The Lilith Blog

There was a great cartoon in the New Yorker magazine a couple of weeks ago; it pictures a mother driving with her three kids in the back seat. The kids were hollering, fighting, and, one could safely assume, had very sticky fingers. The mother’s eyes were narrow slits in the rear-view mirror. The bumper sticker or the back of the car reads: I’d rather be working.

Over the past six weeks, during which I have been home with my newborn and two young children, one of whom is being toilet trained, I admit to hatching numerous plans to escape to my quiet office and its spacious rooms, far from the unquenchable, insatiable mouths of babes. But now, as the midpoint of my maternity leave is incomprehensibly already behind me, I contemplate returning to work with apprehension. Is it possible that this period of time is almost over? That to these days which fold over each other and melt together, clouded in the haze of interrupted sleep, will be added the extra responsibility of functioning in the work world?  (more…)

A month ago, a day after our son was born, my husband brought our “big girls,” ages 4 and 2, to visit me and the newborn in the hospital. “You have a baby brother!” I said to them. The big one, already old enough to know that boys have cooties, lamented the fact that it wasn’t a baby sister. The little one peered into his glass hospital basinet. “She’s a boy?” she asked.

Over the course of the past few weeks, I’ve been surprised at the reactions, including my own, to the fact that a male child was born into our family. I have been overwhelmed by the rituals and practices that surround the birth of a baby boy. I gave birth on a Wednesday, and came home on a Friday afternoon, exhausted, and ready to cocoon. That very night, though, while I nursed upstairs, our living and dining rooms were filled with guests; well-wishers who came to sing, tell stories, give blessings, and eat chick-peas. This traditional event, called a Shalom Zachor, which takes place on the first Friday night after a male child is born, is an opportunity for the members of the community to come and welcome the new child. It is an event that takes place only for boys; girls are welcomed into the Jewish people immediately by virtue of their birth. But since the boy has not yet been circumcised, he is, supposedly, despondent, and is cheered up only when throngs of people descend upon his exhausted parents’ house.

My husband and I hadn’t even wanted to partake in this ritual, but gentle communal encouragement won us over. And I must admit, that, as I sat upstairs, listening to the familiar voices of friends singing and sharing words of Torah, I felt a surge of, could it be, maternal pride, and had a few private moments of clucking around like a proud chicken; I had produced a male heir. I couldn’t help but feel that all of these people were here to celebrate me, and that I had done something right in giving birth to a boy.

This was reinforced in the wider world as well. When I was leaving the hospital with the bundle in my arms, a woman smiled at me in the elevator. “Is it your first?” she asked. I told her that I had two girls at home. “Well,” she said, “you’ve finally got your boy.” In fact, when I gave birth to our second daughter, the nurses wished me well when I was leaving, and said, “see you next year.” When I raised my eyebrows they smiled – “well, aren’t you going to try for a boy?”

Do we still live in a world in which it matters whether or not you give birth to a boy or a girl? Is there something particularly to be celebrated, in the Jewish community and beyond, when a male child is born? Or is it simply that after having two of “the same,” what is recognized is having something “different?” And what does my moment of clucking maternal pride say about me? Am I simply reacting to communal forces that, despite myself, have affected me? Or am I carrying hidden stereotypes that I have never expressed, even to myself? And how do I navigate that, as a mother?

I’m not sure yet. In the meantime, though, I’m reluctantly introducing male pronouns into my daughters’ vocabularies.

-Maya Bernstein

In the leafy bushes immediately outside of our front door, a hummingbird has built a nest. For the past three weeks, during which time my husband has grown a beard in mourning for his mother, and I have swollen into the last month of my third pregnancy, the mother hummingbird has been sitting on her two tiny eggs, which recently hatched two Lilliputian, helpless, hummingbird chicks. We’ve been trying not to use our front door, but none of us can long resist the desire to tiptoe past this minuscule miracle, and peer inside.

