Tuesday, August 24, 2010

back to school - Tuesday 8/24/10

I awoke this morning from a very elaborate dream in which I learn I am pregnant, with medical complications, probably with a girl. I realize that I will need hand me downs in EVERY department - not just girl stuff, as my friends presume, but EVERYTHING, as I have already given everything baby related away.

Once awake, I realized why this has happened. There is nothing like the first day of school to remind you that there are no more babies in the house, nobody even resembling a baby in sight.

About 90 minutes later, Isaac started second grade. Sam gently let me know that he is, at age 9 1/2, too old to pose for a picture in front of school. But Sam did pose quite cheerfully at home, which is more than I can say for Max, who at 7:03, and one month before his 16th birthday, stormed out of the house with his own self-made breakfast and lunch, mumbling something about being behind schedule.

Over the past few years, I've generally been either mildly or very disappointed after awaking from pregnancy dreams, once I realize they're not real. Some of my friends have chosen not to have children. Others continue to have more children. Sometimes I get wistful about not having a daughter. But my childbirth days are over.

When we arrived at school today, there were Isaac's classmates' moms - one was pushing a stroller and another was bulging dramatically in the midsection. But I found that even while reporting my dream to a friend there in the school parking lot, I felt at peace, finally, with having reached this stage of life, with all my kids eating solid food and dressing themselves and living increasingly independent lives.

"Why is that?", I had to wonder to myself. "What has changed?" Then I recalled a girlfriend's words to me earlier in the day, when I told her that Paul might lose his job and that we might have to move. "But you can't leave - your life has just become so rich!" she exclaimed. And that is it, precisely. When I was having babies, I was utterly consumed by them - both literally, while nursing, and afterwards, with managing their rapidly developing persons. I poured a prodgious amount of energy into them each and every day. I still worked when I could, painting, teaching, sewing and writing, but my focus was outwards, or in the case of my memoir, backwards, and I did not take time to consider who I was becoming and what I most wanted to do with my time. I did not look inwards.

But now, with my youngest in second grade, I have had time to get back in touch with myself and I have had the chance to discover who I have evolved into while my attention was elsewhere. In the period since Isaac began going to school for a full day, I have taken up yoga and meditation and journaling. I have taken more time for my friendships with other women, who act as sounding boards. I joined a three year long women's collaborative that explores, during intense, week-long sessions issues of self, both as individuals and members of communities, as well as helping to ferret out our deepest desires for personal fulfillment. As a result of all these changes, yes, my life has been very much enriched. I like spending time with me, for me, taking myself further down my path.

Tomorrow, I think my boys are going to take the bus to school, for the first time. They are excited to be growing up, and I am able to let them and to share their joy. Besides, I've got stuff to do.

Friday, August 13, 2010

summer shabbat shalom!

Our attendance at temple this summer has been spotty at best, and every single backyard shabbat we have scheduled has been cancelled. But we manage to keep celebrating. We agree that we look forward to going back to services, and even as we all miss it, I'm not worried at all.

We all miss the lovely feeling of sitting together and reflecting during a service, and singing together, and being surrounded by community, sharing sweets and bits of our lives with cups of decaf coffee. But we have had lots of other wonderful things to do on Friday nights lately!

We do try to gather together weekly (religiously) in the kitchen, we light shabbat candles, we chant blessings for the special time we take to pause and be together, for the wine (or grape juice) and bread, but then we are swept away again as if carried off by the wild summer breezes.

One Friday night this summer found us in NYC with my sister and her children, two days after meeting Max's flight from Tel Aviv, where he spent a month. That night there were no candles lit, no challah torn and shared. The boys had begun an excursion on the Staten Island ferry just after 5pm, and didn't reach Susan's apartment on the Upper West Side until after 8pm, by which time my sister had already served dinner to our aunt and to her own two children. Oops!

The following Friday night I was sitting in the front of a Cincinnati church, performing Vaughan William's The Pilgrim's Progress, an opera about a search for faith. There were some Jews in the audience, whom I had invited to attend, but if there were any other M.O.T.'s among either the 30 singers or the 38 instrumentalists in the pit, I am not aware of it. Anyway, I found the experience very satisying, quite moving, if not spiritual, and well worth the sacrifice of many evenings of family time all month long, as well as yet another Friday night's attendance at services.

Tonight, our family finished an early shabbat dinner of chicken, broccoli, tomatoes and challah and then dashed down to Oakley to celebrate our friend Gina's exhibit of Street Portraits, photographs she and her friend Steve took in December of some of the people who live on the banks of the Ohio river, near downtown Cincinnati. We had missed the previous opening of this exhibit many Fridays ago, when Isaac's hip- hop dance recital (also held in a church) ran too late to allow us to do anything afterwards.

This time, there was s smaller crowd than previously, when I'm told Gina was swarmed by admirers, so, lucky us: we got to visit to our heart's content with Gina, her husband and the youngest of their three daughters. Last Friday, Max and I were with Gina's whole family as we prepared to entertain at their eldest daughter's wedding the following evening.

