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Best Mother's Day Present EVE

Before I get started on this post, I just have to mention that although I sometimes slip and use British spelling (because living over here across the pond, they all use stupid Queen's English), one British-y thing I will never do (besides enjoy drinking tea), is say Maths.

OK, that's two British-y things I will never do.  I can probably think of a lot more, but that is a post for another day.

So, now that I have gotten that out of the way, I can stop pontificating on the Brits and move onto what I want to talk about.

Ready?

Facebook has been hounding me to look at my Year in Review.  This is where they make an overview of your 20 most popular posts throughout the year and put them in one little place so that you can cry like a baby walk down memory lane.

I found mine to be rather fascinating:

1.  Maya on a playdate with a friend.
2.  Maya toughing it out during Purim with the noise and the crowds.
3.  Maya's class picture.
4.  Maya writing.
5.  Happy anniversary to Leo.
6.  Anniversary of D-Day and remembering that event and it's significance for my family (we wouldn't be here without it, duh).
7. The State of Israel's Righteous Among the Nations Award being bestowed on the family that saved my Father in law during the war.  Read more about that here.
8.  Cute photo of Maya.
9.  Maya dealing with grief in her own special way, and her own beautiful way of processing emotions.
10.  Maya and her little tradition of giving me something of hers to take with me when I travel.
11.  Another cute photo
12.  The requisite birthday post (complete with baby photo) on Maya's birthday. We all like to think we are so unique, but guess what?  We're not.
13.  Maya cueing us in on that she knows how to spell.
14.  More cute photos (note to self:  next year, not so many photos, yeah, right).
15.  Maya and her hedgehog obsession.
16.  Another photo (f*ck, enough already)
17.  Cute Maya post about how she processes life and emotions.
18.  Catching Maya reading aloud (probably my highlight of the year).
19.  Some lame-ass post about going on vacation.
20.  Maya and going to Happy2Move and how much she loves having an extracurricular.

So, what does this tell us?

Well, some would say that I post about my kid too much (A.  Your problem.  B.  If you don't want to hear about my kid, why the hell are you reading my blog anyhow?).

Along with all the debates in the autistic community that are raging, one that I have taken notice of lately is the one over whether autism is something to be celebrated or something to be rid of and cured.  As I have said all along on all these debates, your point of view on these issues is related directly to where you (or your loved one) is with autism.  I totally get both views.

Yes, we definitely have our struggles and Maya is getting older, despite her doing well, her differences are becoming more pronounced in her peer community and less able to wave away with the cute-little-kid explanations than they were a few years ago.  We are entering adolescence (sh*t, we're here, who am I kidding), certain things are getting harder.  The fantasy of Maya "catching up" and ending up with a Math Degree from Harvard (or just being able to do long division) is being pushed ever more into the whatchu talkin' 'bout Willis category more than ever.

Still, a year ago, Maya's being able to read was still big fat question mark.  She couldn't write her name.  This year on Mother's day for the very first time, she gave me a handwritten card along with her home made present.  I have no idea what the hell the gift even was, but that little note is on my nightstand and I look at it every day.

My girl IS learning.  It may be at a microscopic snail's pace, but it is happening.  She understands more and her emotional intelligence continues to amaze everyone around her.  She's kind, she's sweet and she thinks well of herself.  At her age, I could recite multiplication tables and was reading novels, but I didn't understand half of what she does about the human heart.

It's been a great year.

My Mother and Me

When I was a kid, most of the time, I wished I was someone else's child.  

And, I don't mean the fleeting wish that happens after your parents grounded you for not finishing your twinkies or for not letting you go to a Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young concert with the guy your parents bought their pot from (true story).    

I mean, I literally spent a lot of my childhood praying to be transported to another family. I was that kid who sometimes hung around too long at her friend's houses.  Our house was often fraught with alternating bouts of conflict and cold silence. This isn't to say we didn't have our happy times, we did but mostly our house just seemed sad. 

I kept my wishes largely to myself because I was ashamed for feeling the way I did.  Ashamed for being disloyal, for disrespecting my parents for not being grateful for the family and the advantages we had.  

We were a comfortable middle class Jewish family, we had a nice house, cars, clothes, toys, we went on vacations and while we weren't rich, we were certainly comfortable.  My parents played bridge together and in public we were just like every other Jewish family in our town.  My mom was principal of the Sunday school for many years, active in Hadassah, President of Sisterhood.  She chaired the  hamentashen sale and came together with other women in our Jewish community and cooked for the annual Sukkot community meals at our shul.  My dad chaired the Israel Bonds drive several years running and served on the board of our shul.  

I don't have a childhood horror story of abuse but my parents while being strong, charming, funny and highly likable, they were also inconsistent, distant and angry. Sometimes they could be cruel, certainly toward one another but also sometimes toward us.   They both had very difficult, but equally painful, horrific childhoods, the kinds of experiences that shake your most primal needs for safety and security and because of the times they grew up in and had families in, they didn't talk about it. 

They loved each other, but they were both just too damaged to help one another.  My dad retreated into academia and largely wasn't around.  My mom glossed over it all and reserved her pent up depression on us. She took care of our physical needs but not our emotional ones.  

I was an insecure kid, I had problems making friends when I was a small child.  As I got a little older I realized I was never taught how to be a friend to someone, so I wasn't great at it and I was sensitive to rejection.  When I did get included I was afraid and I compensated by alternately being too eager and assertive paired with being terrified and silent.  

I was a bed wetter and I wet the bed much longer than most kids, into my teens actually.  I was terrified to sleep at someone else's house.  Most of those nights, I tried my best not to sleep, I stopped drinking at lunch time and went to the bathroom every half hour all day long until bedtime, trying so hard to empty and lock up my bladder.  Then I tried my best not to sleep the entire night and the next day I would be so tired.  

My parents had the typical 1960's man/woman division of power at home.  My mom took care of the house and the children.  My mom only addressed my bed wetting once, when I was in 1st grade and still wet the bed every single night.  She told me that I was too old to be wetting the bed and that I needed to figure out how not to do it.  How did she help me?  She told me she would stop washing my sheets.  So, that if I wet the bed, I could either sleep on my pee-stained sheets or wash them and change them myself.  I became so scared of her knowing I wet the bed that I slept on my dirty, smelly sheets most nights and took to taking a bath before school so that she would only see me wash my sheets twice a week and think things were getting better.  Of course she could smell and she still washed my clothes so of courrse she knew and ignored it completely.  I learned it was my problem, my responsibility, my fault.  

I remember once when I slept over at my mom's cousins house.  I was excited to spend time with my cousins J and E.  I slept in E's room and my mother did tell E's mom, Cousin F, that I still occasionally wet the bed and she shouldn't let me drink anything.  During dinner I kept saying I wasn't thirsty.  Finally Cousin F poured me a glass of juice and she said, drink honey, and don't worry about anything.  When we went to bed, I was determined to stay up all night and not wet the bed.  E had long since gone to sleep and I sat straight up in bed.  Cousin F came in to check on us and saw I was awake.  Without missing a beat she came over and asked me if I was staying up because I was afraid to sleep, afraid of what might happen.  I didn't answer but she knew, she put her arm around me and said, "honey, who cares if you wet the bed.  If you do, we'll clean it up, easy as pie, now sweet dreams, honey."  Sure enough when I woke up in the morning, I had a pair of E's pajamas on and I was sleeping on two towels.  Cousin F came barreling in the room wishing us a good morning, and winked at me.  The next two nights, I didn't wet the bed.  

I never wanted to leave. 

I was ashamed, not just of the bed wetting but of our whole situation.  I never told anyone about what my mother said to me or the other equally cruel things she would say to my brothers.  I protected her, she was my mom, even though I resented her and didn't feel loved by her, it was one thing if I felt that way, but another thing altogether if people outside our family did.  We were surrounded by loving, caring families in our Jewish community, no one seemed to have a family like ours.  I wanted to belong, to be like everyone else from a loving, caring Jewish family.  

Not only did I learn how to do that from my mother, proving yet again, it's not what we tell our children to do that's important, it's what we model for them.  My mother did it too, for her own parents.  

My mother had a very difficult childhood.  Her mother, the daughter of Orthodox Jews was cut off by her own parents after she became pregnant out of wedlock.  They sat shiva for her and she had to fend for herself.  Single and pregnant in the 1930s.   By the time my mom turned 3, my grandmother was on her 2nd husband.  

