a comment

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When I wake up at 3:00 am nowadays, which isn’t necessarily a new thing, it’s as though I can feel all of the others who are awake with me. Our restless sleep-addled minds negotiating panicked thoughts, now-rational fears, and worries, so many worries. Trying to comprehend the unknown we are all swimming in. Trying to settle into liminality, the in-between space that follows one thing but precedes the next.

Generalized mild anxiety a constant companion, not just in the middle of the night but also in the morning before coffee. And after coffee (is the caffeine making me more anxious?), after lunch (how many English muffins is too many?), after a walk (did I keep enough distance when that jogger ran by?), after a shower, after changing from my black leggings into my grey ones, so as not to feel like a complete sloth in this bizarre new normal.

I’ve been keeping a strange kind of diary on my phone, little notes about what happened each day, including the number of confirmed Coronavirus cases (170) and COVID-19 deaths (1) in my city. Watching the progression here as I track the pandemic everywhere else.

Questions we ask each other now:

How is home schooling going? (My son prefers his real teacher, and misses learning and playing with his friends. I never once before contemplated home schooling my children. Today’s learning consisted only of watching silly Smithsonian Museum of Natural History videos on YouTube with my seven-year-old. Teachers are amazing humans.)

How many Zoom birthday celebrations have you been part of so far? (Three. I wonder if we’ll still be having birthdays over Zoom in a few months when it’s mine.)

What is one of the hardest things? (Guilt. That an autoimmune condition keeps me from being able to even go grocery shopping for my family. That I am safe in a comfortable home while there are people living on the street or in shelters, incarcerated, in ICE detention, unsafe living with their abusers, unsure where their next meal will come from, out in the world fighting for lives in hospitals, picking our food, packaging and delivering the things we need, stocking our shelves, picking up our trash, driving our buses and subways… Guilt that sitting here with my computer on my lap is the most helpful thing I can do for the world right now. I know that even this guilt is a privileged emotion, and completely unproductive, but I’m human, so it’s there.)

We are all so deeply and intricately interconnected, one shared humanity.

What has been an unexpected blessing? (Family dinners happen almost every evening now. And I love the dozens of supportive text threads I have going with my people across the country and around the world, the opportunity to send them love when I’m thinking about them, which is a lot. Also, the beauty of spring, which is unhindered by all this.)

How are you doing? (As well as can be expected under the circumstances. Moments of anxious intertwined with strange moments of zen. Thankful for a zillion comforts. Scared for my father who lives in a nursing home across the country; grateful for the amazing humans who care for him. Heartbroken for our world. Inspired by the goodness of humans.)

How about you? How are you doing?

 

 

tikva’s quilt

/ gal / Leave a comment

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A month before Tikva was born, our community of family and friends surrounded us with the most incredible love, circling around David, Dahlia and me – and Tikva still in my belly – blessing us with everything we would need to welcome our second daughter when she was born. All together in that giant circle, they gave us the strength to take on the unknowns the future held, and the 58 days that unfolded of Tikva’s mighty life, days spent entirely in the critical bay of the intensive care nursery at UCSF.

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For that day, my sister had prepared blank prayer flags that people could write on, sharing their messages for Tikva. We planned to hang the flags above her tiny bed in the hospital.

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Tikva was born 11 years ago today, in the wee hours of the morning while it was still dark outside. Just as I arrived in the labor room, I looked out the window at the eucalyptus trees that surrounded the giant mountain where the hospital sat and a red tail hawk swept by just a few feet away.

Tikva was past her due date, showing no signs of being ready to come out on her own. She knew she had a good thing going inside me, where my body breathed for her, fed her, held her safe and warm. They broke my amniotic sac to induce labor, and as soon as she came out, she was intubated because she couldn’t breathe on her own.

She was beautiful. My Baby Girl.

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Her prayer flags did indeed hang in her little corner, surrounding her with our community’s love and holding. Above the machines attached to the wires that monitored the oxygen saturation in her blood. Above her ventilator and C-Pap and IV bags and the hospital baby blankets with the little footprints and the pictures Dahlia drew for her sister.

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58 days later, the morning after Tikva breathed her final breaths outside in the hospital garden, held by David and me, surrounded by her two primary nurses, Allyson and Elaine, and her two doctors, Roberta and Tom, Dr. Tom wrote to me, For all of her difficult moments, we always felt Tikva’s bed space had a special aura of love and tranquility. It was no wonder that so many of us became attached to your family and that she touched so many lives.

If you ever want to meet an angel on earth, spend time with the nurses and doctors who work in the neonatal intensive care unit. They are high souls.

After she died, I wanted to do something with Tikva’s prayer flags, something lasting that held her story, her meaning, and the hope she brought with her. My friend Elizheva helped me begin to turn them into a quilt. I wanted it to be circular, like a mandala, because for me Tikva is infinite.

We began to sew, by machine and by hand. I never made a quilt before this one, and mostly I sewed by hand.

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Tikva’s nurse Elaine asked me for a piece of the yellow fabric that would become one of the corners on the quilt. This is Elaine playing with Dahlia and me in Golden Gate Park, sometime during the year after Tikva died. I’ll never lose touch with the special people who cared for my daughter.

