Freedom

Passover is the time of year when we Jews celebrate the Exodus from Egypt. We were slaves and then became free people. That’s pretty monumental and it took a lot of wandering, a lot of soul searching and a lot of self-doubt. There were those who yearned to go back to Egypt, because that was as least a known world, a familiar fate. Sure it was awful. But like a prisoner who recommits a crime on the eve of his parole, three hots and a cot can be pretty inviting when you’re contemplating a life of self awareness, choice and independent thinking.

We are supposed to tell the story of Passover to our children. Well, we do that — annually. By now, you’d think they’d pretty much have it down pat. But here we go, we’re gonna tell it …again and again and again. Why is that? What is to be gleaned in the story this year, this telling?

I think I might have an answer. I think this year, with all that has transpired within my world, I think maybe I finally get this Passover story. Freedom is a double edged sword. Freedom brings joy and lightness. It also brings self doubt, fear, even anguish.

This year we have found ourselves free from the constraints of a harsh, abusive work relationship. Becoming free was painful. We suffered intense betrayals, deep anguish and still find ourselves walking the halls in the wee hours of the night because self doubt and worry keep us from restful sleep. We wonder how we will survive on our own, without the punishing security we’d grown used to. How will we take care of our children? How will we maintain our standing in the community?

Freedom doesn’t come easily. It is terrifying. I’ve always wondered how my Jewish ancestors would have been anything but overjoyed as they raced away from Pharaoh and the shackles that enslaved them for decades. Yet here we stand, naked, unprotected from the elements, and we are afraid.

We spent less time preparing for Passover this year. In the scheme of things, Passover prep had to take a back seat. We are too busy struggling to get back on our feet, find solid ground and begin to remake our lives as free people. I feel guilty about my lack of focus this year. But the truth is, the rituals, the foods, the seder, they all seems less important right now. Because I get it. I get why we do all of it. We have been “gifted” with an opportunity to feel the truth of an Exodus from slavery. That’s why we eat special foods, say special prayers and thank G-d for the opportunity to experience freedom.

I think I could skip all the rituals entirely this year. But we wont. We have family to celebrate our new found freedom with. We have children to whom we must continue to tell the story. We have each other, sometimes frightened, sometimes boldly empowered, and together we will journey forward through the uncertainty and fear.

We step into a new world of freedom, choice and self direction this year. We graciously acknowledge the family and friendships that have stood by our side through our imprisonment and propped up our spirits as we reluctantly fled from our captors.

With freedom comes responsibility; the burden to live well, to offer the best of who we are to everyone we meet, to appreciate each and every kindness afforded us. And so to all of you whose kind words, thoughtful deeds and deep love and support have strengthened and sustained us this Passover season, we thank you for making our path easier to navigate and our road more clearly defined.

We admit that the uncertainty remains scary and unsettling. But like our ancestors, going back is not a choice. We must keep our eyes focused ahead, our hearts open and our faith deeply in tact. For it is only with clear vision, love and trust, that we will emerge at the border of a promised land and will retain the insight, courage and readiness to venture into it as free souls who understand the perils of slavery and appreciate the power of liberty.

1 Comment

My son the RINO: Responsible In Name Only

“Personal accountability!” My husband, Mark and I chimed out in sync at a Saturday morning family school session at our synagogue. “Taking responsibility for one’s actions.” We’d been asked by our Rabbi to name something we’d learnt from our parents and hoped to pass along to our kids. Lots of parents had good answers; “work hard,” “be kind,” “give to charity.” But we liked ours best. It was, after all, the central theme of our parenting philosophy. Having both been raised in families that harped upon us to “make your own breaks” and “pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” we were committed to passing those tenets on to our own offspring.

After we’d finished, our kids were invited back into the room and the Rabbi asked them to go and pick out which value on the list their parents had written. Oh, this was gonna be easy. We snickered to ourselves silently as we waited for Eli to ace this assignment.

“Accept everyone?” he questioned proudly pointing to the third value listed on the white board.

“Well, that’s certainly a good one,” I answered. “But that’s not the one daddy and I wrote. Why don’t you try again, sweetie.”

“Treat others as you would like to be treated?” he confidently corrected.

“Um…no, honey,” I stammered a bit surprised by his error. “Guess again. It’s something that daddy and I make you think about all the time.”

“Be kind!” he shouted with a victorious lilt.

When he trepidatiously pointed to “Ride bicycles together,” I lost it.

“Eli,” I said in a voice much louder than I’d meant to, “None of our bicycles even have tires. We haven’t ridden bicycles since last Halloween. Really?”

Then I pointed to our all capped “PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY.” “Oh,” he calmly voiced, “I didn’t see that one.”