Life was mostly not kind to my mother.  She was not shown much tenderness.  Often I think she was like me, forever wishing she was someone else's child.  She became very close to my grandmother's younger sister, who was terribly kind and who took in my mother as if she was her daughter and us, as if we were her grandchildren.  It was to her aunt that she ran to when my dad divorced her and who helped her start over.  She paid for my mother's 2nd wedding and she and my great Uncle gave her away.  Eventually though she turned away from them, unable to bear the thought that she was no longer married to a prominent man, no longer one of those wives.  My mother was a woman of incredible strength, she was a survivor but she never realized all those things were still within her reach, or that people would still love her, even if she didn't live up to the picture she put out into the world, even after she dropped my dad's last name.  

Just like me, my mother never told people what she endured.  To the world, she had loving parents, who were there for weddings, birthdays and Bar Mitzvahs, who were in family photos.  She hugged and kissed them genuinely when they visited and although I didn't realize it at the time, she had that same desperation that I did, that if only the public was the private, everything would be okay.

My mother just didn't know how to be nurturing.  No one taught her.  People may read this and write her off as cruel and she did make some terrible mistakes, but she survived some truly horrifying things.  

What she did do was stop the cycle of chronic physical abuse that was a big part of her own childhood.  She was never able, to the best of my knowledge,  to confront my grandmother or her stepfather and therefore never able to find a way to truly let it go.  

Just like me, she perpetuated the fantasy, but unlike me, she continued it until her mother died and years afterward perpetuating it with her step father for most of his life. 

I remember once, while visiting my mother's extended family when my daughter was an infant, one of my mom's cousins said how wonderful it was to see me so happy as an adult and she told me how she always felt sorry for me as a child because I always seemed so sad.

My mother paid an enormous price for her mistakes as a mother. In the divorce she lost custody of me to my dad and we had a terribly fractured relationship for decades after, sometimes going years with barely any contact.  She lost my brothers too.  She never saw her two oldest grandchildren until they were in her teens and only saw my other brother's children here and there when my brother would take them to her. 

I am grateful that my mother and I were able to repair our relationship.  We talked about the past, and my mother offered no excuses and took responsibility for not giving me what I needed as a child.  

I was lucky that in the last years of her life we shared a close relationship.  We spent the last 5 years of her life, speaking daily by phone and visiting whenever we could. In a weird way, those years were made all the sweeter by the sorrows of the past and although she couldn't break completely free from her own cycle, she did help me to break free, by taking responsibility for the mistakes that she made.  

Although she was never truly able to cut her own iron ball and chain, she did cut mine.     

When my mom was dying of cancer in 2006 my two brothers and I went to be with her.  One evening while watching our old home movies, my brother mentioned that it was the first time that my mother had all of her three children together in the same room since the day my parents finally told us they were getting a divorce.  We gathered at my mom's apartment, she made brisket, like she did so many Sundays for us growing up.  We ate dinner, and in our usual style, ignoring the 400 pound elephant in the room,  chatting about nothing.  Finally, my mom told us she was moving back to Miami and we said goodbye to her.  That dinner took place in 1978. 

We all sat there, flanking my mother's death bed, stunned at the passage of time and at the sorrow of 3 motherless children and their childless mother.  Together for the first time in  28 years and with tears dripping down all our faces, we all started laughing.  Not crazy, nervous or masking laughter, but the genuine sort at the irony of it all, at what we all managed to somehow survive, both together and each in our own way. 

At that moment I looked over at my mother and I saw something in her eyes.  

Happiness.  

When Water is Thicker than Blood

Most of us in the world count among the people closest to us, our parents, our siblings, our spouses, our children.  And in our world we all talk about the bonds of friendship and we experience these wonderful bonds  but when push comes to shove it is our families that we love above all else.

But every once in a while, you do have a friend that truly is family, even when you don't share a drop of blood.


Karen my aunt Patty's girlfriend lived together in the 1970's - quite controversial to be living an openly gay lifestyle then for sure.  Although I didn't even know what gay meant in the time when Karen came running into my life.  Romantic relationships were not even in my sphere of consciousness.  Aunt Patty lived in York, which was about 3 hours away from us.  I remember her as a young child but I don't think we saw each other that often, at least until Karen came on the scene.  I remember them visiting us several times in Washington, PA where we lived.  My Aunt Patty was always sweet and silly but Karen was something else.  She was uproariously funny and she is one of these people who just genuinely love being around kids.  At any given time there were at least 10 kids running in and out of her house.  She always was full of jokes and really funny stories, stories so funny that milkshakes come flying out your nose, I cannot tell you the number of times I almost choked to death in Karen's presence from exploding in laughter whenever I ate or drank something.

It's hard for me to explain but Karen just emulated this sense that she was in your corner no matter what.  If she loved you, you were in for a life sentence of her love, whether you wanted it or not.  Karen came into our lives at a time when my dad was completely preoccupied with finishing his Ph.D. and finding work as a college professor and although I loved my dad more than anything in those years he just wasn't around very often.  Therefore Karen's injection into my life filled a hole.  She and my mom were also very close too. Karen was (and is), funny and easy to be around and there is absolutely nothing she wouldn't do for the people she loves.  Eventually I learned that she had 3 kids and was divorced and I remember going to York for the first time to visit them and meet Karen's 3 kids.  They were a lot of fun.  They lived in a neighborhood just full of genuine, hard working people of good Pennsylvania Dutch stock.  At the time everyone ended their sentences with the phrase 'ya know it' and while I very much made fun of that when I was in York, secretly when I returned to Western Pennsylvania,  I ended my sentences with 'ya know it' too.

I grew especially close in those years to Karen's daughter TJ, we took turns, as girls do,  idolizing each other and fighting, but always came together.  Karen's oldest son Steve was my first official boyfriend when I was 11.  I think our relationship lasted a whole 3 days, maybe even a week.  Before we were 'involved' we fought like cats and dogs all the time, arguing, teasing and outdoing one another at every turn.  When he became my boyfriend we were too embarrassed to even look at each other and our big relationship pretty much consisted of us avoiding looking at each other all day while we played outside, or while we went to the pool or out for ice cream.  In the evening we kissed goodnight and that was it.  Soon it fizzled out, I was secretly miserable about it even though I broke it off and if I remember correctly he rebounded to the girl that lived across the street.

Karen struggled financially back then, she was putting herself through college, was divorced and had 3 kids.  They ate a lot of spaghetti and something called chipped beef which I, in my middle class comfort of steak twice a week and brisket on Friday night,  had never heard of.  I am not sure Karen's kids ever ate steak unless they had it when they visited our house.  It didn't matter one bit though.  Me and my steak, we were unhappy.  Even though they didn't have a lot but it was a lot happier and funner than my materially comfortable house.  During the day they took us swimming or to the park or we played lots of games.  At night we went in the basement where it was cooler, watched movies and ate popcorn.  I remember one evening when Karen's kids went to visit their dad, she took me out to dinner and we went to a pretty fancy place and had surf 'n turf.  My first lobster ever (and I was forever a convert, sorry Rabbi).

When we moved to Miami they visited us there and in the summers or on Christmas break from school I often went to York.  When my parents separated we originally went to York.  My mom who was pretty lost at the time let me choose the place and the thought of being around Karen and her kids seemed like the best possibility.  It was always so much fun there I thought I could be there with them and not be sad at all.  So we moved to York but my fantasy didn't really pan out.  We ended up living on the other side of York, renting part of a house from one of Karen's friends and she was a nice woman but it was pretty isolating where she lived.  My mom had to go back to work to help support us as my dad was giving her a difficult time and she found a nursing job but had to mostly work evenings from 3-11.  At first I thought I could spend the time she was working at Karen's but that didn't' work out most of the time.  My mom was depressed and not up for much, so in the hours she wasn't working she slept late and by the time she got up it was too late to go over to Karen's as she had to get ready for work.  So I only saw them maybe once a week.

Going through my own pain and missing my dad, I was not really up for venturing out myself and trying to make friends in the neighborhood.  I spent most of my time alone in the house we rented, watching tv or sitting outside and waiting for my mom to get home.  The woman whose house it was was very nice but she had her own life so I was alone a lot of the time.  After about 2 months I was completely miserable and told my dad I wanted to go be near him and he convinced my mom to move with me.