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Onto the yellow fabric, Elaine quilted a red tail hawk – the animal spirit that followed us before, throughout, and since Tikva’s life. Red tail is a divine messenger, bringing messages from the spirit world.

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As we drove cross-country for our move to Cincinnati, I sewed circles and spirals onto the quilt. Infinite.

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And in Cincinnati I connected with another quilter named Barb, and she helped me continue my project. I added the corners, Elaine’s hawk and pieces of baby onesies friends had made or gotten for us. Barb sewed the checkerboard back side of the quilt.

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Four years later, just before moving to Atlanta, our son Judah was born and became a part of our family through adoption. I didn’t do very much work on the quilt in the five years we spent in Atlanta – my plate was full with caring for a new baby, supporting Dahlia through her bat mitzvah and middle school, working, and being the partner of a newly ordained rabbi.

But as soon as we moved to Alexandria, I saw the wall in my new sunroom where I would hang Tikva’s quilt, and I knew I had to finish it. So I asked around for a quilter at the synagogue that was our new home, and I met Sandi. And she helped me to finish Tikva’s quilt.

When I traveled west last fall to say goodbye to my beloved mother-in-law before she died, I brought the quilt with me. I wanted her to see it, and I finished sewing it there, quilting little spirals throughout the quilt.

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When I got home, I sewed a crystal bead onto the quilt for my mother-in-law, imagining her holding Tikva, their spirits now intertwined.

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I spend a lot of time in my sunroom, on the couch under my bookcases, surrounded by two of my most favorite things in the world – Tikva’s quilt and my books. It feels as though this wall was built for Tikva’s quilt, and I know I finished sewing it at exactly the right time, even if it took me ten years.

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I feel a strange kind of peace, 11 years later. Or maybe it’s more acceptance. Grief is no longer a sharp and jagged thing, edges smoothed by time and space. And yet I think a lot about the sliding doors that closed and opened, a parallel universe in which Tikva survived. I could be sitting on this couch with my 11-year-old Tikva, the quilt above us as I tell her the story of her beginning. Or a time and a place in which she was never diagnosed with a birth defect and was just born healthy and well like her sister – no quilt at all. Probably in a different city. In a life where we may never have met her brother.

Strange how life unfolds. Complicated and mysterious, far beyond my grasp. I’ll get cupcakes today, as I do every year, and with my husband and my children, we will celebrate the day Tikva was born. The day she changed everything.

Happy birthday, my beautiful Baby Girl. I love you forever.

The Best Picture of Tikva - Rudi Edits

hope and a heart in tatters

/ gal / 1 Comment

HOPE

Do not be daunted by

the enormity of the world’s grief.

Do justly, now.

Love mercy, now.

Walk humbly, now.

You are not obligated to complete the work,

but neither are you free to abandon it.

~ The Talmud

My husband came home from leading Shabbat services yesterday, walking into our home more quietly than usual. His voice barely more than a whisper, he called me into our bedroom to tell me something out of earshot of our children. I thought he was going to tell me that his mother had died, since he was flying out that afternoon to see her.

“There was a massacre in a synagogue in Pittsburgh this morning,” he told me. I looked in his eyes and wrapped my arms around him, and he began to sob as I held him. This strong, calm man who is a leader in our Jewish community; who has a way of maintaining equanimity through the most difficult times. My husband who is a head taller than me and at least one and a half times my weight let me do the only thing I could do in that moment – hold him. Cry with him.

His phone buzzed in his pocket and he began exchanging messages with his colleagues, conversations about security, about protecting our children at religious school the next day, about how we come together as a community in spite of, or perhaps to assuage, our fear. He was still sending these messages as I drove him to the airport, and when I dropped him off.

Then I went to run an errand before heading home to our children. Roaming stunned and aimless through the store, I found this little sign, one small but tenuous word: HOPE. This small thing was suddenly the most important thing in the store to me, and I held it as I continued on to get what I had come for. I brought it home and put it on the bookcase in my sunroom.

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This morning I drove our children to Sunday school at our congregation, the one my husband leads. I reminded my teenager to be aware of her surroundings and to let an adult know if she saw anything suspicious. I let my five-year-old remain unaware of how cruel people and the world can be, for a little while longer.

I parked my car behind one of the two police cars in the parking lot, the one with red and blue lights blinking. The parking lot was full. Parents and children streamed into our synagogue. Our emeritus rabbi and our cantor and a member of our board welcomed families as they arrived. We exchanged hugs.

THE PARKING LOT WAS FULL.

FAMILIES STREAMED IN.

Unintimidated, undaunted, even amid our collective fear and the weight of our sorrow.

Police officers patrolled the area, ensuring our safety. Everybody was talking about Pittsburgh. About antisemitism, about nationalism, about racism and discrimination and fear and fear and fear.

So much fear.

Of the other.

Of each other.

I am proud to be Jewish; I always have been. And today I am scared to even write this, to declare so publicly, in this space that anyone can read, that I am a Jew. Today in America, and in our world that feels like it is on a collision course with nationalism and authoritarianism, that is terrifying to declare.