Our daughters are delighted. They’ve told everyone. “Our hummingbird made a mest,” says my two year old, and the four year old chimes in, “and all day long she sits like this, without moving, keeping her babies warm.” She imitates the bird, staring straight ahead, unblinking, until she turns her big, light-filled eyes to her audience, waiting for them to become infected with her joy. Though the chicks have hatched, still the hummingbird sits, keeping the live little chicks warm, but now she also flits around, gathering whatever it is that nourishes tiny birds, and bringing it in her beak to her ravenous brood. She feeds them and sits on them again.

Often, I find myself hovering near our front door and gazing protectingly outside. If the mother is out foraging, and I notice a crow or robin nearby, I hiss angrily. My own children seem to me like frightening giants when they leave our house, squealing and excited to gaze at what the natural world has laid at their fingertips. “Quietly! Gently! Not too close!” I warn, knowing that I am partly talking about myself, about the turning, stretching new life within me, slowly descending, soon to hatch. I identify with the beady-eyed, resigned, taught expression of the mother hummingbird, an expression which acknowledges with resolve that fragile life is within its care.

Each morning, when my husband returns home from the morning minyan he attends daily to say Kaddish, the mourner’s prayer, he reports on the state of the birds. “She was sitting on the nest,” he shares, or “she must have been out gathering food.” Each day we wonder whether or not they are surviving, and what the next day will bring. In the evening, the children put their hands on my belly. “It’s moving!” they shout as a fist or foot sweeps across my translucent belly. At night, when I toss from one side to another, seeking elusive comfort, my dreams are a-flutter with hummingbird, tranquil and stoic on her nest. Sometimes I dream that I am her chick, curled up beneath her warm, breathing body, and sometimes I dream I am she, and am overwhelmed by a desire to fly far and fast, away, even as I sit.

–Maya Bernstein

I am back on the train again. Strangely, this morning, it is the window that is foggy, preventing me from seeing clearly the world beyond, rather than the air being full of Bay Area morning fog. Last week, my mother in law passed away unexpectedly. I have just returned from the week of sitting Shiva with my husband and his family. My mother, sister, and her baby flew across the country from New York to be with our daughters. A whirlwind of motion in an attempt to preserve some semblance of stability, in a world that has become so suddenly foggy.

How do you talk to children about death? In the few weeks that their grandmother was very sick, we began to try to prepare our children. “Your Anyu is very sick,” we told them, “and Papa is going to visit her to try and help her feel better.” Our oldest furrowed her brow, and then said: “Papa, don’t get too close – we don’t want you to get sick.”

One beautiful afternoon on Passover, when the weather in Palo Alto seemed a mockery of the cold within us, I was sitting in our garden with the girls, and the little one noticed a bee on the ground. “Look!” she shouted, and we all ran over. The bee was hobbling, on the verge of death. “That bee is very sick,” I told the girls. “It will most probably die soon.” The little one looked closely at the bee. “Bee – sick,” she said slowly, “and Anyu sick.”

When I received the dreaded phone call, I held the girls close, and told them that Anyu had died. The older one tried to explain it to the little one: “When someone dies, it means we never see them again.” And then she asked me: “Did Anyu get old?” Their Anyu was just shy of 62; her own mother is alive, 93 years old, and is in mourning for her daughter. All day long, the older one was trying to work it out. “I’m going to die before my sister, and you’re going to die before Papa, and Papa’s going to die before me…” attempting to comprehend the incomprehensible.

We made pictures and talked about memories and read all of the books and played with all of the toys and wore all of the clothes Anyu had given them. Now that their father has returned, unshaven and watery-eyed, they are slightly wary of him. Their windows, through which they peer bright-eyed and joyous, are clear, like those on the other side of this train; ours are so blurry it seems impossible to imagine clear sight. They cannot comprehend their own loss. They have lost a grandmother, a friend, a confidante, an advocate, a role-model. They have lost one of the finite number of people on this planet who love them more than anything in the world.

They watch us closely as we blink our eyes, and with our damp sleeves try to rub at the windows, hoping the sun will begin to shine through.