After that I didn't have a lot of contact with Karen. There was a lot of change in my life and by the time I really could have forged my own contact with Karen she and my aunt had broken up so I felt awkward about contacting her.  It wasn't until almost 30 years later that we did enter each other's lives again.  When my mom retired she decided to leave Miami again and move to York to be close to her brother and sister (and her other brother who also lived in FL made plans to move as well).  I visited my mom many times in York and the first thing I thought of each time was to call Karen but at the time my mom moved there she told me  Karen was fighting breast cancer so I didn't feel it was the right time.

It wasn't until a year and a half later that I just picked up the phone and called her, it was when my own mom was diagnosed with Pancreatic cancer and given only weeks to live.  I decided right then and there that life was too short and I was just going to call her.  I got her voicemail and left a message, in about a half hour she called me back and that was all she wrote.  Although I was a kid and she was younger than I was at the time we last saw each other, not a second had passed.  She was the same easy, fun, funny, generous, fantastic woman that I remembered.  Although my mom died only about 6 weeks after I made that call Karen spent time with my mom and not a second had passed between them either.  My mom was so grateful for Karen's presence in her life those last weeks.

When my mom was diagnosed my brothers and I went to be with her but she insisted that we visit for a few days and leave and not come back.  She told me secretly that she thought she wouldn't be able to die if she felt she was leaving us and that she wanted to go peacefully.  I didn't fully get her thinking but my brothers and I decided to respect her wishes.  Her husband was caring well for her and she was under hospice care at home as well.  In the few good weeks she had after I left her we spoke every day (as we had since the time I was pregnant with Maya) and she told me many times how she looked forward to Karen's visits the most.

Since her death Karen has again taken me in her arms both literally and figuratively.  She counts me as one of her kids and is a force of love and support for Maya.  Although she has not said it to me I think she feels that since my mom, for whom Maya was a constant source of joy in her often joyless life, feels the need to carry that torch for my mom and be there for Maya.  She has been a source of unwavering support for me and my role as a parent, never judging, always encouraging and telling me not to be too hard on myself.  Karen understood my mom better than most people and although we don't specifically talk about it, I often feel like Karen tells me the things that my mom wished she could have.

My own mom sometimes had trouble sharing her feelings or being demonstrative.  She had a difficult life and a lot of sorrows which were difficult for her to put behind her.  I am ever so grateful though that what she did do for me, was bring me a woman who could.

Blogging at Times of Israel

Hey there, I am blogging today over at The Times of Israel.  I've written a tribute to my dad.

Click here to read my post.

Wanting to see it

For a second time we have spent a vacation in the French countryside of the Dordogne region.  Small bastide towns, castles dating back centuries, caves, wine country and miles upon miles of beautiful scenery make this part of France a wonderful spot to be in.

Not to mention the food, the birthplace of Foie Gras and truffles as well as national French delights (croissants anyone) make Dordogne a feast for all the senses.

And don't even get me started on the wines.

Two years ago when we went I was all obsessed with the wines of Bordeaux and the creme de la creme, St. Emilion Grand Cru.  Good wines definitely but honestly a bit too heavy for my taste.  This time around we focused on wines produced in the Dordogne region itself which are lighter, Leo fell in love with Monbazilliac, a semi sweet white wine that the French drink as an aperitif or as a dessert wine.  And I developed a penchant for Pecharmant, a blend of cabernet, cab franc and Malbec wines.  I drank Malbec rose every day for lunch and it was heaven.  We decided not to go crazy buying wines this time so we brought back a modest two cases (12 bottles), considering two years ago we brought over 100 bottles back and we don't really have the proper room to store them (now I wish we had a basement), we were very restrained this time.

As I mentioned before, I love spending time in France but it also haunts me since it is the birthplace of my father, the country where he spent his most formative years, the majority of which being refugees, hiding in Vichy France, living with unimaginable fear.  That time and what he experienced in France shaped the man he was to become,  therefore I feel this strange longing to walk a little in his footsteps.

During our vacation we took a side trip to the city of Cahors in the midi-Pyrenees region, about 2.5 hours away from where we were staying.  My dad, aunt and grandparents spent 6 weeks in Cahors during the war.  When the Germans attacked France they lived in Cuise-la-Motte, a small town in the northern part of France.  They were bombed out of their house and spent a few days in the woods with other families and my grandparents decided to travel south and try to get out of France via the Pyrenees mountains, go into Spain, into Portugal and try to get a boat to the United States from Portugal.  They set off on bicycles, my dad riding on the back of my grandfather's bicycle and my aunt on the back of my grandmother's.  They rode mostly in the night when the roads were less crowded and my grandfather felt there was less danger, although it was still risky.  France is a hilly terrain and outside of the major cities there were not yet a lot of paved roads, so the riding must have been treacherous and with two small children in tow and heavy packs on their backs, the journey was slow going.  They had money and gold sent to them by my grandfather's brother who had a flourishing furniture business in Fredericktown, Pennsylvania.  They took shelter in small villages and unlike a lot of other refugees, were able to pay for meals and shelter along the way.  My dad, who was all of 6 years old told me that my grandfather taped his and my aunt's mouths shut on the bicycles so that in case they cried out in their sleep, they would not attract attention.

It took several weeks but they finally reached Cahors and there they stopped and they rented a one room apartment to rest and get their bearings.  My grandfather went out and started inquiring about the best route to Spain through the mountains and he learned that the trip was very dangerous, that many French refugees trying to escape France were killed by Spanish robbers for their valuables.  After discussing the situation with my grandmother, they decided it was too risky to try and escape and that they were better off trying to live quietly somewhere in Vichy, France which was, at least on paper, not directly controlled by the Germans.  My grandfather took some of the gold sent to him by his brother and bought false identity papers which protected them from immediately being identified as Jewish and he made arrangements to move out from the city.  My grandfather went to university in Toulouse, a larger city a few hours away from Cahors.  He traveled to Toulouse by train and met up with a former professor and friend to get some advice.  The professor agreed with him that their best chance was to live in obscurity somewhere, in a small village.  His friend offered him the use of his late parents home in Vacquiers, a small village outside of Toulouse.  So they ended up settling there and living out the war years and my grandfather donated gold to the Church in Vaquiers, next door to their home and the Priest, whom my grandfather befriended,  looked out for them and even hid them in the Church for a few days later in the war when the Nazis entered Vacquiers.

Cahors was an important stop on their journey, it was a turning point, had they not stopped there they  maybe would have been killed trying to get to Spain, so I wanted to go there.

Driving there and through the entire Dordogne valley I couldn't help but notice the similarities between this part of France and the part of Pennsylvania where I grew up.  Rivers creating winding, hilly country single lane roads, trees as far as the eye can see, a smattering of houses, mostly old, some beautifully maintained, others having seen their better days decades before.  Old tires and buckets being used as flower pots.  Small sheds and houses dotting the roadways with faded billboards advertising a nearby restaurant, grocery store or attraction.  The beauty of the rivers with people swimming or boating in small canoes.

I have to admit that I was lost in a reverie every time we got in the car.  I took in the scenery but in my mind's eye, I was driving along the Monongahela River of my youth and remembering the summers I spent on that river, boating with friends, swimming, laying in the sun.  The days, months and years spent in our furniture store in Fredericktown on the banks of the Monongahela, the beauty of Southwestern Pennsylvania, so similar to that of the French countryside.  I was imagining how my dad, aunt and grandparents must have felt as new immigrants to Fredericktown, in their rented house on the banks of the Mon.  They didn't speak the language and were in this strange place, with a strange culture (there were no pain-au-chocolates in Fredericktown), but part of them must have felt at home in this small town on the edge of a riverbank with trees and hills as far as the eye could see.

I have no idea where they stayed in Cahors so we just went to the center of town and walked around and took in the town square, it was market day so there was a lot of activity.  We spent a lot of time in the shade near the merry go round where Maya rode and rode and rode, switching from horse, to spinning car, to swing.  Maya, being young for her age still loves the merry go round and France is a haven for her since they have them in practically every town.

My dad was a lot of things, he was brilliant, charming, funny, engaging but he was also dark, angry and embittered.  Most of all he was mysterious.  My dad raised me and certainly was a profound influence on me, I spent a lot of time with him growing up and lived with him exclusively after my parents' divorce.  But in so many ways there is still a lot I didn't understand about him and I certainly wasn't able to help him.  I understand that and accept it but of course I wish I could have helped him.  