But…

I am the grandchild of Holocaust survivors and so is my husband. My family on both sides were forced to leave their homes in Poland and in Egypt as refugees in the late 1940s. I work with and on behalf of today’s refugees; today’s immigrants and victims of violence who are here seeking refuge. I have a black son; his ancestors came to this land in chains.

We are Jewish.

This is personal.

And my silence only helps to let them win. But darkness can’t win, and neither can fear. That is not what my grandparents survived for.

So until my heart feels less in tatters and hope feels less tenuous, I’ll keep looking at the little sign on my bookshelf and I’ll remember this:

In my heart, LOVE WINS.

 

all of time in this moment

/ gal / 1 Comment

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In the front row of the sanctuary, seated in the center so that my eye looks right at the Torah in its arc, I listen to the cantor singing the blessing over the wine. In a flash of my mind I am 18 years old again, at a Shabbat dinner at UCLA surrounded by new Jewish friends who know the entire full blessing so well that I can hear they have sung it every Friday of their lives. I only knew the beginning of the blessing then, and just the words, not the melody; it’s all we had recited in my home growing up, on those occasional Fridays when my mom decided to make chicken and rosemary potatoes for a special dinner and we lit the Shabbat candles. At that dinner during the beginning of college, I tried following along with the long prayer, mostly listening. Now, in the sanctuary of the synagogue in Atlanta where my husband is concluding a five-year tenure as one of its rabbis, preparing to move to a new congregation in a new city in a new state where he will lead a Jewish community, I easily sing along with the familiar words and melody.

All of time coalesces in this moment and I think about what it means to me to be Jewish, to have Judaism as my sanctuary. I remember the first day of freshman orientation, when I walked through a courtyard at UCLA towards the table marked with a sign that read, Jewish Student Union. I unexpectedly found my people that day, and in those years I connected with my Judaism on a new level. I think it was then that I knew without doubt I would marry a Jewish man and raise Jewish children one day.

I didn’t grow up a synagogue kid, but I went to Jewish summer camp for three years, and had come back from one of those summers to tell my parents I wanted to have a bat mitzvah. They hired a retired cantor and every Wednesday of 8th grade, he came to my house and taught me to read Hebrew, taught me all of the prayers in the Shabbat morning service, taught me my Torah portion, and helped me write my dvar Torah. Before our meetings he would sit in his car and smoke a pipe, and his breath smelled like cloves and cinnamon while we studied together. I had my small bat mitzvah at the library of the JCC, where there was a Torah I read from before 40 family members and friends, and we had a party in the garden of our home. My maternal grandmother had died just a few months before, and I felt her presence deeply on that day. My paternal grandmother had come from Italy, and prepared all of the food for the party.

I didn’t do much Jewishly after that, but at UCLA I connected again with this piece of myself that I had never questioned. I am the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors and Sephardic refugees who were forced out of Egypt in the 1950s for being Jewish. My Judaism growing up was in the fact that I was born in Jerusalem to parents who had met on a beach in Eilat. It was in the Sephardic and Ashkenazi food my grandmothers made when they came to stay with us from Italy and Israel. It was in stories I heard of relatives who had been rabbis, in my great uncle who prayed daily at the Sephardic Egyptian synagogue in Paris. It was in my cousin’s wedding in Tel Aviv, where I had been a bridesmaid when I was nine years old and danced with IDF soldiers who had come dressed in their fatigues to celebrate their friends. It was in my memory of putting a tiny piece of paper into the Western Wall in Jerusalem with my nine-year-old’s prayer that my great grandmother live forever. It was in the stories I heard of how grand life had been for Jews in Alexandria before Nasser came to power. Stories of my Polish grandmother sewing clothing out of potato sacks in Auschwitz to trade for eggs she could eat.

She would have been so proud of my husband, my maternal grandmother. Proud to know that I had married a man whose family came from the same part of Poland. Proud to see the humility and grace with which he holds the responsibility of being a rabbi, of leading a Jewish community.

All of time coalesces in this moment and I look up at the majestic sanctuary of this historic synagogue in Atlanta, this beautiful Southern city that has been our home for five treasured years. I feel gratitude and love for its people, its history, the way it has held us. I think of my daughter’s bat mitzvah in this sanctuary last year, of the four years of preschool here that have given my son the unquestioned conviction of his Jewishness. I think of the work I have been able to do to connect the Jewish community to the refugee families I worked with professionally. I think how much I am going to miss the Southern hospitality and genteel welcome we have received from everyone here, the sweet lilt in how words are spoken, wondering if Northern Virginia can still be considered the South.

Then, after the senior rabbi has spoken, after others from the community have spoken – all so graciously, so lovingly, so generously towards my husband and our family – my husband goes to the bimah to speak, from this pulpit that is now so familiar to him that it has been strange until this moment for him to sit with me in the front row. From my seat in the center of that front row, I watch him, I hear his words, and tears stream down my face, boundless love and pride burst from inside me.

