The Lilith Blog

Don’t worry. I’m not going to purport that we eat them, nor will I wax poetic on how juicy and delicious those baby pulkes would be with Soy Vay. Though I’ll confess that the idea has occurred to me. And it has been confirmed by other parents who have told me – “when they’re little, they’re so cute, you could eat them. When they grow up, you wish you had.”

It’s summertime, and, as is our custom, we are preparing to visit family on the East Coast. We fill carry-on knapsacks with enough food to last a week, enough toys to keep our children busy for what turns out to be at least ten minutes, and never quite enough diapers and changes of clothes. My husband tries to sneak in the New York Times, but I always pull it out and stick another coloring book in instead. We go to see our parents, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, cousins, friends, and, our grandmothers.

Whenever we go to NY, we head over the George Washington Bridge to visit my grandmother and Genya, my childhood nanny. Both of these women live alone in big apartment buildings. Both are witty, smart, curious, and fun-loving. Both have outlived their partners and many of their friends. Both have loving family members who live nearby, but who are also busy with their own lives. Both have ever-glaring televisions. Neither can drive. My grandmother, a self-proclaimed Luddite, has learned to navigate the Internet, opening new avenues for interaction – but virtual ones, nonetheless. Whenever we visit them, they confess to me that it is so hard to be alone, so lonely.

I remember the profound loneliness I felt when I first became a mother. I had left my job, and was spending day after day alone with my infant, nursing, changing diapers, timing naps, taking walks. It got so bad that I studied for the GMAT just for fun. That phase passed, but the feeling of being alone in the world with a new baby made an impression on me. There is a window of time, after the initial exhaustion of giving birth, and before the busy days of preschool and play-dates and Music Class and swimming lessons, where the baby and her caregiver are alone. And today, so many of us live far from family members who can fulfill a primal need for “oohs” and “aahs” and “I remember” stories during that window of time.

Here we have two groups of women – lonely, desperate for meaningful human interactions – who can fulfill profoundly each other’s needs. The older women will ooh and aah, and share their stories, and the new mothers will have an audience for their precious little ones. Can we somehow connect these generations who have so much to gain from one another, but whose interactions are often limited to squirming supermarket aisle conversations or cross-country trips across a long bridge?

–Maya Bernstein

CalTrain, which runs from San Jose to San Francisco, zooms by the corner of East Meadow and Alma, about five blocks from our house, numerous times a day. It stops about two miles north and three miles south of that corner. When I go to work at my office in San Francisco, I bike the two miles to University Avenue, to take the bullet train. I love every aspect of the commute. The train represents the best of civilization – a common good that benefits the earth, society, and its individuals, and runs with efficiency, speed, and trust. My time on the train is sacred – conducive to writing poetry, connecting over the phone with friends and family, getting work done, or, simply, staring out the window, lost in the motion of thought.

My daughters love the train, too. We often have to cross the busy intersection at Alma and East Meadow, either in the car, on the way to school or music class, or in the double-stroller, me on roller-blades, on the way to the “sprinkler park,” a popular spot in the summer heat. My three-year-old is always on the lookout for trains, which she can hear coming by its bellows and whistles, and the cling-cling-cling of the red and white arms, which lower to prevent cars and pedestrians from approaching the tracks. Whenever we see a train, she shouts: “It’s my lucky day!” and we sing the “choo-choo” train song. Late at night, when it’s quiet, we sometimes hear the train from our bedroom; I have always found it to be a soothing, joyous sound.

This week, work took me to Los Angeles for the day. Driving home from the airport, where I had parked the car, I signaled my right blinker, planning to make the turn from Alma to East Meadow, so close to home! Flashing blue and red police lights jarred me into the realization that the intersection was closed, and that, no, I hadn’t imagined it, and had in fact just passed a train, which stood silent, frozen, ablaze from within, a hiding behemoth on the tracks. Fire-trucks and police cars blocked the intersection, where, because of an interminable red light, I was forced to sit and wait. I looked. A dark shape, covered, lay on the street, a few feet from the tracks. It was strangely silent. Nothing was in motion. The light turned green and I drove on, out of my way, to cross the tracks at the next block, and then circle back home.

That night, a 17-year old teenage girl had committed suicide by stepping onto the tracks in front of an oncoming train. She was the second teen suicide, a student at nearby Gunn High School, to die in that spot in a month. Last night, a mother successfully talked her son out of stepping in front of a train in the same spot, while an emergency meeting for parents was taking place on at a local community center.

The past few days I have been trying to block out the sound of the train. When I close my eyes, I see its bright lights, and feel its enormous weight, its unstoppable power. The battles I have been having with my daughter about whether or not she can take her favorite toys to school feel frighteningly insignificant, and I shudder when my babysitter laughs when I recount them, sighing – “little children, little problems; big children, big problems.” And when I pick up my daughter from school, I quietly hope that we won’t see a train, lest we stop by the tracks, lest I have to answer her questions about the flowers and bears and signs placed by their side, lest I hear her cheerful voice, gleefully shouting, “It’s my lucky day!”

–Maya Bernstein

On Tuesday morning, my small office’s regular staff meeting took place in the plaza in front of the Supreme Court building in San Francisco, under a chuppah, amongst hundreds of waving rainbow “marriage” signs. We were awaiting the news from the court about Prop 8, which, in November of last year, banned same-sex marriage in the state of California, after it had been approved by the justices in May, 2008. Though expectations were not high that the court would reverse the ban, the mood in the plaza was hopeful, joyous, and full of anticipation.

That morning, I’d had a fight with my three year old. I didn’t know that one could fight with a three year old until I became a parent of one. We fought about the washcloth. I keep a washcloth beside the sink in the girls’ bathroom. I use it to wash the yucky stuff out of their eyes and the crust from around their mouths (a casualty of the pacifiers), each morning. Now, this is a good washcloth. It prevents the waste of many tissues (which saves trees!) But it must be used appropriately. I use only a very small corner at a time, so that it can be re-used, and, most importantly, can dry quickly. Because if it gets too wet, it begins to emit a nasty, damp washcloth smell. Then it is a bad washcloth. The smell, like the ring in The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, sticks to everything it touches, including fingers, dolls, shoes, and toothbrushes. I find myself doing a load of laundry just to clean it. That wastes water, which is very bad for the trees. So, you will understand why, when, that fateful morning, my three year old was at the sink, cold water rushing around her, the washcloth soaked, dropping torrents of water on the counter, the floor, and the baby, I was not a happy mother. I know, and knew even then, that I should praise her for her independence. And talk calmly. But I grabbed the washcloth. And berated her. And gave her a time-out. And she cried, and I yelled, and a door got slammed. And I went to work with shame in my heart, and stood, in the hot sun, with people shouting, “we want justice,” thinking about my daughter.

The court upheld the ban while preserving the 18,000 marriages made between May and November of last year. The crowd immediately mobilized. It boo-ed. It chanted “shame on you.” And then a man with a megaphone organized a march, shouting out street directions, as people, peacefully, full of emotion, hand in hand, began to walk in protest. I was overwhelmed. If a passionate crowd of brutally disappointed people could respond civilly, its dignity intact, then why was I losing it over a washcloth?

My friend lent me a book: “How to Talk So Kids will Listen, and Listen so Kids will Talk” by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish. I liked the first sentence very much: “I was a great parent before I had children.” I read the first chapter, and, the next morning, the protests were more peaceful, from both our ends. We’ll see. In the meantime, I keep marching.

–Maya Bernstein