–Maya Bernstein

Virginia Heffernan, in her piece Framing Childhood in this week’s New York Times Magazine, writes, with only a hint of sarcasm, that “we form families in the Internet age so we can produce, distribute, and display digital photos of ourselves.” I am here to admit, that at least from where I’m sitting, she speaks the truth. From the “marching orders,” which “come immediately, with the newborn photo, [and] must be e-mailed to friends before a baby has left the maternity ward,” the business of parenting is intertwined with the business of photo-taking, sharing, tweeting, Facebooking, and, shouting from the rooftops – look what I’ve done!

I justify the obsession by reminding myself that our closest family members live hundreds of miles away. I am doing a great service, I think, when, in the middle of a game, instead of playing along, I jump up and run for the camera. I am conquering lands and oceans, bringing my children into the homes of the people who love them most.

For ultimately, this obsession with keeping records of our children, and sharing them with anyone who will gaze smilingly along with us, is connected to the overflowing human desire to be in relationship. And, like all of today’s technology, the act of taking a photograph creates the illusion of being in relationship. When we take out our cameras, we think we are saying to our children, our extended families, and our friends: you are important to us. It’s analogous to “friending” someone, or tweeting at someone. What we’re forgetting, though, is that when we pulled the i-phone out of our back pockets, our kids were in the middle of a game, engrossed in real relationship, and we interrupted them, or, worse, extracted ourselves from being in real life relationship with them to duck into the role of observer. We’re engaged, but not too engaged.

Because relationships are hard, and technology is easy. It is harder to be an active member than to be an observer, aloof, behind the camera, manipulating the images, choosing what to show and to whom and when. And parenting is one of the messiest relationships of them all. It is infinitely harder to be a parent than to showcase our children. It is harder to be a good child than to send cute pictures to the grandparents.
My family came to visit this weekend. From the moment they arrived, cameras and camera-phones were clicking, as if, somehow, those ephemeral pauses, cloaked in hugs and smiles, could help bridge the gap of distance, and delay time, keeping us close together a little while longer. Interestingly, the frequency of the prevalence of the cameras diminished over the course of their visit. Eventually, we all got too busy being together. Eating. Going to the park. And laughing, spontaneously, when things happened so fast that we forgot to record them. And when I look back at the time we spent, those fleeting moments which cannot be shared over the internet on Kodak Gallery or Snapfish, are the ones that will stick forever, messy, joyous, and gone, guaranteeing we’ll need to come back for more.

–Maya Bernstein

The winter Olympics are approaching. Hooray! Something to watch on TV besides reality shows. I’m a product of the TV of the 80s. Fraggle Rock, Growing Pains, and MacGyver. Now, that’s TV. And the Olympics were always occasion for a good hot cup of cocoa, and wide-eyed dreams. Who knows, my eager ten year old self would think, unaware that even then I was too old and past my prime, that could be me one day.

In his interview with Deborah Solomon in this week’s New York Times Magazine, Vancouver-based author Douglas Coupland, speculates about his path in life. He says: “My question about luging is, How do you get into the luge community to begin with? Is it one day like, ‘Mom, Dad, I really want to luge.’ And your parents are like: ‘O.K., I’ll quit my job. We’ll move to an Alpine community.’” And he concludes: “I could have been an Olympian if only my parents had bought me a luge.”

Ah. I should have known. Of course it’s our parents’ fault! Well, once we’re on the subject, if only my parents had nurtured my innate desires and abilities, I would definitely have been an Olympic swimmer. Or an actress. Or, perhaps, a concert pianist. Though yes, they bought me a piano, gave me swim lessons, and attended my school plays, they did not, negligent folk that they are, uproot our family and move to Vail. So as not to appear ungrateful, to their credit, I will concede that they did buy me a Golden Retriever, and, now, as a mother living in close quarters with messy kids, there is no way in the world I would ever consider living with a dog.

How much responsibility do parents have, especially in today’s highly specialized and competitive world, to notice and nudge their children towards a specific path in life? How do you nurture the innate talents of each child? Can you do that while attempting to also convey a system of shared values? And while providing them with the space and freedom to have a healthy childhood?