In words spoken and unspoken, he says to me, We did it. This thing we set out to do together at the very beginning of our relationship 18 years ago, when I first told you I wanted to become a rabbi… We did it, and look how beautiful it is! All of time coalesces in this moment and I feel my grandmothers sitting on either side of me, agreeing with me as I reply silently: Yes we did, babe. Yes we did. And yes, it is beautiful. So beautiful.

After he spoke to the congregation, a standing ovation from our community showered him with the kind of love that fills every well of reserve our family is going to need as we take this next step forward in time.

The entire evening was a life-giving moment. My well is full.

I am going to miss this place, these people, so much. The 18 years leading to this moment have not all been easy. But they have all been so important. Our five years in Atlanta have been our best. I leave here deeply satisfied and grateful. I am so proud of my husband. I am proud of us. I am proud of our family. I can see how every single moment before this one is the moment that brought us here. To this precious place in time where we could pause …Well full. Deep breath. Here we go… before our next adventure together.

 

the way back

/ gal / Leave a comment

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As I got into bed last night around 2:30am, I told my husband that I felt like I had fallen through a hole in time and landed in an alternate reality. Like the dystopian fiction my father introduced me to when I was my tween daughter’s age: Huxley, Orwell, Bradbury, Camus. As if real life were still moving forward somewhere in the place I had fallen from, and I just wanted more than anything to find my way back there.

I lay awake for a while, knowing sleep was going to be elusive even though I was physically, mentally and emotionally sucked dry. I thought of all the people celebrating the 2016 election while I was lying in shock, the depth of sadness I feel today only barely registering. I practiced the words I would tell my daughter in the morning, when she woke up and realized that we hadn’t woken her up from sleep to hear the victory speech of the first woman president.

I don’t believe people are inherently bad, but I do believe that when we act from a place of scarcity rather than abundance, of fear instead of trust, of individualism over connection and collaboration, that we can do incredible harm and create rifts that can take generations to heal. I don’t want to be a part of that.

I woke up this morning and recognized a familiar feeling. It’s hard to describe, but it reminded me of the day over eight years ago when I woke up from a dark and brief sleep and realized that I had – the night before – said goodbye to my baby daughter Tikva as she breathed her final breaths. In that remembering, I felt a combination of shock, bewilderment, disbelief, the beginnings of a grief that I would (will) never quite completely shake, and this question:

How will I ever reconnect with hope?

There is one difference between that morning in 2008 and this one today. I have the gift of hindsight, the gifts of my experience, and the big picture of all I have gained since then. I know how I found my way back to hope.

It was a dark time, and for days, weeks, months, and even years I felt it all – anger, sorrow, fear, regret, doubt, hopelessness, aloneness, grief. So much grief. I cried and I wrote and I cried and I wrote and I questioned every single moment of my daughter’s short life and I screamed WHY at the universe, which had no answers for me.

And then, as I did all those things, I began the long, slow work of healing. And I did it, without realizing at the time, like this:

I connected. I met other parents who had lost their babies. It was painful and terrifying because all of a sudden there were a million ways babies can die, and I became aware of how often it happens and how many cracked hearts there are in the world. But those parents – they saved me. We saved each other. Connection saved us. It saves us every day.

I wrote. I wrote as if my life depended on it. I shared my experience for my own survival. I shared in others’ experiences as a witness, as a friend on the most difficult road. I put aside shame and self-consciousness and fear of not being good enough and I spoke openly about my experience. And I heard from others that they understood, that they felt understood. And I was able to turn some of my pain into a love that I could share with others.

I owned my story. I took responsibility for it, recognizing it as the greatest gift my daughter had given me. I started to practice radical self-love, forgiving myself for the ways I thought my body had let her down. I told my story in a new way – as a story of the mighty power of unconditional love. As a story of resilience. Even as a story of hope.

I reached way beyond my comfort zone. I sat with the discomfort until its edges softened and ease sneaked in. I trusted that I could contribute to the collective healing even as I was struggling to heal myself.

I became relentlessly determined to be a light in the world. Because I have held both life and death in my arms, and I don’t take anything for granted. Because on my daughter’s headstone are the words, “Love is all you need.” Because I know that I came here in this lifetime simply to love and to connect.

This morning I said to my husband, “I really need to read something today that is going to give me guidance on how to move forward. How to regain hope in order to dissolve the fear and sadness I feel.” I held my children tight before sending them off into a world that feels changed from how it felt yesterday. I went on Facebook and found comfort there, in community. I cried. I listened to Paul sing Let It Be and Hey Jude. I cried some more.

I don’t know that I’m going to find that single piece that will tell me what to do because I think the knowledge of how to move forward is going to come out of each one of us – together. But I am determined to find my way back to hope, so I promise you this:

I will connect.

I will write.

I will be responsible for the story I choose to tell and the words that I use.

I will dare to do uncomfortable things and put myself in uncomfortable places in order to bring about justice for all people.

And I will remain relentlessly determined to be a light in the world.

Will you join me?

for b.