I was furious–at him, at myself, at my husband. What did all our work add up to if he couldn’t even pick the right parental value out of a line-up of usual suspects that seemed blatantly obvious to us?

I tossed and turned over this all night. Then I woke up and recreated the list on a small poster board and asked our older son, Levi, who wasn’t at the family school event, to peruse the list of parental values and tell us which one was the one we had listed.

“That’s easy, mom,” he answered in less than a nano-second. “Personal Accountability.”
I breathed a heavy sigh of relief. “That’s what you’re always saying,” he went on, “That’s pretty much the whole premise of how you parent.”

I wondered if Mark had tipped Levi off and prepped him for my experiment. But my husband firmly denied providing our eldest with any pre-test coaching. The bigger question became; why hadn’t Eli been able to identify our parenting platform?

After much deliberation, we realized that sub-consciously we’ve been giving Eli a pass on a lot of things, in large part due to his younger sibling status. It’s just easier and less of a struggle to ask his older brother to help out. This was a text book birth order pit and we’d stumbled right into it.

As parents, it’s easy to declare loving all of your children equally. But that doesn’t mean we treat them all the same way. Finding those inequalities and managing them is a critical challenge that every parent of multiples needs to face. It’s not a pleasant reality. Maybe you do expect more from one child. Maybe you coddle the second. Maybe one’s easier to manage so you rely on him or her as more of a helper.

It’s not a simple issue. But it is one that’s worth examining. What do you think? How equitable are your parental expectations?

Defiance!

Doesn’t he look like a challenge?

“Going my way home?” my impish 8 year old son, Eli, asked as he leaned thru the passenger side window of my car after happily bounding off the school bus yesterday afternoon. His grin warmed my heart.

“No silly,” I chirped, “We have to go pick up your brother at school. Hop in.”

Then he flashed a mischievous smile, turned tail and ran away from me at lightning speed.

OK, I was stunned. And I mean stunned like a deer who had just been shot in the chest by a tranquilizer gun. All the other moms at the bus stop looked at me with embarrassing glances, trying not to actually meet my gaze. Inside my head, I heard them snickering about my parental ineptitude. I tried to make light of the situation. “Ha ha,” I chuckled, “He just loves to race me home.” The awkwardness was palpable.

I drove away and as soon as I was out of their view, I pulled over and tried to catch my breath. I rationally weighed my options. I could go immediately home to rant, rave and revile my youngster for publicly disobeying and humiliating me. Then I could physically imbed him into his car seat and embark upon the trek to his brother, Levi’s, school to retrieve him. But I gotta tell you, that didn’t sound all that appealing to me.

Instead, I began driving slowly away from my home where I imagined Eli victoriously awaiting my arrival for our scream fest. No, I was not going to play the scene out like that. I carefully considered what potential perils Eli might possibly encounter as he sat locked outside our house for the next 45 minutes. I admit I had visions of an errant mountain lion meandering past and eating him, or a band of gypsies kidnapping him at gun-point, but I figured that the odds of either of those things happening in our well-patrolled, gated community with plenty of neighbors within ear shot, was more than unlikely. Besides, when is the last time you saw gypsies packing heat? The greater threat seemed to me to be withholding the valuable lesson that this opportunity presented for my child to learn about natural consequences, responsibility and respect.

Sitting outside the house alone was a small price to pay if it taught my boy that it is not okay to run away from me or directly defy me like that. Sure he might be scared. He might cry. He might even fear abandonment for his impulsive behavior. But as a staunch believer in behavior modification and “Love and Logic,” this negative consequence naturally follows the poor choice he made. The only way for him to internalize that lesson is to truly experience an unpleasant outcome that naturally emerges out of his rash and impulsive behavior.

I picked up Levi and raced home nervously. When I pulled up to the house, I expected to see my tear-stained youngest son regretfully pouting outside the front door. But he wasn’t there. It was either the gypsies or he’d figured out where the spare key was hidden. I began to panic and ran inside the house. I hurried down the hall towards his room but slowed my pace and nonchalantly passed his doorway to see if he was there. I spotted him peripherally and continued walking. He was hiding under his covers awaiting some horrific consequence, I imagine. I said nothing.

Later that night he came to me and apologized. We talked about it briefly and I let him think that it was over and all was well. Unfortunately this weekend is the Diamond Back game he’s been waiting for months to attend. When it comes time to head to the ballpark, the babysitter is arriving and we’re going to have to explain to Eli that we love him too much to risk losing him at such a busy stadium. Since we can’t trust him to not run away from us, he’ll just have to stay home with a sitter while the rest of us enjoy our peanuts, popcorn and crackerjack.