My husband, his brothers, and their wives (including me) are all in Jewish education. My mother, her sister, and her brother, her brother-in-law, her niece, nephew-in-law, daughter, son-in-law, and his mother, are all doctors. Is this good or bad? Or neutral? What does it mean? Maybe it is good to help carve your children’s career paths. Too much choice is overwhelming, and can leave you stranded, frozen, unable to choose. But how do we know if we are nurturing innate passions, or less-than-gently pushing our kids towards our own desires? And this begs the broader question: how much can parents be blamed, or credited, for the choices of their children?

Questions to ponder while watching young, lithe creatures, who have dedicated their childhoods to achieving one specific dream, fly through the air. Whose parents bought them a luge.

–Maya Bernstein

When I was pregnant with my first daughter, I became prey to the endless array of children’s gear, clothing, and toys marketed to parents as if they would be negligent if they did not purchase it. One evening, while watching Saturday Night Live and realizing that the commercials, marketed at young parents like myself who were too tired to go out on a Saturday night, and too lazy to find a babysitter, were for Barbie Dolls and Transformers (has nothing changed???) , I took a stance, and made a definitive decision that I would never let “kids’ stuff” take over my house. Kids don’t need much, I told the magazines as I flipped through them, trying hard not to fold down the corners of pages with cute stuff I liked.

Another kid, ten dolls, a hundred books, and a billion Lego pieces later, I am often unable to find the living room carpet because of all the toys. Some were gifts, some were bought in moments of weakness at the toy store across the street on rainy days, and many were hand-me-downs, but, there’s no two ways about it; our house is bursting with kids’ stuff. And worse – it is bursting with stuff that refuses to be contained or maintained in any semblance of order.

So it is with little choice that I wage constant war. I am the general of a one-woman army fighting against a tireless team that wickedly employs the best of guerilla warfare. They’re good. They go after the tiny stuff. The Thumbelina-sized pieces of the Russian dolls. The little orange spoons from the tea-set. The littlest boot from the wooden doll’s dress-up doll. And their hiding spots are inspired. In the bowels beneath beds and cribs, inside the deep crevices between the pillows of the couch, in minuscule bags placed inside larger bags placed within boxes wrapped in blankets. How they test me!

After bed-time, I transform. If only I knew how to sew, I’d make myself a costume. Just call me “Super-Finder.” Or “Stuff-Buster.” Anyway, my days end under couches and tables, ear to the floor, on the war-path, obsessed with finding each toy and placing it in its proper location. I go through boxes and bags of toys, looking for missing pieces from other sets. Each night, I attempt to impose order, and each morning, they’re back at it, seemingly innocent, strewing chaos in their wake.

Is this the nature of mother and children? For them to be pushing, constantly, against whatever boundaries we have erected to define our lives? For them to endlessly challenge the structures we have imposed, until, one evening, in the midst of the chaos, exhausted, we lay ourselves down, and begin to question those very boundaries and structures? What would happen if, one evening, and perhaps the following, I left the mess? If I allowed chaos to sink its claws deeper into my skin? If I relinquished some control, and then some more, handing it over to them, so that, one day, I would have no choice but to say – it is beyond me, I cannot find it, I cannot reach it, and you must search for it yourself?

Children have a way of spreading into our corners, hiding little pieces in our deepest places. And when, on those weary evenings, we search ourselves, we often find that which we didn’t know belonged, and, in the process of striving to maintain our inner home, our very rooms expand.

–Maya Bernstein

I used to love to fly. I would request a window seat and forget that I was in a tiny claustrophobic cabin and lose myself to the clouds, to the perspective of being in a liminal space, above life on land, and closer to the vast expanse beyond. I always travelled light; my carry-on contained a good novel, a pen, and a notebook. Airplanes represented the wide world of possibility, new languages, new vistas, the possibility of meeting kindred spirits, and adventure.