Eight years on from his suicide there are still questions that I will never be able to answer.  And I think maybe that is why I am drawn to France, that perhaps the simple act of walking in or even near his footsteps,  being submerged in the country, language and culture of his birth somehow makes me feel more connected to him and gives me peace in accepting all the unanswered questions he left behind.

My dad had loving, caring parents but his childhood was wrought with fear and that stayed with him for life.  I remember once finding a box of canned food under his bed in our house in California, PA.  I asked him what it was doing there, he told me that he couldn't sleep without it there.  When I asked him why, he got a faraway look in his eyes and he simply said, "I hope that you will never have to learn what fear is." It wasn't the answer I was looking for or an explanation, but I walked away from that conversation knowing that he knew something truly terrible.  

Seeing Maya on that merry go round in Cahors feels like some kind of full circle.  Here she was, my daughter, my dad's granddaughter, in the same city where he had been, not living in fear, but smiling and laughing, running, cavorting, and enjoying herself.

Free.

Something just feels right about that.

The Best Gift

A couple of nights ago Maya spent the night at her grandparents' house.  When she came back last night both she and my inlaws were all a-flutter with stories about what they did and how fun it was and both my MIL and FIL were talking about what a wonderful child Maya is.

One of the best gifts my parents ever gave me was living in close proximity to my grandparents.  For the majority of my childhood my grandparents were a mere few minutes away and in my teen years 25 minutes.  

We were a small but close family.  We didn't have a big extended family and we only saw them a couple of times a year so largely it was just us.  

Us being my parents, my aunt and uncle, my 2 brothers and four cousins.  

We spent a lot of time together, besides being in school together (as my brothers were with my older cousins), we all spent time in and out of our furniture business, working there, going there with my grandmother and on Sundays we were always together at my grandparents' house.  We went to Sunday school and often afterward walked straight to Meme and Pepe's house, about 5 minutes away, and Meme made us lunch, of course none of us ate the same things but Meme didn't care, she loved having all of us squeeze around her 4 person kitchen table, making so much noise that a plane could have landed in the dining room and I am not sure we would notice.  There Meme shouted over us, hearing our orders for sandwiches,  and of course there was chocolate milk, 7 glasses filled to the brim with whole milk, 3 tablespoons of Nestle's Quick and the perfect stir.  

And of course when we were all done with our lunch, we headed to Meme's laundry room, what she called the utility room and opened the candy cupboard where there was enough M&M's Nestle's Crunch, and Life Savers to feed a small nation for a couple of years.  

In the afternoon we sprawled into the living room, the boys always outnumbering me and my cousin Alison, the only girls in the family, so they dominated the television, first cartoons, then Three Stooges, then sports, all the while Pepe snoozed in his chair in the living room, with a handkerchief over his eyes.  On Saturday nights Pepe, a master bridge player, played bridge until the wee hours of Sunday morning and spent Sundays catching up on his sleep with us basically burning down the house around him.  I never understood how he could sleep through our noise but he did.  

Eventually, Al and I, sick of the boys, took our leave of the living room and went into Meme's bedroom where we watched movies, played with Meme's jewelry, did our nails and just talked.  In summer we would sit outside on Meme's big back porch with Meme, she would make us lemonade or we would drink Pepsi and talk with her, while she rocked back and forth on her glider and called us her meideles (a Yiddish term of affection, literally, little girls).  She often told us stories about when she was a girl, talking about her mother, her sisters, her piano teacher whom she was really close to.  It made Meme really happy that Alison took up Piano lessons and sometimes when we dared enter the living room, Meme and Alison would play the piano.  I didn't play but I always danced and Meme would always stop playing and clap along to Al's clunky tune and my clunky dancing.  Meme's eyes would sparkle with laughter like she was watching Tchaikovsky and Anna Pavlova perform Swan Lake.


At some point Pepe would wake up, he would say hello to each of us in turn and then go to the kitchen to eat his lunch, usually consisting of something like herring or sardines, cottage cheese and fruit.  Meme often gave us ice cream while we sat there with him, Neopolitan, perfect rows of strawberry, vanilla and chocolate scooped into her little red ice cream dishes.  Sometimes if she was a little slow with it, Pepe would tell her Masha, put out die ice creem.  And when he finished his lunch he would drink his tea. 

Now that I am older and have learned a little something about the world, I understand that he drank his tea the Russian way, the way he learned as a child.  As a kid it was just Pepe's way and the funniest thing ever.  He would fill his cup up to the brim, steep his teabag, when he finished, Meme would quickly take it and put it in the strainer.  He opened the sugar bowl and took out a sugar cube, he would take one and break it in half in his hands, popping the sugar cube in his mouth, and putting his face down to the tea cup and slurping about half the tea in one go, then after a few moments he would pop the other half of the sugar in his mouth and drink the rest.  I never failed to bust out laughing hearing this little man of about 5'2" whose voice didn't go above a whisper slurp his tea.  And every time Pepe would say to me, vy you laugh, Dana, I am just drinking my tea?  

And while Pepe ate his lunch, we would file into the kitchen, 2 or 3 at a time and sit with him and he would ask us about school or we would ask him questions and he would tell us things he knew.  I am always amazed that Pepe talked to us like adults, he always listened to what we had to say and we hung on his every word.  

Pepe had a real dry humor about him and he could make us explode in laughter with his zingers.  One legendary Pepe story went like this.  He was at the store and he handed the delivery orders for the day over to the delivery guys, and one particular guy, a real mouthpiece, started complaining.   One of the deliveries was a sofa of which the only one in stock was in the very back of the warehouse, which meant a lot other pieces of furniture would have to be moved out in order to get this sofa and get it onto the truck.  He started with "uh, Mr. Gross, I don't think we are gonna to be able to get that sofa, it is in the back of the warehouse and will take half the day to move everything out of the way to get it onto the truck and we'll fall behind and not get all the deliveries done today." Pepe paused for a moment, turned to this guy and said, they are putting men on the moon, I tink you can get a sofa from de varehouse.  


My brother and I still tell that story and many other of Pepe's classics and they never fail,  even today,  to make us roar with laughter.  

Still, we loved talking to Pepe and as each one of us grandchildren in turn got older, our relationship with Pepe strengthened.  As the youngest in the family I watched my brothers and cousins go off to college, meaning they weren't there every Sunday, but when they did come home, they always came to Meme and Pepe's house on Sunday and there they would sit, while Meme fussed over them and while they would sit and talk to Pepe about school, about what they were studying and about the future.

And it wasn't just Pepe that we adored, it was Meme and her sweet nurturing way with us, she did everything for us so happily.  The joy on her face when she was running around making lunch for us or sitting and watching us eat and laughing with us was evident to me, even as a child.  We were everything to her.  She relished every single second spent with each of us.  As I got older I learned more about what Meme and Pepe went through during the war and how Meme was the only person in her family to survive the Second World War (Meme's parents, grandmother, 6 brothers and sisters, their spouses and children were all killed).  My mother used to admonish me and tell me to help Meme more with lunch and dinner and when they would come over in the afternoons she would tell Meme to sit down and relax, but Meme wouldn't hear of it.  She didn't talk about it much but I think having us there and doing for us made joy pump through her veins, after having experienced such an immeasurable loss as Meme did, she was grateful for every single second with her grandchildren and the mess and chaos were just a very happy by-product.

Later in the afternoons Meme would start to make dinner and the menu was usually the same thing, Delmonico Steaks, homemade French fries, fresh green beans and salad.  Meme was not an all around fantastic cook, but she had her things that she made better than anyone.  This meal was the pinnacle of her culinary abilities, how in the hell she was able to turn out 12 steaks using her broiler in the oven all hot, all at the same time, all well done but still juicy, I will never ever know.  Her salad was the best salad ever.  Not fancy ,she never used anything but iceberg lettuce, tomatoes, cucumbers, red onions, radishes but it was her vinaigrette which sealed the deal.  A very simple vinaigrette of oil, red wine vinegar and salt.  She would put it in the salad bowl first, stir it and put the salad on top and not toss it until the very second that she served it in her individual glass salad bowls.  It was cold, crispy and fresh and perfect every time.