/ gal / 1 Comment

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There are two trees in front of the house next door. They bloom twice a year, once in the spring along with all the other trees, and again in the fall after they have lost their leaves. I never knew trees could do that, and even though I’ve seen them bloom twice before, this year again it amazes me. It feels rebellious, audacious. Generous. These beings of nature that do their own thing but manage to give of themselves in the process.

I’ve been connecting with some very old and very dear friends the last few days, some with whom I haven’t spoken in years, following the passing of a friend we all shared. It hit me that I am at that age – when friends my age start to go. I’ve lost important people in my life – grandparents, friends, my child. I’m not new to death or loss or grief. But this hit me differently.

Life feels tenuous today. I feel hyper aware of something I know but manage most of the time to ignore: that nothing is guaranteed.

And yet here we are. We bloom when we can, we fall when we can’t stay up. And then sometimes we manage to bloom again, like those trees.

Like those trees, we reach out to each other, but sometimes not enough. Sometimes it takes a loss to remind us.

This is for you, B. Thank you for your adventurous and generous heart, for your wit and humor, and for all you gave of yourself to all of us who love you.

 

on cankles and self love

/ gal / Leave a comment

ClavicleExcerpt from Shrill, the amazing book everyone should read, exploring our views about fatness, by the incredible Lindy West.

Dear 15-year-old French boy I had a crush on the year I was an exchange student,

I still remember your name, I probably always will. I can almost remember your face 30 years later. You were adorable and you had a nice smile. You wore v-neck sweaters and button down shirts and nice pressed jeans like French boys did then, in the eighties. You were popular, you made your friends laugh, you made me laugh as we all sat in cafes after school and drank coffee from small cups and shared cigarettes, like French teenagers do. You and that one other guy, you were like the ring leaders, but no one seemed to mind because you made us laugh.

I doubt you remember me. I was only there for one semester, visiting your school all the way from California. The American girl who spoke fluent French because she had lived in France as a little kid. The one who wanted so much to fit in, to be as French as she possibly could be, who bought her own v-neck sweaters and smoked her first cigarette and drank coffee along with you and all your friends. It was so exciting to feel like I could fit in, like I could belong, even for just a little while.

You were nice to your friends, you were nice to me. Until that day you weren’t. But I doubt it even registered. I doubt you even knew what you did was hurtful.

You don’t remember, but I do. 30 years later, an amazing life, an amazing partner, an amazing family and an amazing community of my own, and I still remember.

We were sitting in a cafe with our friends and I was sitting next to you. I’m sure I was beside myself with excitement that you had sat next to me that day. I’m sure my heart was beating really fast. I’m sure it was the moment I had written to my friends back in California about, the moment I had hoped for. When you would notice me. You looked down at my legs next to yours, and you put your hand on my thigh, and you looked at me. I can’t remember exactly what you said, but the look on your face said everything: Look at the way your thighs expand when you sit. 

I can’t remember what I said or did in response. I know I must’ve been stunned. I know my heart cracked into a million pieces. I’m sure my face turned red. Nobody noticed. Nobody said anything. I think I looked at you questioningly and you laughed it off, the cruelty already dissolving in your mind, I’m sure. Then you started to tell a story to the group, and I sat there, still next to you, invisible but stuck in that booth between you and the wall.

I should have fucking hated you. I should have slapped you and asked what your mother would do if she heard you talk to a girl that way. But I didn’t. Instead my heart cracked, and I looked at my thighs, and it stuck. For life. The way my thighs expand when I sit. As all thighs do, by the way, even your skinny little French boy thighs in your pressed jeans.

I hope you grew up and never hurt another person like that. Or if you did, I hope you got shit for it from some girl more confident, at 15, than I was.

****

Dear friend from freshman year in high school who invited me to your slumber party,

Some years ago I was watching 30 Rock for the first time, catching on to the Tina Fey craze a few years later than everyone else. There was an episode where Tina Fey made a comment about a part of the body I’d never heard of before: her cankles. I laughed so hard I cried. And I cried, too. That’s it! I yelled to my husband. That’s what I have! Cankles! 

I didn’t know whether to be happy, relieved, proud, or incredibly sad that I had cankles. But at least, in that moment, I didn’t feel alone. If there was a word for it, if Tina Fey had them too, clearly I wasn’t the only woman on earth with thick calves and not-very-defined ankles.

Did you know that word 30 years ago, even though your legs were the opposite of mine? Even though you had thin legs and thin calves and thin lovely ankles, and you could wear heels without feeling like a duck? Do you remember what you said to me at your slumber party, when all of us were lying on your bed and we had our legs up against the wall?

This is what you said: “Ohmygod! You don’t have ankles!” You probably don’t remember, and maybe you can’t believe you even said it. Maybe you would feel terrible now if I reminded you. I hope so. But I remember. And it stuck. I’ve held it for all those years. My ankles that are barely ankles. My fat calves that go right to my feet. My cankles.

I thought about my cankles when I took a walk this morning. I thought about the way they hold my legs up, help my feet move, allow me to be able to take my morning walks. They work well, as well as your thin ones, I’m sure. Sometimes I joke that in my next life I’m going to have kick-ass amazing ankles and thin lovely calves, maybe I might even wear 4-inch heels. But does it really matter? Do I really care, or was a seed just planted that night at your slumber party that no longer belongs there?

