The Lilith Blog

The baby’s got a new trick. She can turn her hands into wind-shield wipers. When it’s time for breakfast, I drop her into her high-chair and dump some cheerios and a hunk of banana on the tray while I go get the yogurt, or oatmeal. Her older sister sits at the table eagerly, awaiting the show. I approach the high-chair with trepidation. The banana and cheerios are now glistening on the floor. Mmmmmm – yogurt! I say. Go go gadget wind-shield wiper hands, she squawks, and the spoon, dripping with blueberry goop, cannot, despite my athletic dexterity, approach the holy zone of the closed mouth. Her sister giggles in delight. I persevere, placing a beloved piece of strawberry on top of the yogurt. Look, I say, strawberry! But the hands go wild, swish swish swish swish, as if the light drizzle has become a torrential downpour.

How to get (healthy) foods into the mouths of babes? My parents tell me that I was a terror; they would put on a song and dance show, involving puppets and costumes, to get bites into my mouth; as the show and the meal progressed, my mouth would get fuller and fuller, and I would perform the finale, expelling from my cheeks the entire meal.

It doesn’t seem to get any easier as they get older. My three-year-old’s latest is: “I’m hungry for candy.” And my babysitter, whose two grand-daughters are eleven and thirteen, comes in worried each morning with new stories about the dinner-table tears, and the after-dinner fights that revolve around picky eating and body-image issues.

And all of that “getting food into them” assumes that the food is on the table, prepared, diverse, colorful, delicious, piping hot, and nutritious, exactly when they’re hungry.

I asked my three year old if she likes being a kid, or if she’d rather be a grown-up. She thought for a minute and said – I want to be a grown-up, because grown-ups cook all the time.

Who knew it was going to be so hard, and so all-consuming?

Apparently, lots of people. Everyone, from the New York Times to Michelle Obama to the Mommy Bloggers, like Chef Mom, Weelicious, and Meals for Moms, to name a few, is talking about how to get healthy food into kids (and all their relatives).

Now, I love to cook. But it’s exhausting to plan meal after meal after meal. It takes so much time, and constant creative energy. And, within minutes, it’s on the floor, or smudged into their hair, or is a stain on their clean pajamas. And then it’s messy dishes and pots and left-overs, which get lost in the cavernous fridge.

Feeding one’s family is part of that never-ending up-and-down cycle of parenting, a cycle expressed by T.S Eliot, in Little Gidding of his Four Quartets – “what we call the end is often the beginning, and to make a beginning is to make an end – the end is where we start from.” Even if, last night, you cooked the most incredible dinner in the universe, which your children ate neatly and with great appetite, you’ve got to cook another one for tonight. There is no arrival; there is, simply, the journey. The show must go on.

–Maya Bernstein

The baby learned to walk – ah! The freedom of it! Tentative steps for a month, and then, seemingly suddenly, the determination palpable, the joy uncontainable, the falls inevitable, she is on the move. Most radical, I imagine, must be the change in perspective, from feet to knees, from the steady lines and right angles of carpets and table legs to the vast expanse of air and space between the objects perceived from two feet off the ground.

She looks to me like the vision of a dream my father had, when, as a grown man, he went skiing for the first time, and, after a cold day of carving wide turns on Vermont’s icy slopes, he slept soundly, dreaming of flying.

Bumbling elegance. Blocks, shoes, and her sister’s dolls, dwellers of the now-remote realm of floor, once studied scientifically, intimately, are now constant obstacles on her path, that of all-consuming movement, a-shimmer with the distant twinkling of objects on low shelves and tables, the treasures of the Promised Land.

Avivah Zornberg, in her book The Particulars of Rapture, cites an essay by Adam Phillips, from his work On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored. The essay quotes Sartre (in Being and Nothingness) who discusses someone confronted with an overhanging rock face while on a walk.

For the simple traveler, who passes over this road and whose free project is a pure aesthetic ordering of the landscape, the crag is not revealed either as scalable or not scalable; it is manifested only as beautiful or ugly.

Phillips comments:

If I am simply on a walk, the rock face is an obstacle; if I am a painter, it is not. But the absurd – the psychoanalytic – possibility…is that I may realize I am on a walk only when I perceive the cliff as an obstacle. That is to say, the only way to discover your projects is to notice – to make conscious – what you reckon are obstacles…The desire does not reveal the obstacle; the obstacle reveals the desire.

I watch the baby glide from room to room, and she is beautiful. When I am not in motion, I am the simple traveler, the painter, the mother, standing to the side, observing her journey, dreaming, as I watch her fly, of flight.

But, when I am in motion, when I’m on my walk, this baby is my crag and that crag is my obstacle, and I must determine – scalable or not scalable – in order to survive. Then must I pick her up, and tuck her under my arm, and run down the stairs, and out the door, and she, eyes-wide, knowing, and not knowing the desire for flight, and its obstacles.

–Maya Bernstein

My mother-in-law forwarded me an email with this description of a Parent’s Job Description. I haven’t been able to find the author–-though multiple links come up when you Google “Parents + Job Description.”

