I have a child on my hands who is desperately upset that Obama’s acceptance speech is on after he goes to bed. He has made me ‘promise promise, up to one-hundred’ that he and I will watch it together on the web tomorrow morning before he goes to Kindergarten.
“Mommy, it is cool I am a kid instead of a baby in your tummy when this is happening.”
Yes kid, yes it is.
And now for something completely different.
The scene: first day of kindergarten (yes, I’m well aware I should have bathed the keyboard in my salty tears and written an entry bewailing the passage of time and the fact that I don’t have a baby anymore. I’ll get right on that, just as soon as I’m done enjoying the extra hour of time in the morning and drinkin my martini after he passes out into bed at night, exhausted from his brain working so damn hard)
The players: Sean, and Miss Th, one of his two room counsellors/teachers in camp this summer.
Miss Th: “Hi Sean! How was your first day of Kindergarten?”
Sean: “It was good! I learned how to read in one day!”
Miss Th: “….well that’s awesome buddy!”
Sean: “So I’m done with school now, right?”
Lift me up so high that I cannot fall
I was raised essentially religionless. My father was raised conservative Jewish; he would skip out on his Hebrew school classes and go amuse himself at the Museum of Science and Industry for hours. Years later, I worked where he escaped to, and lived within a stone’s throw of the Synagogue- now gone- where he had learned Hebrew, touched a Torah for the first time. But his family eased back to reform, and my father fell away from the faith almost entirely. He would identify as a Jew, naturally, but did not attend services, never engaged with me in any great religious discussions. That was left to my mother.
She was also raised Conservative, but was far more devout as a child and teen than my father. Hers is the classic thinking Jewish female story which I have heard in bits and pieces over the years, like lost pages from a book found in a trunk. How she rebelled against her Hebrew school teachers when they wouldn’t set work as hard for her as for the boys, how after years of fighting she was secretly relieved when she was allowed to quit the girls’ bible study, how her mother- desperate for her to be a good nice Jewish girl- sent her off to junior B’nai B’rith, where in fact my mother learned not how to be a nice Jewish girl but rather how to shimmy out the bathroom window and go sneak smokes with a friend. Her devotion came to a screeching halt the day she walked from from om Kippur services, the sun still out, faint with hunger, to find the rest of the family eating. They didn’t want to wait for sundown- too inconvenient, the piety they had instilled in her being revealed as a facade. To this day, my mother cannot deal with a Passover Seder at her mother’s house without clenched teeth, and she delights- and crowed with pride when I did it- when someone baits my step-grandfather and catches him out in his mishmosh of hippy psychobabble, Indian guru following, and superstition filled and foundation-poor Judaism. To say she is a screaming agnostic is putting it mildly.
But here I am, in Kansas, where faith is like the air, whether it’s the somewhat hysterical, brittle, bleached and whitened and white evangelicalism of the megachurch across from the kid’s school, to the scared for our children’s moral welfare rush to Catholic private school, to the bedrock so many of our neighbors come from- honest and earnest farmer’s children, simple and strong and pure in their faith. I was raised Jewish- culturally Jewish- and it wasn’t until college and the brain-spasm inducing leaps through tractates that I became more profoundly immersed in it. For all that I was not taught Hebrew, nor sent to Israel, I realize now how deeply the religion of my parents’- a religion they both fundamentally and purposefully turned from, though they both laid claim to it culturally- permeates my bones. It is how I think. It is how I argue. It is how I regard family, and work. It is how I regard willful blindness to suffering, to uncomfortable truths, to regimes running amok unchecked. It is how I embrace bravery no matter where someone comes from.
Sean turned to me the other day, after we’d had a religion discussion on the weekend, and said wonderingly, “You’re more Jewish than Daddy.” I opted not to get into the fact that Dad grew up on Long Island so really, culturally, he’s in the know. Yes, I assured him. And because I’m Jewish, he’s Jewish too- like me. And because he was baptized, he’s Catholic, like Dad. Sean continues to talk about going to church with his grandparents, and the fact that I don’t go (and, truth be told, that he thinks Dad didn’t want to go, clever boy). Friends here ask wonderingly how I can be Jewish and not go to services, not have a home synagogue. One of my dearest friends in the world just came back from a retreat, of sorts, and impressed on me that its style of Judaism might be just the thing for me (and he’s right, it might be, and we’ll see).