Our parents would come around 4 and we would eat dinner in the dining room.  After dinner came dessert,  Mocha Tort cake from Silberbergs Bakery in Pittsburgh.  The most luscious yellow layer cake with mocha icing and chocolate sprinkles.  Our family practically sat shiva in the 80's when Silberbergs closed its doors and to this day I never have tasted a more delicious cake (although the Burnt Almond Torte at Prantl's does run a close second, they even ship them in the US, order one, you'll never be the same).

I spent a lot of other time with Meme and Pepe growing up.  I often slept there as a young child on Saturday nights while my parents went out or my dad took my brothers to see the Penguins play at the Civic Arena.  My parents would drop me in the morning and Pepe would drive us (and often my cousin Alison would join us) into downtown Pittsburgh on the way to his bridge club.  He would drop us at Kaufmann's or Joseph Horne's (the two big department stores of the day) and we would go into their more than 20 floors and shop and usually Meme would buy us a new outfit or hats, gloves and scarves, shoes or whatever fancied her or us.  We would always eat lunch at Kaufmann's and I'll admit it was fun seeing Meme, this kind, mild mannered, demure Yiddish woman eat a hamburger and fries.  She cut her burger in half and ate it like a tea sandwich, taking little bites out of it.  To this day I still cut my burgers in half.

In the afternoon we would go with our purchases to the bus stop to take the bus that ran between Pittsburgh and Washington, PA.  Alison and I would sit together and Meme across the row from us, it was usually a pretty quiet journey, sometimes Meme closed her eyes but she was often in her own reverie until it was time to get off the bus which dropped us right at her house.  Back at their house we would relax, sometimes playing cards or watch tv until Pepe came home for dinner, we'd eat early (well early by today's standards, 5.00 was a regular dinner time when I was a kid) and then Meme and Pepe would get in the car to go to the Washington Mall to take their evening walk and go food shopping.

When we got back it was just in time to watch All in the Family.  Meme, Pepe and I would sit in the living room.  I used to love watching this with them.  Pepe wasn't much of a tv watcher but he loved All in the Family and he and Meme used to laugh their heads off watching it.  Of course I grew up watching All in the Family and still love it, but really, I loved it because they did.  After it was over Pepe would leave to go to his bridge club and play until 2 in the morning and Meme and I would retire to her bedroom and watch the rest of the Saturday night TV in bed.  I loved her crisp white sheets that she pressed in the mangle and her big flowered duvet cover that she pulled out from the closet every night and how it smelled like the many bars of  soap that she kept in her closet to keep everything smelling fresh and clean.  I loved seeing Meme in her fancy silk nightgowns that she bought at Saks Fifth Avenue that were pressed and perfect, with her matching pink slippers and robe.  I loved hearing her laugh at the Bob Newheart Show or at Carol Burnett and how after it was over she would tell me to turn over and go to sleep while she watched the late movie, always rubbing my back softly until I fell asleep.

The comfort of that familiarity, at least for me was like the perfect blanket, never too hot or too cold, keeping you warm and safe at a place where you know you were loved. 


Of course being a kid, I didn't realize how special it all was until it was gone.  But that is how it is with life.  And to be honest, perhaps if it was something that lasted forever, it wouldn't be so special.  


Maybe it is the fleeting nature of beauty which makes it so precious?  


When Leo and I talked of getting married and where we wanted to live our lives, I didn't hesitate in the decision to move to the Netherlands, even though it was a new country, with a new language, where other than Leo and his family I didn't know anyone.  Leo was pretty surprised at how easy it was for me to decide to live here, he thought I would have wanted to settle in Israel, where I had a great life and where Leo's brother and sister were or that I would want to go back to the US.  But it was an easy decision, I wanted any family we would have to have the possibility of having grandparents close by.  I knew my parents, divorced and blinded by their own pain, they would have loved her certainly, but I didn't really think I could create that special bond with them.  

Of course what I really want to give Maya is Meme and Pepe.

My inlaws are very different people than my grandparents were,  they have a different life, their own way about things and their own manner with Maya.    Despite all the differences though I can see that my daughter is just as close to Leo's parents as I was to Meme and Pepe.  She sees them a few times a week and I can see the same wanting in her to be with them, the same wanting as I had as a kid.  Maya loves being with them and they her.  She has the same light in her eyes and enthusiasm that I felt just being in Meme's living room.  She does things with them, small things but that are very special to her, they are uniquely hers and Oma's and Opa's.  Maybe she will be able to take comfort in replicating certain things in her adult life the way they were as a kid, like the way I always make my vinaigrette the same as Meme's or how I keep soap in my drawers and closet or how I rub Maya's back the same way Meme did mine before she falls asleep or how I tell her that she is such a beautiful sweet girl, the way Meme told me.

I hope that when she grows up, just like me, her time with her Oma and Opa and her cousins will be a source of comfort and security for her, it will serve as a touchstone for her, helping her through the tougher times, remind her of how much she was loved and how no matter how much time passes that love will stay with her, just as Meme and Pepe's stays with me.

3 (ish) Words

I owe this post to my friend Sarah who often poses random but interesting questions to her friends on Facebook.  Sarah by the way has her own fascinating blog chronicling her unique journey as a young mother, a new immigrant and a person who like the rest of us is fighting to find her way in the world.  Her blog is is daring and beautiful.  She's not afraid to write about the hard stuff.  It's a good read, check it out.

Anyhoo, today's challenge laid out by Sarah was to describe your parents in three words.

It was hard to come up with just three, because really, my parents were so many things, 3 words is not enough.  30 words?  Maybe.  As I read through the list of other responses, I found lots of words like supportive, neurotic, inspiring, demanding, loving, overbearing, selfish.  Of course my parents had all this too but I decided to go with the first words that occurred to me.  

And it was clever, independent, tragic.

My parents had a lot of traits in common and that is probably what drew them to each other in the first place.  In asking them both that very question at various points in life, they gave me more or less the same answer - "I liked the way she looked," "He was charming and handsome." Keeping in context that my parents came from a generation where after you finished college you were expected to marry and start a family.  And my parents were true to that expectation.  They met in their senior years (my dad's of college, my mom's of nursing school), they dated, they got pinned.  They both graduated in June of 1957 and in September 1957 they got married.

Anyhow as of late, my dad has been on my mind a lot.  I think that is largely because we are in the cusp of summer, which was always my favorite time of year as a kid, particularly when I was a teenager and lived with my dad.

In summer, my dad was done teaching for the year and even if he taught in summer, as he often did, it was usually only a class or two so he had a lot more free time.  We went out for dinner a lot, during the school year we stuck close to home going to the Acropolis or Alfano's in town or over to Bartoletti's in Fredericktown near the store.  If my dad was in the mood for something more sophisticated we headed over to the Back Porch in Charleroi or our family standby, the Red Bull Inn.

In summer though,  he took me to the symphony at Heinz Hall or to shows at the Stanley Theater in Pittsburgh and I used to love those evenings with him.

We'd make a day of it, starting off in Shadyside in Pittsburgh, having breakfast or lunch at Pamela's or heading to Bloomfield to Tessaros.  We'd invariably end up in the afternoon in Oakland, walking the campus of Carnegie Mellon when he would tell me of his days there as a student or we'd go to the University of Pittsburgh's Cathedral of learning and stroll through the Commons Room and tour a couple of the Nationality Rooms which I highly recommend if you're ever in Pittsburgh.

We'd have dinner at family favorite spots Samreny's or Poli's and then we'd get lost in an evening of music, pomp and circumstance.

My dad also gladly shlepped me around a lot in the years before I could drive.  He would gladly take my friends and I to one of the malls in and around Pittsburgh and he would let me get my girl on and he would take the Sunday New York Times and he'd go explore the book store and of course the tool section at Sears and then he'd sit on one of the benches in the mall and read the paper while I shopped and enjoyed myself.

He didn't talk about it much, but as a single dad, there was a part of him that I think felt guilty that I didn't have a mother around to do girl things.  I think because of that he was indulgent about me doing girl things and that is why he would so easily give up a whole afternoon just so that I could shop, try on clothes, makeup and shoes and he never uttered a word of complaint about it.

During high school I spent 4 weeks at summer camp.  He sent me to Camp Tel Yehudah, situated on the Delaware River in upstate New York.  TY as it is known by it's campers is a Young Judea camp and having a Jewish identity and Jewish friends was something which my dad was important.