I admit to laughing out loud at least once. In the spirit of Purim, which we celebrated this week, I wanted to share it with you.

JOB DESCRIPTION

TITLE

Mom, Mommy, Ma, Mo, Mama, Ema, Amma, Maman

Dad, Daddy, Pa, Pop, Papa, Abba, Ba, Baba

JOB DESCRIPTION

 Long term, team players needed, for challenging permanent work in an, often chaotic environment. Candidates must possess excellent communication and organizational skills and be willing to work variable hours, which will include evenings and weekends and frequent 24 hour shifts on call. Some overnight travel required, including trips to primitive camping sites on rainy weekends and endless sports tournaments in far away cities. Travel expenses not reimbursed. Extensive courier duties also required.

RESPONSIBILITIES

The rest of your life. Must be willing to be hated, or at least bite tongue repeatedly. Also, must possess the physical stamina of a pack mule and be able to go from zero to 60 mph in three seconds flat in case, this time, the screams from the backyard are not someone just crying wolf. Must be willing to face stimulating technical challenges, such as small gadget repair, mysteriously sluggish toilets and stuck zippers. Must screen phone calls, maintain calendars and coordinate production of multiple homework projects. Must have ability to plan and organize social gatherings for clients of all ages and mental outlooks. Must be willing to be indispensable one minute, and an embarrassment the next. Must handle assembly and product safety testing of a half million cheap, plastic toys, and battery operated devices. Must always hope for the best but be prepared for the worst. Must assume final, complete accountability for the quality of the end product. Responsibilities also include floor maintenance and janitorial work throughout the facility.

POSSIBILITY FOR ADVANCEMENT & PROMOTION

None. Your job is to remain in the same position for years, without complaining, constantly retraining and updating your skills, so that those in your charge can ultimately surpass you.

PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE

None required, unfortunately. On-the-job training offered on a continually exhausting basis.

WAGES AND COMPENSATION

Get this! You pay them! Offering them frequent raises and bonuses. A balloon payment is due when they turn 18 because of the assumption that college will help them become financially independent. When you die, you give them whatever is left. The oddest thing about this reverse-salary scheme is that you actually enjoy it and wish you could only do more.

BENEFITS

No health or dental insurance, no pension, no tuition reimbursement, no paid holidays and no stock options are offered (though this job supplies limitless opportunities for personal growth and free hugs for life if you play your cards right).

–Maya Bernstein

A friend of mine was visiting from out of town for a conference recently, and a group of her women friends gathered to see her. We ordered in pizza, and the woman who was hosting lit candles, which she arranged on her twin boys’ ping pong table, opened a bottle of wine, and baked heart-shaped mint brownies. I arrived first, and watched as everyone walked in and gushed “It smells so good!” “Wow – candles!” as the hostess handed them glasses of wine. We sat around and caught up, talking about our kids and our work, the pros and cons of being on Facebook, and finding time to exercise. The conversation could not help but come back, over and over again, to how nice it was to be sitting together in this house, eating on pretty plates (which we would not have to wash), drinking wine, candles lit, on a week-night.

The hostess told us all we had to get out more.

We told our visiting friend she had to visit more.

We thought about starting a non-book club book club.

Then dessert was served and one woman said that she should come here to get her daily dose of fruit – it looked so much more appealing than in her house. I agreed – who ever has time to cut up a pineapple? We all laughed at ourselves, acknowledging how nice it was to be mothered.
When I first moved to the West Coast, before I had children, I was tired of making new friends. I missed my old friends, my “real” friends, dispersed across the globe. I hated the phone, the time-differences, and all of the superficial technological innovations that create the illusion of “being in touch.” I missed touching them. I still do, terribly. But I have become more open to my definition of friendship. I’ve realized that there are many types of friends; for me, the common denominator for the basis of all friendships is sharing pivotal life experiences while living in close proximity. Friends are the people who have at some point given you a hug when you need it. They are people with whom you’ve shared pineapples, face to face, and then, later, the people with whom you talk about that pineapple, and whose hugs you remember.

When I became a mother, I became friends with other mothers, mothers who live nearby, whose kids play with my kids. We are sharing together one of the most profound journeys, and, thrust together by circumstance, we have become friends. In today’s age of countless Facebook friends, and of vast geographic distances separating us from the people who have known us our entire lives and with whom we feel the closest, these friends are precious. I’ve come to accept that new friends don’t annul old friends, just as a new child does not diminish the love one has for an older child. As Papa Bear sings to Baby Bear in Three Bears and a New Baby, “I love her cuz she’s curly and small; I love you cuz you’re furry and tall – curly and small love, furry and tall love, everyone loves through all their days, different people, different ways.”
We have a capacity and a need for endless friendships; these friendships arise in different circumstances and fill different needs, and, rather than negating one another, they accentuate the uniqueness of each era of our lives, revealing the infinite prism that compiles our very selves.

–Maya Bernstein