Well, that’s changed. My carry-on now contains: ten diapers, thirty wipes, two half-empty tubes of diaper cream, one thermometer, Infant’s Tylenol, Children’s Tylenol, seven hundred (broken) crayons, three hundred markers (out of which three have ink), five coloring books, three sticker books, four pacifiers, two extra pairs of socks, pants, shirts, onesies, and tights, one stuffed elephant, one stuffed dog, five squishy bath toys (don’t ask), two board books, hand sanitizer, five extra clips, four sandwiches, two plastic bags full of noodles, three cheese sticks, carrot sticks and celery sticks, apple slices, fruit leather, crumbled crackers, pretzel sticks, one sippy-cup, and two juice boxes. Though we often order a window seat, if I am lucky enough to convince my four-year-old to let me sit in it, the little one spends the entire flight on my lap pulling the window shade up, and down, up, and down, up, and down, up, and down, so that I have no choice but to vacate said seat and let my four-year-old sit there.

The hardest part is getting the little one to sleep, since one of her greatest joys in life, to quote Amy Ozols: “is wakefulness—and not simply passive wakefulness but the kind of vigorous wakefulness that makes a person like me start to question the very possibility of silence as a condition that can exist in the universe.” The process usually takes at least an hour of my telling endless stories, singing endless renditions of “Hello, Everybody” and “Mary had a Little Lamb,” and physically wrestling with my daughter to keep her lying down. During this time, I endure vicious looks from the passengers around me. It begins with a slight shifting from the people in the rows directly in front of and behind me. Then come the not-so-subtle over-the-shoulder glances. Then people clear their throats. It moves like the wave in a ripple until I feel like the entire plane is going to stand up and scream at me to just keep my kid quiet, and how dare I subject them to this torture, and shouldn’t there be a rule that children shouldn’t be allowed to fly, and that I shouldn’t be allowed to be a parent.

Ironically, it’s these same people who, before the flight, smile at the girls as they run through the airport, arms horizontal, pretending to be airplanes, and who delight in how cute they look in their fur-hooded vests. Just hope we’re not on your flight, I mutter as we pass them by.

We recently flew to Montreal, via Denver, and our bags decided they’d rather ski west than east. As I railed against fate, and argued with the guy in India hired to tell me he was sorry for the inconvenience, I couldn’t help but notice that my daughters weren’t fazed. They were wide-eyed, busy with playing with new toys, connecting to their grandparents, gasping at the frigid air, gaping at the snow, and listening intently to the sounds of French on the radio. They had traveled, and this was an adventure. And so I hung up the phone, put the girls in borrowed boots, and took them sledding beneath the cloudless sky.

–Maya Bernstein

I’ve spent the past month searching for a new nanny. Albina, our beloved babysitter, who had lived three doors away, moved. She doesn’t drive, and now lives just far enough away to have rendered me mad with searching for a chauffeur for our nanny, and then distraught that I am not an upper-class lady in Victorian England, able to afford a nurse, nanny, governess, maid, gardener, cook, butler, footmen, and chauffeur, all of whom, I have convinced myself in the course of this upheaval, I need.

One night while lying in bed, after two weeks of conducting interviews, subjecting my daughters to new faces every day, staying home from work, sending friends to spy in the park, and coming up empty, I burst into tears. My husband bolted up in bed and asked what was wrong. “I miss Albina,” I sobbed. We had finally found our groove together, she and I. My children loved her. She took care of our plants. She cooked us home-made blintzes and French fries, baked apples and squash, and a pea soup that my picky daughters would eat when they would eat nothing else. She spontaneously cleaned things – our porch, the garage, the floors. And she was the best newborn care nurse I’d ever met, bathing the children in strange Russian herbs, and swaddling them so that they had no choice but to sleep for hours. My husband tried to reassure me. He had never really connected with Albina; he couldn’t communicate with her in Russian, and found her aloof and reserved. “We’ll find someone else, and the children will learn to love her too. Don’t worry.” And he gave me a kiss, rolled over, and immediately fell back asleep, oblivious to my tortured state, my unappeasable angst.