We lived in a very small town and there were hardly any Jewish kids around.  And while I enjoyed California, Pennsylvania and made good friends there, there was always a part of me that felt different from everyone else.  I was an active member of BBYO a popular youth group and  I enjoyed the weekend get togethers and activities.  I made friends in BBYO but it was pretty cliquey, I never quite made it into the "in" crowd there and I always felt like I was trying too hard.  At camp it was different.  Yes there were cliques but a lot of the kids in Young Judea in Pittsburgh were more down to earth, they seemed to have less to prove and I just fit in there more easily.

So every July I trodded off to the pinnacle of the Young Judea year, spending 4 weeks at Tel Yehudah.  I flew by myself to NYC and met up with the camp there and headed out for the 3 hour ride to Barryville, NY.  I loved camp, I made good friends there, I learned a lot and developed a love affair with Israel which continues to this day.

Still 4 weeks was a long time to be away and there was no Skype, email or Facebook so my dad and I wrote letters, his letters mostly consisting of small notes or something a newspaper clipping of things going on at home or comics or other little snippets he thought I'd find interesting.  Two or three times a week I would dutifully call collect and my dad would want to hear everything about camp, what we did, what we learned about, about my friends.

And midway through the 4 week period, there was visitor's day, where parents could come and see their kids at camp.  Most of the parents that came were those from NYC and the surrounding area.  For kids like me and many others, from farther away, trodding out to Barryville, NY was just too far to come for one day.

But my dad always came.

He would drive 7 hours each way to be able to spend 4 hours with me.  I'd show him around, show him my bunk, introduce him to some of my friends but mostly he enjoyed walking down by the river bank where there was nothing but the sound of the water running over the rocks and nothing but trees and blue skies all around.  We'd talk about home and the family, what was happening at the Store (which was always a common topic in our family) or we talked about the trees or the flowers or the indigenous wildlife of the area.

Those were perfect days, not just because I was young and as you get older your youth takes on a splendor which can only be enjoyed when the times are a few decades in the rearview mirror.  But they were perfect because they were wonderful in and of themselves.

When your parent commits suicide, it can, if you don't pay attention, color every memory with that one horrible, sad, tragic, inexplicable act.  You can forget that there ever was anything wonderful or beautiful.  The pain, that your loved one carried with them and endured until they could endure it no longer as well as your own pain, at the loss which can never be truly explained, take up residence in your head and heart.  If you're not careful, it can eclipse everything else.

Sometimes those beautiful memories are too hard to think about in light of what happened later.

But sometimes, something so inconsequential as a question can bring those beautiful memories back, they can also lay their claim to your mind and your heart and just be wonderful and beautiful in their own right.

Untarnished by any suicide.

The Benefits Linger On

Today is the 68th anniversary of D-Day.

Those who fought in that battle which began on June 6th saved millions in Europe from sure annihilation, starvation and oppression.

Unless you are from another galaxy (or perhaps some pockets in America), everyone has seen countless documentaries, news stories, movies about D-Day.  As one of the greatest battles of WWII and the 20th century, perhaps no other battle has symbolized freedom as much as the Allied landing on the shores of Normandy early that June morning.

My dad was half a year shy of his 10th birthday on June 6, 1944.  He was merely 1 year older than Maya is right now.  Living in hiding in Vichy, France for most of his lifetime at that point, my dad, aunt and grandparents huddled around the radio, listening to news of the invasion on the BBC.

My dad told me once that listening to those BBC broadcasts was the first time he ever allowed himself to be hopeful.  

That phrase and conversation with my dad still lives on in my mind's eye.  I can still feel the fabric of the chair I was sitting on when we had this conversation, can still see my dad's hazel eyes clearly as he looked away from me, can still see the blue shirt he wore, and the outline of his keys in the pocket of his chino pants.

I can remember all of that perfectly, but still more than 30 years later, I cannot imagine what it would be like to live without hope.  

My dad, aunt and grandparents lived comparatively well during the war years.    They were, thanks to the generosity and foresight of my grandfather's brothers able to buy phony identification papers which did not reveal their Jewish identity and thanks to the kindness of his university professor, they were able to live out most of the war in relative quiet and obscurity.

My dad, aunt and grandparents, circa 1940.

They were never deported, never humiliated, never gassed.

They were the lucky ones.

D-day brought freedom to Europe, liberation to European Jewry, Gypsies, Homosexuals and others oppressed by the Nazi regime and their collaborators. Many soldiers and civilians died in those weeks, more than 3,000 American soldiers died during the invasion.  So many sacrificed so that the world could live in freedom.

For the last decade the world Jewish community and others have been desperate to preserve as much history from this era as possible as the numbers of those who lived through this period, who fought, who were persecuted are dwindling rapidly.  It won't be long until the last survivor, veteran and witness are gone.

But I will never forget the sacrifice of those soldiers, those brave men and their families who fought, died and sacrificed so that I could live.

I probably never would have been born if the D-Day invasion had never taken place and it is doubtful that Leo would have been born either.

I don't think my dad ever really truly got his hope back, there were times in his life which were more hopeful than others, sure but living through that period brought him a blackness and despair which is unimaginable.

My daughter Maya is one of the most hopeful people on this earth.  Her joy and hope runs with wild abandon. Maybe she got it in such a high dose because it had so eluded her grandfather.

I'm sure he'd love that.

Courtesy of Elijah

As part of the Passover Seder, after dinner there is the part where you welcome the Prophet Elijah.  It is said that the appearance of Elijah will signal the start of the Messianic age.  So, during Seder you set an extra wine glass for Elijah and after the meal  you invite him in by opening your door so he can enter and saying a prayer, and if you are a Passover Purist you sing the Hebrew Song Eliyahu Hanavi.

We are not purists.  Plus I fear my families' collective singing voices are so bad that if Elijah heard us singing while standing in our open doorway, he'd head for the hills.  But we set the extra wine glass for him anyway.

You never know.

This past Thursday Maya also had her Easter party at school.  The parents are invited to join their kids during the party for a special lunch and then some kind of special activity.  Either Leo or I always attend these parties both because it is fun for Maya but it also gives us more frequent contact with her teachers.  One of the disadvantages of Maya going on a bus to school is that we don't see her teachers every day, so these parties give us something outside of the official meetings to check and see how our girl is doing.

I have always been pleased that during Maya's whole social career, from daycare to her current school, other kids do seem to like her.  She always has one or two kids who are just crazy about her.  I hope that means that she is a likable sort of kid.  She does struggle socially even still, but slowly but surely she is gaining a smidgen of ground here and there.

At this year's party, there were a lot of new kids in Maya's class.  In Maya's school the kids stay about 1.5-2 years in each grade and they don't move forward classically at the end of the school year, but they  move forward when they are ready since each kid works at their own level they hit their milestones differently.  In February, 3 new kids joined Maya's grade 2 from grade 1 and 2 kids moved forward to grade 3.

So when I walked into the party, I was greeted by a few new faces.  One boy, M, a cute little red headed boy, ran right up to me and told me he was Maya's good friend and asked who I was, when I told him I was Maya's mom, he then said, Maya's mom, that means you speak English (as Maya proudly boasts at school that she speaks English with her mom and knows 2 languages).  He was such a cutie pie.  I took my seat near Maya's desk for the party.  A few minutes later I got a big hug from L, that is probably Maya's closest friend at school, a cute little boy that Maya plays with a lot.  He doesn't talk a lot but he is a very sweet, good natured boy and he Maya spend hours chasing each other on the playground with wild abandon.  Later in the day, we ran into H, a little girl who has recently moved to grade 3.  She ran up to me and threw her arms around me.  I asked her if she liked it in her new class and she said she did, but that she misses Maya a lot.

I must admit, it makes me feel very good to know that even though she still might not get the socializing thing right all the time, my girl has friends at school.

We've not done any outside of school socializing with any of the kids as of yet.  Each kid at Maya's school has their own particular set of issues and Dutch people are strange about playdates anyway.  Weekends are restricted mostly to family and close friends of the parents because most children go to school in their own neighborhood which means classmates and friends are a very short distance away on foot or bikes.  Plus, unlike the US, it is perfectly safe for your children to play outside all day so there isn't as much need for parents to become cruise directors in order to ensure that your kid has a social life.