****

Dear cute guy I had a mad crush on my freshman year in college,

Somewhere on some ancient diskette somewhere I have a computer diary I kept during the year I knew you. Probably 90% of it is about you, and the insane all-consuming crush I had on you. I don’t think you had a clue how in love with you I was, partly because I was only one of probably a dozen girls – maybe more – who felt the same way that year. But also because you didn’t see me.

I don’t mean you didn’t know I existed because you did. We were friends. You were nice to me. You were nice to everyone. You shared your beautiful smile generously. You flirted generously, making all of us who adored you feel like maybe, if only…

But for me there was one problem with that: You didn’t see me. Not that year, when I carried 60 extra pounds on my body, more than I felt comfortable with. You didn’t see me that year, after I had spent the previous year emotionally eating Ben & Jerry’s after my parents’ divorce. You didn’t see me when I was fat. You didn’t see me because I was fat.

Then one day, during my junior year, I ran into you on campus. I had lost much of my extra weight by then and I wasn’t fat anymore. You noticed me as I walked by and you invited me to sit down. You asked me how I’d been and you gave me your undivided attention. You were still nice to me, but in a different way. Because for the first time, you could see me.

I was flattered. I probably ate it up. But it hurts now, when I think about it. Because nothing about me had changed in those few years except my exterior. Well, maybe one other thing had changed: I was more confident without those extra pounds. But should I have been? Could I have learned to be a big girl and also love myself unconditionally? Could I have been a confident fat girl? Would you have seen me, sooner, then?

****

I have been the fat girl. I have been the thin girl. I have been somewhere in between. Regardless of my weight, my thighs expand when I sit. My ankles aren’t fat and neither are my calves, but I am built a certain way and I didn’t get well defined ankles this time around, and my calves are thick. But the thing is, even when I was fat, when I wore a size 16 and not a size 4, I was still me. I was still beautifully perfectly me.

Here’s another part of my body I discovered I had as I got older, as the weight came off: clavicles. It’s true, well defined clavicles are for thin girls. When you’re fat, they hide. My clavicles now can hold oceans. I love them. I used to love them because they meant I was thin. Now I love them because they are part of me.

And I love my flabby thighs that expand when I sit, with the stretch marks that remind me, each morning when I get out of the shower, that I was once fat. They used to make me cringe, my stretch marks, and fill me with regret. If only I hadn’t eaten all that Ben & Jerry’s… If only. But they don’t make me cringe anymore. Because they’re mine, part of me, and they tell a story.

I used to tell this victory story about how I gained weight really fast because of what was going on emotionally in my life, and then lost the weight in a healthy way; how I refound the body that felt like me. But I don’t tell that story anymore, it no longer serves me. The only victory, I understand now, is that I learned to love myself.

I think 90% of why I was miserable when I was fat was because I felt invisible and unworthy of love in that body – ashamed, ugly, hidden. We are cruel about fatness in our society. I’ve been cruel about fatness – my own and others’. And we raise thinness way up next to holiness, that thing we should all aspire to be: Thin. And if we get there, all of a sudden we are seen.

Take a moment to question why that is. Take a moment to question whether we can do better. As women. As men. As a society. Toward ourselves and toward others.

****

Dear 15-year-old girl I used to be,

One day you will be 45 and you will be thin. You will have clavicles that can be seen and they will hold oceans. You will be seen. You will see yourself and know you are beautiful.

You will also wish your boobs were bigger, not smaller. You will wish you had more curves, not less. You will still joke that one day in your next life you will have kick-ass ankles and wear heels. You will still wish your thighs were more firm.

But you will love your body. And you will appreciate all that you can do in it. And you will find comfort in that. And you will feel gratitude for all that you are. Because you are amazing. Your body is amazing.

Trust me. I know. And I love you.

the beginning

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Jewish Couple

(Photo: Rudi Halbright)

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Look how young we look… Look at my hair, that’s my natural brown.

Look at my hair. It was so full and thick.

Mine too, long and curly and brown.

Look at my arms. I’ve got to start lifting weights again.

Look at our skin.

All that natural collagen.

Remember that night, when we stayed up all night and danced and then watched the sun rise in the desert?

Wow, look at us. We’re kinda hot.

And so young…

Scene: My husband and I are looking through photos on the computer. Photos from 2000 to today. We’re looking for something in particular but we keep getting sidetracked, distracted by how much younger we looked… when we were 15 years younger.

It’s kind of funny. We can’t help but laugh at ourselves as we do it. Realizing the cliche of longing (just a little) for plumper skin, flatter abs, hair free of grays, a few less cracks in our souls.

And yet… We’re never going to be as young as we are right now. We laugh that in 20 years we’ll be doing the same thing, except the photos we’ll be looking at will be from 2015.

There are definitely times when I would love to be able to dance all night again. I’d even love to dance for a few hours somewhere besides my kitchen, to music louder than what comes from my iPod speakers.

But what I couldn’t do then that I can do now is dance in my kitchen with my daughter. And she’s so fun to dance with. And in between moves she grabs me to give me huge bear hugs.