Last week, I finally hired someone. The kids are delighted. Our new babysitter is Portuguese, but speaks fluent English. I am mourning the loss of a beloved second language in our home, but my older daughter, whose Russian I admit has deteriorated with her preschool attendance, is delighted to have someone she can understand. Our new babysitter brings her toddler daughter on the days she works for us. My need to hire someone, and the fact that she comes so highly recommended from a friend, and that she drives, and can help with carpool, has outweighed this detail. This, for me, was a distressing decision, but my little one asks every day for her new little friend; she loves spending those days with a buddy, someone with whom to play in the park, eat lunch, and color.

Why is it that the transition has been harder for me than for anyone else in my family? Who is our nanny really for?

I work part-time – a decision I made for emotional, intellectual, financial, and sanity reasons. But, despite what I thought before I birthed my children, I can’t help but feel that the primary responsibility to care for their daily needs is on my shoulders. What I’ve realized over the course of the past month, in searching for a replacement for Albina, is that I am, in some strange way, searching for a replacement of myself. I am looking both to replicate myself for my children, and to bring someone into my home who makes me feel cared for. Someone to seamlessly take my place when I rush out of the house at seven-thirty in the morning, and quietly relinquish it when I return in the darkness of suppertime. And more. I want someone who will cook for me when I’m tired and hungry. I want another mother in my home, a mother who fills in my gaps, who has a green thumb and can darn socks, but who doesn’t threaten to replace me. This is a delicate, intricate, trembling balance of power, of identities. It has taken me years to establish. And now, bereft, I am the one in mourning, having lost a piece of myself.

–Maya Bernstein

While spending time at my parent’s house with my daughters recently, I reacquainted myself with some of my favorite childhood books. My parents have a stash that weren’t subject to today’s politically correct sensors. My older daughter delighted in Maurice Sendak’s The Night Kitchen, which tells the story of a little boy who has a dream, who stay up all night mixing “milk in the batter, milk in the batter.” It goes without saying that the boy is naked in his dream, and that the illustrations are anatomically correct. Some books I didn’t let her read, like another Sendak book that still terrifies me, Outside Over There, about goblins who kidnap a baby while the big sister is in charge.

Then there were those books that I decided were worth the read, but that needed some on-the-spot, parental re-writing. My parents’ library’s version of the Three Little Pigs fell into that category. Did you know that the original mother pig sent away her children because she didn’t have the means to care for them? That it was a maudlin and traumatic farewell? And that each little pig set out on his own, and the first two, who built houses of straw and sticks respectively, were actually eaten by the Big Bad Wolf? Contrary to my memory, they didn’t escape to their older brother’s House of Bricks? And that the third little pig, after outsmarting the wolf in the apple orchard and the county fair, captured the wolf and ate him? Ate him? Need I remind you what the wolf had recently eaten?

Luckily, I thought, my four-year-old will not notice if I revise the story slightly. After all, I am quite experienced in such editing. The older brother in Tiki Tiki Tembo? Well, it’s not that he was never quite the same again after he spent too long in the well; he merely had to rest in bed for a few days, and learn to be a better listener. The family members in The Carrot Seed? They’re pretty harsh, so I soften their language a bit – “I’m not sure it will grow,” they say, instead of the definitive “it won’t come up.” I was confident I could appropriately re-work Three Little Pigs. Little did I know that my daughter’s grandparents had been reading her the book surreptitiously, word for word. When I attempted to deviate from the text, she carefully corrected me: No, the wolf eats the piggy, Mama. Then she wanted me to read the book again, the right way this time.

So much from shielding her from the winds that blow down Houses of Straw. And why is it that I was the one trembling after each reading, while she, resilient, asked for more?

You would think that I would have learned by now that, as parents, we are defenseless against the raging winds when they choose to blow. We painstakingly build our houses, confident they are made of bricks, and when the wolf shows up, unannounced and uninvited, he huffs and he puffs and he blows that house down. Maybe our children should be exposed to these stories from an early age. Will this help prepare them? Will this help them learn that the challenge actually lies in how we respond to those raging winds, how we choose to continue our stories, and build anew, once the illusion of solid structure has crumbled around us?

–Maya Bernstein