So there's no need for play dates.

Unless you are raising a child on the autistic spectrum who doesn't have many friends and occasions to socialize.

Then you are screwed.

A few months ago at one of the parents' nights a few parents were lamenting the fact that their children do not have friends outside of school and someone suggested passing around a telephone/email list of all the parents so that contacts could be made.  For years I have been incredulous that the schools don't do this anyway, but things work very differently here than in the US in this respect.  The Dutch are big on their privacy.  So at school the only way they would put together the list is if all parents agreed to it, and since the Dutch apparently don't find the need for this sort of thing, it never happened.

At the parents' night I had the opportunity to meet L's mom.  She in particular was the one that suggested the list and talked about how L has never had a play date.  After the meeting I introduced myself to her and gave her my business card and told her that if she ever wanted to organize a play date between L and Maya to contact me.

That was in November.

And if you thought it was challenging to deal with a kid with special needs, organizing a play date seems very daunting.  I've been reluctant to pursue it, largely because I have virtually no contact with the other parents at school since apparently no one wanted to exchange contact details on a telephone list and also I don't have any real information about what other kids' special needs situations are.  Can they even handle a play date, will it be too much for them, too much for me?

And the few play dates we had haven't really led to anything.  Case in point, at Maya's former school she was very good friends with a little boy, D.  D and Maya really loved each other and they, to the best of their limited abilities, were very good friends.  They needed a lot of supervision but they also had a lot of good fun with each other.  D's parents lived just a couple blocks over from us so it was the perfect situation to build a friendship, or so I thought.  Once when there was a bus strike we had to shuttle the kids back and forth to school and Leo met D's parents at school and we arranged to car pool them.  A couple of times I mentioned getting the kids together after school and I got a positive response so we organized a play date on a Sunday morning.

I don't know what happened, maybe D didn't have a good time but considering how those two kids laughed their heads off together and that he cried when it was time to go, I find that hard to swallow.  D's mom was initially pretty nervous about leaving him with us, she asked me if she could stay for a while to make sure he was okay and finally she got comfortable with the idea of leaving, she asked me about 100 times if I was sure I could handle it.  She didn't give me a lot of details, so I had no idea whether I could handle it or not, but I just kept telling her yes, not to worry.   D's mom did tell me that he was prone to giant meltdowns and that he was on medication.  I'd never seen him be anything but sweet but I trusted that D's mom was probably afraid of leaving me to deal with one of his meltdowns.  Finally I told her the decision to leave was hers.  I felt confident about the situation and if something happened I would certainly call her immediately but that ultimately the decision was up to her.  Finally she did decide to leave.

Everything went just fine, no issues at all.  The kids had a great time and although they did need constant supervision, everything went great.  After 2 hours D's mom picked him up and promised the next play date would be at their house.

An hour or so after they left I noticed that D left his jacket behind.  I texted his mom about it and heard nothing.  A week later a second text sent by me offering to drop the jacket off at their house.  A week after that I got a short text response telling me not to worry about it, they would stop by and pick it up.  I texted her to remind her a week or two later and nothing.  Never got another call, never got that invitation.


They apparently left our house and crossed the border.  Never to be heard from again.


After this I started getting a little gun shy about playdates from school.  Maya is a pretty easy kid but a lot of the kids she is close to at school seem to have bigger issues than she does, although I have no real knowledge of their situations.
I just decided to leave well enough alone.

And then (cue music)--

Last night after the Seder finished, after we opened our door and our hearts to Elijah the most incredible thing happened.  I went upstairs to bed and checked my blackberry and saw I had an email.  Thinking it must be an announcement of another sale at the Gap or a news subscription, I was shocked to see an email from L's mom asking to organize a playdate at her house for Maya and L.

So maybe Elijah didn't enter our house last night but perhaps he sent something even better.

A friend for Maya.

Finding, Not Bestowing

Sometimes you just have to be grateful for grace that comes with not understanding certain realities.  As hard as it is, as it can be, particularly to watch someone you love go through it, you also sometimes have to be just a little bit grateful for the blessings that obliviousness can bring.

I have experience with this, with two people who are very close to me.  One is my daughter, the other my grandmother.

My daughter Maya Rivka is named for my grandmother Marsha Rudnik Gross.  I chose her name in the Jewish tradition, naming our daughter for one of her ancestors.  We chose to name her for my grandmother, my beloved Meme because she was such a presence in my own life and because I wanted her to carry the legacy of an honorable woman, a woman pure of heart and motive.  I chose her middle name to represent my grandmother's maiden name.  A name which she didn't use but that died with her.  My grandmother was the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust.  Her parents and five brothers and sisters, their spouses and children were all killed and although she didn't speak about it all that often it was something she carried with her.  It didn't pre-empt later joys in her life, but it made her treasure what was really important, the family she built.  Her husband, my grandfather, her children, my aunt and my father,  and us, her 7 grandchildren and later her great grandchildren.

Still, it is not lost on me how similar in character my daughter is to Meme.  Both pure, who love those around them completely and who will always float toward being happy rather than being sad.

And they have something else in common, a limited capacity at understanding certain things and certainly that reality has brought its sorrows, but there is also grace to be found as well.

Meme, at the end of her life had Alzheimers and after many years, at first just being forgetful, in the middle coming in and out of awareness and the fear which came with the understanding that she had that she was losing who and what she was and in the end the heartbreaking but blissful oblivion.  Blissful in the sense that she no longer came back to herself and the lack of that return meant that she didn't have to spend moments aware and scared.  I remember spending the weekend at her house while she still lived there, a weekend when her home caregivers wanted the weekend off so I went and stayed at her house.  It was heartbreaking to watch her check to see if the door was locked every two minutes, not remembering that I locked it when we came inside but it was even worse as she drifted off to sleep and then jolted awake fully aware and then begging me not to leave her, not to leave her all alone and asking me not to let her slip away from us.

As hard as it was to lose her completely, to have her no longer recognize me or my dad or any of us, to have her lose her command of English and slip into French, then Yiddish, then stop speaking altogether, to have her only able to sit in her room, eventually wheelchair bound at the nursing home surrounded in her room by photographs of her life and her family but that who in the end became strangers to her.  

I missed the grandmother that had loved me so well, that had been there for me my entire life, the woman who stepped in when my parents divorced, who tried everything she could to comfort me, and who did everything humanly possible to make up for the fact that I didn't have a mother close by to lean on as a teenager.

I was glad that although I was losing Meme while she was still alive, that at least that in her total slipping away from us, in her oblivion, that the heartbreak was ours alone and no longer hers.

And I was supremely grateful for the timing of it all.  This all happened as my father slipped more and more away from us into his own paranoid, delusional world, where he was convinced that his sister, my aunt was out to get him and take his birthright from him.  And he spent the last 15 years of his life waging a war, presumably against my aunt, but really against himself.

It was this fight, this giving into demons that spurned my father onward year after year, in this, his own private war which eventually consumed him completely.  It destroyed the family, first eating through the business and later what my grandparents had so lovingly built.  It ate through us, his children as we lost our aunt and uncle and our cousins and tried to understand and grapple with just who this person was that walked around in the body of our father?  We lost our cousins who had been more like brothers and sisters to us, with whom we spent every weekend and holiday as kids and who we had just assumed that our children would grow up and know the same bonds with each other as we had.   I had hoped that Maya would know the love that I had grown up with and would be surrounded by an extended family, loads of people to hold her hands and cheer at her achievements and pat us on the back when she fails and that I would do the same for my cousins' kids.  That, sadly has not come to pass.  I wanted to fight my father, but I was too scared, too dependent on him and too afraid to take a stand.

But I was grateful that Meme did not understand the full extent of what was really happening while it was happening, that where ever she was in her world, her family was still in tact.  And I am grateful that both Meme and Pepe died thinking that the what they had built would go on and on for generations, not able to comprehend how fragile it all really was.

At least there is the comfort of that.

I am not a religious person so I don't want this to get all religious-y but this is the thing about blessings.  Many people believe that blessings are bestowed but I believe they are found.

What does it take to find them?  Desire and perspective.

You can take nearly any situation and set of circumstances and depending on your perspective and how you want to see it, turn it into a blessing or a burden.  look at a red dot on a canvas and see a red dot, some people see a ball, some people see the sun.  If you are Maya you might see a train, a seal or a monkey named bongo.  It's all based on your perspective.