And that man, the one I met in the desert, we made her together.

I think about all we’ve done together since we met more than 16 years ago. Everything we’ve lived. What we’ve created. What we’ve lost. What we’ve built and rebuilt. The love we’ve brought into our family. The children we love and help to grow. The grownups we have become and the way we help each other shine.

We were just beginning, then, in those photos. And God willing, we’re still just at the very beginning.

how love smells

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I washed my hands in the restroom of a doctors’ office the other day and smelled it instantly. It lingered on my hands even after they were dry. The smell of that particular kind of medical antimicrobial soap, I will know it forever.

In a flash, for a moment, it is 7 years ago and I am back at the big sink outside the NICU, the one whose water flow is controlled by foot pedals. Or the sink inside, right next to my daughter’s tiny bed. The one only nurses are supposed to use, but which they let me use as well. That same soap. That same smell.

For a while it unsettled me to encounter it. Just over a year after my baby died in that hospital, I found myself at the sink in the bathroom of another children’s hospital in a city 2500 miles away. I had just interviewed for a job managing a research project in their NICU, and before returning to my car in the parking garage, there I was washing my hands and that smell… I almost collapsed as I watched the tears flow down my face in my reflection. In a daze I found my car, and I sat privately and cried, doubting that I was ready to be working in such a hauntingly familiar environment. Wondering if my desire to create meaning from the loss of my baby girl would be overpowered by the raw emotion of having so recently lost her. I didn’t get the job, and perhaps it was for the best. I would have been so good at it though. Good for the right reasons.

Then one day that same smell surprised me – in the moment that it went from being unsettling to comforting. It was February 2011 and I had come to the hospital to deliver the twins who had stopped growing mid-pregnancy inside me. They gave me – the grieving-mother-to-be – the largest room, the nicest room, and also the room furthest away from the other mothers (those giving birth to living children) in Labor & Delivery. I went to wash my hands at the big hospital sink and there it was… that smell. With tears in my eyes I said to my husband, “It’s the same soap.” And I just stood there and smelled it. I washed my hands at that sink many times that night, and the smell remained the strangest kind of comfort throughout.

The smell doesn’t haunt me now. Whenever I am in a medical office, I smell the soap to see if it is the same one. When I encounter it, I take the time to smell it, and I travel back for a moment and return to a time and place where my daughter is still alive. Where the possibility of her survival still exists. Where my entire purpose each day after washing my hands up to the elbows is to sit by her side and love her.

****

I keep my baby daughter’s things in a wooden chest in our home. It’s amazing what accumulates from such a short life. Not just things she touched but things that came afterwards. Like the little shrine I made in her memory for Dia de los Muertos that first fall, with three friends who had also lost their babies. Like pictures her sister drew as she navigated her own grief. Like the shirt I wore at Tikva’s blessing way when I was still pregnant, the sweater that kept me warm throughout the second half of my pregnancy, and the nightgown I wore when I delivered her.

The tiny blanket that lay over her during those weeks is in a jar, along with the hat that covered her head when we took her outside to breathe her final breaths. The stuffed lamb and the stuffed duck that lay against her fragile body are in another jar. I open those jars sometimes and take a deep inhale. The smell is the same, a little musty but so familiar. Perhaps it’s not exactly her smell, and whatever it is has replaced the familiar in my memory because I would open those jars to smell it so frequently in the months immediately after she died. Like the soap, it brings me a tiny bit closer across the divide between the living and the dead.

****

It’s been more than 7 years since she lived and died. That’s a long time. And yet there have been times during those years when her loss feels especially present. There is no rhyme or reason to why and when that happens, it usually catches me by surprise. The loss of her is very present for me right now. It’s not a stabbing pain, more like a dull gnawing to remind me. I said to my older daughter the other day, “What do you think life would be like right now if Tikva had lived?” She replied that we probably wouldn’t have my son, her brother. She’s right. We always wanted two children and Tikva would have been the second. So this little being who came and went so fast and will forever remain a baby, she will eventually come to represent something to the little boy who came afterwards, her brother.

After Tikva died, on one of the nights of our shiva, as friends and family filled our home with love and food to share in our mourning, three amazing women came through our door. Two of them had been the midwives we’d worked with during my first pregnancy with my older daughter, and it had been years since we’d seen each other. The third was an acquaintance from many years before whom I’d gotten reacquainted with when I donated some of my breast milk for her baby. I had freezers filled with my pumped milk from the two months of Tikva’s life, more milk than she was able to drink through her feeding tube, and I wanted it to go to babies who needed it. This woman who came to our shiva with our midwives was one of them. It’s hard to explain the connection you have with someone who was able to nourish her baby with the milk you pumped for your own baby who is no longer living.

She walked into our home carrying a basket of warm muffins wrapped in a beautiful napkin, and I hugged her with tears in my eyes. She did not take her basket and napkin with her when she left, and they have followed us in the 7 years since. This little basket that is perfect for small corn tortillas, and this beautiful single cloth napkin.