On the way home, just now, Sam sat in the back of my minivan (Paul and Isaac were in another car, long story) and lined his face up in the center of my rear view mirror so that we could have a chat. I paused first to leave a (relatively) brief message for my friend Jennifer, itemizing my latest ideas about how we are going to go about promoting our cello violin duo to wedding and event planners, and then hung up to resume my conversation with Sam. He asked me to turn the music off so that we could talk more easily, and a moment later we were laughing together.

Just as I pressed the power button on the minivan sound system, a mysterious new tune began to play, startling us both. It was a ringtone coming from my Iphone, the one reserved for unknown callers. Sam listened to me answer and then describe and explain reiki energy healing to a woman in the white VW bug which had just been stopped next to us at a red light, who had noticed the reiki sign on the side of my van.

Sam and I then proceeded to have a great little chat about the infinite source of energy available to us all, that should flow into us naturally and effortlessly through our breath, but doesn't always do so in an optimal way because of the many things that get in the way, that tend to obstruct.

Our flow is good. Shabbat observance may be a bit obstructed, but our family is connected, and we are celebrating. Many signs (back to school shopping, brown patches on the front lawn and empty tubes of sunscreen all over the house) remind us that it's late in the summer, and as much as I savor many things the season has to offer, it's just about time for us to move on, to resume our rest-of-the-year schedule patterns, with Friday night temple services and Saturday morning snuggle time, and hopefully, one or two backyard shabbats before it suddenly gets too cold.

Thursday, August 12, 2010

the inspiring people in my life

I told a friend today that I haven't blogged recently because my life is so consumed with matters that primarily concern other people, and I don't believe that it's my business to share other people's stuff on my blog. But perhaps I can share what I am observing in the people around me, and how it affects me.

Generally, I have observed lately that living life fully takes a constant summoning of courage. Sometimes this may appear to be fearlessness, and in some cases, as with my twenty-year-old opera conducting friend this summer, it may be just that. In most cases, though, I think what we perceive as fearlessness is the seemingly effortless summoning of courage by someone who has become more expert in it than others. Often this is someone who has experienced what happens when you let everything you thought life was supposed to be fall and shatter and then, when you pick up the pieces and rearrange them, find something more beautiful there than what you had before.

My sister and many of my friends are doing this lately in a variety of ways. I am grateful that I find it very inspiring to witness and even support and encourage them as they transition from married to single again, from homeless to nesting, from employed to unemployed and back again, from divorced to happily remarried or happily independent, and from employed and miserable to pursuing their heart's desire in graduate school. They are reclaiming integrity and hope, they are aiming higher this time, with greater optimism and wisdom, with increased strength and level-headedness and faith in themselves.

Soon, if Drake is actually dissolved by the as-yet-unnamed entity that may purchase it and Paul's current workplace actually ceases to exist, we may be rearranging shattered bits of life expectation in our house as well. But, as I said to Paul the other night, the only constant in life is change. What we can decide, what we have control over, is how we embrace, resist or confront it.

Paul and I are living a very blessed life together and we know it. As I recently pointed out to him, we have each already survived two huge and traumatic transitions, essentially on our own: first, our own birth and twenty some-odd years later, moving to Cincinnati. Oh, yes, and I almost forgot, there was also my divorce, hundreds of miles away from friends and family. But since 1999, we have faced change together as a team, and none of it - including the births of our children, surgeries, the deaths of loved ones, giving up a business to relocate for a fellowship, spending a year tied up in litigation - none of it has been quite so traumatic as those earlier changes we faced without each other. I have to believe that our combined spirit and energy will make each future transition easier for us to navigate.

Meanwhile, thanks to all you everyday heroes for continuing to inspire me and for showing me how it's done.

Monday, August 2, 2010

Isaac's dream house

We live in a ranch home with three bedrooms, a basement and a garage. What do you think it means that my seven year old has concocted the following fantasy house for himself?

It is twelve stories high
You go in the front door and three steps this way, up you go to the circus room. There is also a zero gravity room up there.
Upstairs from the circus is the guest room, where you can have sleepovers. Across form the guest room is the spa and barbar shop.
After a massage in the spa, you can use some of the air from the zero gravity room to help you float on a slide into your bed.
Because above the spa are the bedrooms, one for me (Isaac) and Sam to share, one for Max, one for Mom and Dad.
Up above the bedrooms is a two story pool, so that there can be a very big deep end.
Across from that is an ice skating rink and a place to play pool.
Up the elevator from the pool is the garage where people can bring their car to get a whole new fancy redesign. They will pay me a lot of money for this because they will also get to use the fun rooms in the house while we work on their car.
I will also charge people to use my house for birthday parties. They can use the circus rooms, pool, ice skating rink and they can play pool. I will make them a cake, too. The kitchen is just above the garage.
At the top of the house is a sunbathing deck. You press a button on a remote to open up the roof and let the sun come in. Another button allows you to dive off the top of the house into the pool. After you press the button, the pool slides out of the side of the house like a drawer opening in a bureau, and then you dive down into it. Beneath the pool is the vegetable garden, and when you make a big splash and water comes out of the pool, it falls on the garden below and waters the vegetables and helps them to grow.
In the house there will be a housekeeper, a cook, a gardener, a lifeguard who also works in the garage, a barber and spa people.

Tell me please: where did this child come from?