I don’t look forward to his reaction. He’ll be angry. He’ll be crest-fallen. But I believe in my heart that he will learn how to better control his urges, how to respect his parents, and that his actions have very direct and relevant consequences.

5 Comments

Believe me it hurts me more than it hurts you!

Eli's poem 😦

Being a parent sucks! I’m serious. Why can’t we just love our kids, play with them and have fun? Instead we have to teach them lessons, watch them suffer, and worry about them every waking moment. It simply is not fair!

Today is a bad day. I open a big show tonight. It’s been a grueling few months. I’m tired, strung out and full of anxiety about the performance. So my adoring spouse decided to let me sleep in and drove the boys to school this morning. On any other morning I would have been thrilled. But when I awoke around 9am and stumbled into the kitchen for a much needed double espresso, I discovered a sight so horrific, I wanted to crawl back under the covers and never emerge again.

You see, there on the counter, all ready for transport, sat my 8 year old son Eli’s painstakingly created diorama and all the accoutrements of his poetry project that were due today. My heart sank. He has worked so hard on this project it’s unbelievable. This was an injustice I had to make right.

I threw on some clothes, grabbed the diorama and poems and ran out to the car to rescue him. But there was a hint of doubt filtering through my mind that I couldn’t quite shake. Of course I was doing the right thing by bringing him the project. Wasn’t I?

I called my husband at work. “Just wanted to check in on what went down this morning. It looks like with you driving the boys and the change in the routine, Eli forgot his poetry project and I know they’re presenting them today,” I could hear the guilt in my voice even as I tried to sound neutral. “So, I’m just gonna swing by and drop it off for him.”
Silence. “OK?” I added beseechingly.

The icy voice on the other end of the phone chilled me to the core. “No. Don’t bring him the project. He has to learn from this. If you go running to school to save him, this entire painful experience will have been for naught.”

“But it really isn’t his fault,” I clamored. “If I would have taken him, I would have made sure he brought the project. Don’t you think this is an extenuating circumstance?”

“No, I don’t,” my husband cooly replied. “Debra, this is a perfect lesson in taking and owning responsibility for himself. Don’t rob him of it.”

“But…but…but…” I couldn’t get the words out. “But he’s only 8! And he must be devastated,” I could hear my sobs backing up in my throat.

“But he wont forget his school work ever again if we let him learn this lesson,” my husband countered. “Besides, you don’t have to see his broken-hearted expression in your mind every day for the rest of your life. I do. It’s brutal.”

So I came back into the house, replaced the diorama on the counter alongside the poetry book, and tried not to feel like the worst parent on the planet. But it’s hard. I believe so firmly in the “Love and Logic” approach to parenting in which we are engaging. I see my friends with older kids, and I know that the lessons grow ever more complex and challenging as kids grow up. Learning personal responsibility today could very well save a child from making a really bad decision when he’s older; and the truth is that the stakes get incredibly high as kids get older.

I’ve asked most of my friends whether they think I did the right thing. Most of them say yes, but they add that they would never have done it themselves. That makes their tacit nod of approval feel like condemnation of the highest form. I guess we’ll just have to walk this path alone and stay true to the principles of natural consequence in which we believe.

But, just in case you feel compelled to comment and tell me that I did the right thing, feel free. It might help me sleep a bit easier tonight. But no pressure.

6 Comments

Overdue

I got an $80 collection notice yesterday from the Scottsdale Public Library. $80! Are you kidding? It was for four books my adorable imps had checked out like a decade ago. I was fuming.

I waited until they were strapped into my car after school to spring the news on them. “Mom, can we go for frozen yogurt?” Levi, my 11-year-old, asked. “No, I’m so sorry sweetie,” I cooed, “We have some things to take care of at home today.” My statement hung in the air like a luminous storm cloud.

“Um…what things?” he asked. Hah! He took the bait. “Well,” I casually started, “We have some things that aren’t ours at home and we need to return them and apologize for their tardiness.” I then let the silence sink slowly into their realities. They perplexedly swore their innocence with the conviction of serial killers on death row.

Finally I dropped the other shoe. “When is the last time you boys went to the library?” “We haven’t been to the library in months,” Eli, my 7-year-old, proudly announced. “Uh oh,” murmured Levi. “We forgot to return our books didn’t we?” I reticently mumbled affirmatively and explained that they would need to find the books, take them back to the library, and personally apologize for their laziness. Then I addressed the matter of the fine.

“I am going to pay the fine because if I don’t we will be turned over to a collection agency who will stalk us, threaten to ruin our credit and torment us to the brink of insanity. Then, each of you will pay me back for your share of the bill. No one may set foot in a library until the fine is 100% paid. Clear?”