And you know what? It is my son’s favorite napkin. He calls it “My Napkin” and it is the only one he will use, even when it is filthy and needs washing. He throws a fit if anyone else picks it up.

And I love that. I love how it is all connected – this baby who came and went too fast, this mother I reconnected with whose baby drank my milk, this napkin that has followed us from that time and which didn’t end up in the trunk of Tikva’s things, but instead fell into the hands of my son, the one who came into our lives as the culmination of everything that began when Tikva left us.

The connection between them all is love. It’s that same connection I feel when I smell that hospital soap. It’s in the musty smell inside the jars in Tikva’s trunk. It’s the connection to love – my love, the ones I love, the love from others. The smell and the feel of love.

 

the moment

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I was out last night when my children when to sleep. They had pizza and watched football with Daddy, jumped on the new trampoline we brought home yesterday. As I left for my book club, they were dancing in the living room. I came home a few hours later and went into each of their rooms to kiss them – as I do every night – before heading to bed myself. Each of them opened their eyes briefly when I came in, recognizing me in a peaceful haze of dreamy sleep, then closed them again and rolled over. They don’t usually do that;  they are usually so deeply asleep I can hold my face to the tops of their heads  and breathe in  their smells or kiss their warm necks without a single stir.

This is it, that future I imagined for myself when I was still a little girl. This is the place where I am surrounded by love, presented with purpose, in a house filled with noisy chaos. This is the family I couldn’t even have dreamed up, but which found me nonetheless.

This is the moment I’ve been waiting for all my life.

Before I left for book club last night, I stood at the table with my daughter and looked into her eyes – those hypnotic, deep, dark blue eyes embraced by the thickest, blackest eyelashes, those eyes that droop a bit at the ends, so kind and so sparkly and so intense at the same time. We stood facing each other and sang  John Legend’s All of Me to each other, spontaneous, unrehearsed, perfect. The entire song, from start to finish.

As I listened to her voice and mine, how they are similar and how they are unique, the way they go together, I noticed how powerfully my daughter sang. She sang each word with clarity. Confident, expressive. I thought about how she is ascending in her life, finding her voice, harnessing and embracing her power and her place in the world. I could hear my own voice singing with hers, also clear and loving, but a little more timid. Not because I am afraid to sing loudly, but because that is not what I was there to do in that moment. As I sang with my daughter I allowed myself to be her reflection, so that she could see how brightly her light shines. It is not my time to overshadow her, it is my time to raise her up, to help her shine, to support her growth into the amazing woman I already have glimpses of.

This is the moment I’ve been waiting for all my life.

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It takes daily acceptance to age gracefully, without resistance. I have not mastered this – let’s just say it’s where my ship is pointed, my intention. Lately I’ve been unable to look in the mirror without noticing the way my eyes are changing. They’re still big and wide and dark, my eyelashes still long (though not as thick as they were when I was my daughter’s age). But they are more sunken than they used to be. Tiny lines reveal themselves in the light and the shadowy thinning skin underneath them is persistent, highlighting the sunkenness. I know I am the only one noticing these details about myself; we tend to dissect ourselves with the greatest diligence and scrutiny. Yet I feel aware of the subtle yet persistent whisper that reminds me, You are aging.

My husband reminds me that I am younger in this moment than I will ever be again. Maybe so, but I don’t feel (or look) young anymore. And it’s kind of caught me off-guard.

My children are young. Everything is open to them, everything is possibility. Their skin is unblemished, their foundation solid. Their eyes are wide and aware. They are assertive and fierce. Everything is a question, everything is desire. There is so much that they need, and they trust completely that it will all be provided. By me, by Mommy. By Daddy.

I had the realization recently that one day my children won’t need me in the way they do now. One day they won’t need to talk to me every day, to ask me a million questions. One day they will remember to wash their hair and clip their nails and do their laundry all on their own. One day they won’t need my hugs and kisses to begin their days. One day they will find their own answers.

This is the moment I’ve been waiting for all my life.

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My father is a very handsome man. He was a handsome boy, a handsome young man, a handsome middle-aged man, and now he is a handsome older man. The older he gets, the more he resembles his father, whom I only knew as an old man. My father grayed late, but now his hair is almost completely white. His skin is thinner, more spotted. His body, affected by Parkinson’s, more unreliable. His hands still feel the same as those younger hands that held my tiny little girl hands. His own eyes are more sunken. But those eyes… They are the same eyes. Dark and deep and alert, reflective, loving. When I look at his childhood photos I see the same eyes. When I stumbled onto the black and white studio portrait from his twenties where he is dressed in a black suit, holding a cigarette like a classic movie star, I see the same eyes. When I close my eyes and find myself at my desk in my bedroom reviewing multiplication tables with my young father, I see the same eyes.

I see them now, within his older, more hazy, more sunken eyes that are somehow the same and different together. Just like my own familiar yet different eyes.

I think of the fragility of an aging parent, how I connect to this and also to my own aging. How one amplifies the other. I think of the contrast between my children and my father, and the place on the spectrum – somewhere in the middle – where I find myself.

This is it. This is the moment. The moment I’ve been waiting for all my life.