Nothing has made me more Jewish than the last 6 (oh jesus god in whom I do not believe, six) years in Kansas. Nothing has tied me more closely to my forebears who prayed alone or in small groups, unable for whatever reason to congregate openly. Studying Talmud or Kabbalah are not solitary acts- you are exhorted not to, lest you lead yourself astray, and in fact Kabbalah is said to be off limits until you’re older and wiser- and I don’t whip out some Steinsaltz and get crackin of a Thursday evening. There are synagogues here- a shockingly huge number, in fact- and I’m hardly the lone Jew on the prairie. But this inward turn of my religious devotion, the mindfulness that can be permitted by swales of grass and gaping blue sky, it simply couldn’t happen in Chicago. And nothing has convinced me of the presence of a greater power moreso than Sean.
I find myself grasping, these days. Not for formality, but for words, for ways to communicate the meaning of God, of faith, of the good that both Judaism and Catholicism can bring to Sean. My parents in no way shape manner or form intended to raise a child who believed, unwaveringly so, in God, and yet they did. Unlike so many other things they did- academic excellence, humor, love of books- that I can point to concrete moments when they imparted lessons, when they showed by example, when I know they were actively parenting and teaching me, I can’t do it for this. My kid’s picture bible was from my stepgrandfather. The JCC preschool was an accident. They let me put up a Christmas stocking because at age 3, when told I couldn’t hang one but yes I’d been a good girl but Santa doesn’t visit Jewish kids, I shrieked “You mean Santa’s a BIGOT?”, and they just didn’t want me to grow up thinking that. I don’t go to temple. And frankly, I won’t go to temple. So how then do I impart to my child the grace and serenity that my faith gives me, the knowledge that I can be lifted up so high that I cannot fall? I have no road map, I have no guides. I can call my mother and ask how she dealt with my voracious appetite for knowledge, my refusal to take a nap, but this one, well, vaya con dios, she says.
Indeed.
When Sean had his naming ceremony, written for him and officiated by the Velveteen Rabbi, she of course referred to the lessons his father and I would impart to him, and the personality traits she hoped he would have- “May you be blessed with your parents’ wit and intelligence; their sense of humor and their sense of perspective; their ability to cherish the unusual and the commonplace, football games and nights at the opera, hamburgers and haute cuisine.”
I remember talking with his pediatrician when he was two, and we were working hard to expand his culinary horizons. I was desparing- he would eat the avocado rolls and the veggie tempura from the sushi place, but god help us if we put a piece of meat on his plate that was not a cut up hot dog, burger, or meatball. He had backed away from eating BBQ and suddenly meat sauce was verboten. His pediatrician laughed outright at me- sort of high and hysterical truth be told- and assured me as I lamented over what he wouldn’t eat that the list of what he would was beyond jaw-dropping and into amazing territory.
This weekend, we brought him with us to the lovely French bistro, which has now instituted another, more traditional bistro menu. He packed away the better part of an adult sized order of steak frite with sauce bordelaise, along with the lion’s share of the olive oil crostini and salmis (two kinds- genoa and cracked peppercorn red wine salmi)- tried the chicken liver mousse pate, demolished his blueberry sorbet, and cheerfully helped me finished my chocolate creme brulee with tiny palmier. He then flopped over on the banquette and announced he was tired, drifting off into a food coma.
Monday I went to pick him up from school, and had a concerned teacher to deal with. Sean had only eaten most of his lunch, rather than all, which for him is a sign of dire illness on the level of the bubonic plague. When asked by his teacher why he had refused his ravioli, he declared he didn’t like the sauce. So she asked what kind of sauce he does like, expecting to hear ‘white’ or ‘no meat’ or somesuch. At pickup, she siddled up and asked me, in great confusion, precisely what ’sauce borderlace’ is and why he’d be eating it on something called ’steakinfreet’.
Ways to humiliate yourself, #191
Be stuck in traffic in your 13 year old volvo sedan, with the Black Eyed Peas “Let’s Get It Started” cranked to earsplitting volume, rocking out with your 5 year old.
And have the head of their school pull up next to you.