After the requisite agreements to my terms, Levi asked how much the fine was anyway. “$80,” I replied. Then, as you might expect, came the tears, the pleas for mercy, the imploring sob stories about how long it took to save up that much money. But I was the picture of perfect maternal moderateness. I never flinched, never wavered, never even suffered a moment of my usual neurotic self-doubting. I knew this was a lesson that would pay off down the road and I was teaching it with aplomb.

We found the books and the boys hesitantly went into the library to explain their plight to the kindly librarian at the checkout desk. She feigned a stern reproach and then thanked the boys for their honesty and courage. At home, I collected $40 from each of them. I will admit to feeling a great deal of shame upon prying open my little one’s basketball bank and scooping out every last nickel and dime he had to cover his loss. Levi, on the other hand, brought me a wad of crunched up singles, a few fives and a twenty dollar bill he’d been saving since his birthday in September.

Now, if you’ve never had to take money from your children, let me tell you, it is not an enjoyable task. You feel low, dirty and basically like you’re some kind of hopped up addict who needs to steal from her kids in order to score her next fix. It’s ugly, even when you’re doing it for the right reasons. But I pushed through because I knew that in the long run, this was a lesson in responsibility I did not want to be teaching with much higher stakes five years in the future.

All of this would have been a great maternal success story had it not been for one thing. I called this morning to give the collection agent at the library my credit card number. But I’d been empowered to beg for financial mercy myself by a friend whose daughter had lost a library book once. She told me that there was actually wiggle room when it came to library fines.

I pleaded my case to the grandmotherly librarian on the phone. She explained that she couldn’t erase my fine. But she offered me a significantly lower option that I immediately agreed to. Without getting into specifics, and I don’t want to encourage other violators to take advantage of the kind-hearted folk who work at our public libraries, but let’s just say that Andrew Jackson was happy to help me out and foot this bill entirely.

So here’s the question; do I tell the kids I only had to pay a fraction of the fine? Or do I keep their hard-earned allowance money to drive home a lesson that will serve them well in the future? This truly is a conundrum. Keeping the money would be like making a profit off my children. That definitely cannot be right. But giving it back makes the consequence too lackluster and teaches them that there are always ways to squirm out of taking responsibility.

Why is it that the one time I’m actually certain about my convictions, someone does something kind and admirable and I’m right back in the midst of self-doubt, confusion and parental anxiety? Somehow this just doesn’t seem fair.

Please, tell me what to do!

6 Comments

Save the socks!!!!

That’s it! My 9-year-old son has left his last pair of dirty socks on the living room floor! I’m serious. I’ve had it. It suddenly dawned on me this morning. I’m an idiot. I am constantly asking him to pick up his socks. I try to be nice about it, try not to harangue. But NOTHING works. Every morning I find a myriad of socks on the floor throughout the house. For a while I just picked them up and threw them in his hamper myself. At least then I didn’t have to look at them and be annoyed all day until he came home from school and I forced him to pick them up and put them in the laundry. But no more.

I am collecting the socks from this point forward. So far I have 7. (Not sure how that happened.) And here’s the fun part; when he runs out of socks, he runs out of socks. I don’t have to yell at him or be critical or even upset myself over it. I simply pick up the socks, put them in a bin in the back of my closet and wait patiently to see how he reacts when he has no more socks. (Technically, I should be throwing them away each time I find them. But I can’t quite get myself to do that. So I’m hiding them away and pretending they no longer exist.)

Frankly, I’m taking a sort of perverse pleasure in imagining his reaction the day he runs out of socks completely. “Mom,” he’ll undoubtedly shriek across the house, “I don’t have any socks to wear.”

“Wow,” I’ll say calmly with the pathos of Mother Theresa, “That’s a bummer. What are you gonna do about it?”

“What do you mean?” he’ll stammer. “Where are my socks?”

“Gosh honey, I have no idea,” I’ll empathetically respond. “Where did you last leave them?”

In my fantasy, he flashes back to every moment he carelessly jettisoned his socks across an otherwise neatly kept room in the house and immediately realizes the error of his ways.

“Oh mom,” he’ll say with complacency, “I guess I’ll have to go to school without socks today.”

“I guess so, sweetie,” I’ll warmly agree.

And here’s the really hard part. I will then have to seal my lips and say nothing more. That’s what my “Love and Logic” tapes say. Let him come up with a solution. (The only one I can think of is having to use his own allowance to purchase new socks.) And thus, he deals with the consequences of his actions. Period. End of story.

Until of course he leaves the new socks strewn across the house. My belief, however, is that he’s an extremely smart boy and will eventually learn how to be responsible for his personal items.

Please tell me this is going to work.