Blessings are there, you just have to want to find them.

I have a child with autism.  Yes it is sometimes a burden, there are very real worries and heartbreak, and probably heartbreak still to come.  I recognize all of that but I also recognize the light and beauty of it all as well.

I could look at Meme's alzheimers, my parents divorce, the obliteration of my family, my father's suicide, Maya's autism as terrible occurrences and circumstances and they are.  And there are times when I do rail about why me, why us of it all.  But other than the sheer acknowledging, which is important it's not going to benefit me at all to live only in acknowledgment and railing.

I'd rather try to find the good.  Not because I am this sunny, religious, new-agey person but because it is the good that keeps me going, moving forward.  It is in the living with difficult circumstances and still being able to find blessings, no matter how small which to me make life more interesting, more enjoyable and make the human experience one worth living.

So I find my blessings where I can.  And some of them lived in Meme's alzheimers and some live in Maya's autism.  

My grandparents taught me a lot of things but unfortunately they didn't live to see the fruits of their wisdom bloom on me, when my Pepe died I was 22, frightfully insecure and letting my insecurities rule my life.  Pepe's death brought Meme's dementia to light and she vanished before I could get my act together and figure out what is really important.  As a young adult in my 20's I was still too busy running away from what I was, denying my fears and numbing the rest with drugs and alcohol.  I didn't yet understand that the only way to get rid of your demons is not to push them away but to face them.

It took me much longer to figure that out, but by then they were gone.

So, I show them by passing what they taught me onto my daughter.  I love her with wreckless abandon, I am not a perfect parent by any measure but I try to err on the side of loving her too much instead of too little.  I try to show her that it is possible after you've been knocked down, to get up again and that even though one cannot escape sadness or heartbreak or challenges,  there is a way to handle it with dignity and acceptance.

I see Meme in Maya, her happiness and joy, her beautiful, resilient spirit have all been touched by the grace of my beautiful, wonderful grandmother.  Her strength and courage and dry humor have Pepe's signature all over them.

My daughter has an innate sense of who she is and that what she is, is good.  My daughter may struggle with reading and with understanding certain things, but at age 8, she sees the good in herself.  That's much more than I saw at the same age.

And while Maya has many challenges and many things she doesn't understand as well as she should, on some level I am sometimes grateful for her own lack of understanding, in the same way that I was with Meme's.  I am glad that Maya doesn't yet understand that she is different from other kids, that even if other kids reject her, it may sadden her for a second but it doesn't eat into what she thinks of herself.  That she is able to dust herself off from a disappointment and easily find joy again.

So, even though she never met Meme and Pepe, never set foot in their house, has no memories of them, even though they are just a photograph hanging on the wall of my foyer, they are a part of her.

Some of the best parts of her.

Small Blessings

I have mentioned in earlier blog post that I don't have big love for the month of December.

One of the reasons is that December is the month that my mother died.

My mom and I had a pretty tumultuous relationship over the years and to this day I am not sure I ever really understood who she was.  My mother didn't share a lot with people, and even less with those people closest to her.  Even though my mom and I talked a lot, I know that the things that were the hardest for her to say were still buried deep inside her.  She did tell me some things about her youth, some of those things were indeed awful but then other family members remembered different things and unlike my dad, it was tough for me to get a full picture of my mom.

My mom was born during the Great Depression and those were not easy years for her family.  My mom was the 3rd child of 5 and the oldest girl.  Her two older brothers didn't live with her, at least most of the time.  Her mother, my grandmother, also had a difficult time in her youth.  The child of strictly Orthodox Jewish parents in a small Jewish community in Monongahela, Pennsylvania, my grandmother brought shame unto her family by becoming pregnant out of wedlock.  This caused her parents to declare her dead and sit shiva and mourn her.  I don't know much more about this story as no one really talked about it, I know there had to have been some kind of reconciliation as my mom, as a youngster spent a lot of time with her bubbe, her maternal grandmother and ironically I think it was this which kept my mom connected to her Jewish roots, as she is the only one of her brothers and sisters who practiced Judaism.


I don't know much about my mom's father either, as my mother didn't see him very much, he left when she was a toddler, once my mom told me he was an alcoholic but I also remember whispers from my great Aunts that he spent quite some time in a mental hospital and at some point he and my grandmother divorced.  When my mom was about 3 my grandmother married the man I knew as my grandfather and I think things even became worse for my mom after that. I do know some things but I will not divulge them here because my mom was immensely private about her youth, but let's suffice it to say that a youth where your mom is cut off by her own family, your two older brothers live much of the time in foster homes and a cruel mother and step father do not really build a lot of confidence or a sense of security in a young girl and she brought all that pain and insecurity into her adult life.


My mom became very close with her mom's younger sister, Aunt Naomi, who I think in a lot of ways was a kind of substitute mother for her.  My mom loved her own mother dearly and they did share a close relationship at different times in their lives, but my grandmother was distant and often judgmental.  My Aunt Naomi was more generous with her love and approval and my mom naturally navigated toward her.  She became close to her children as well.  I actually saw more of my mom's first cousins than I did of my aunts and uncles as a kid.  I saw my aunts and uncles too but they lived farther away so they were not a regular presence in our lives.  By the time I was born my grandmother and grandfather had moved to Florida so we only saw them once or twice a year.  Aunt Naomi and her husband Uncle Joe lived in Pittsburgh and we spent holidays, family birthdays and lots of weekends together.  On Saturdays we would often drive to Squirrel Hill and my dad would pick up deli and we would head over to Aunt Naomi's.  When I was 9 Aunt Naomi moved to Florida, near where her two sons had moved.  The next year we followed and two years later Aunt Naomi's daughter, with whom I was especially close and worshipped moved there too.  My grandmother Sylvia died the year after we moved to Miami so again Aunt Naomi and her family were the center of our familial unit.  They seemed to be everything my mom's own parents were not.  They were warm and affectionate while my grandparents were mostly formal and reserved.  Unlike Aunt Naomi and Uncle Joe, I never actually spent much time alone with my grandparents.  They were nice but you had to be on your guard at their house, you were not allowed to mess anything up and you had to sit, be quiet and not cause trouble.  A pretty tall order for a kid.  My grandparents lived in a high rise apartment in Ft. Lauderdale, FL across the street from the beach, which was one of the main attractions of going there.  When we came from the beach we had to go straight to the apartment's pool and shower off, trying to remove every possible grain of sand before entering the apartment.  When we did come in we had to head straight to the shower and after the shower, we had to use our towel to dry off the tiles, so that my grandmother wouldn't get mold.  One time I forgot and my grandmother made me spend the rest of the afternoon in the bedroom by myself.  At, Aunt Naomi's, where we could run around with reckless abandon, Aunt Naomi would play hide and go seek (in between making chicken soup and kishke of course) with us and let us play dress up in her closet or with her jewelry and where we were smothered with hugs and kisses was way more preferable than my grandmother's house, where I basically had to sit, read a book and be a good little girl.

My mother was very much a product of her times, you didn't talk about things, particularly painful things and you solved problems by working on the outer self rather than the inner self.  I think my mom thought if she could just get out and find a good life everything would be okay.  And that is what she did.  My mom went to nursing school at Montefiore Hospital in Pittsburgh and she met my dad, then an engineering student at Carnegie Tech at one of his fraternity parties.  She fell in love with my dad almost instantly.  He was young, handsome, charming, intelligent and from a good family.   My mother was beautiful, athletic and smart.  They began to date one another and eventually after meeting each other's families they got pinned.  My mom told me many times of the first time she met my grandparents.  They had only been in America about 7 years by that time and they were still living in Fredericktown, Pennsylvania, a few doors down from our furniture store.  My mom said that they were very quiet people but they were very kind to her.  My mom was almost speechless seeing that my grandmother served steak for dinner.  My mother almost couldn't believe her eyes when she saw that each person got their own steak.  That was just unheard of in her house.  Although my mom's parents were financially secure by that time, my grandfather a successful civil engineer, they lived in a very nice house and were one of the few families at the time to have a built in swimming pool, still my mother's mother would never be so flagrant as to serve steak.  My mom immediately saw that my father's parents were generous, particularly to their children, and not just in the steak department but that they were interested in their children, they wanted to hear about everything, about school, what they were studying and what was going on in their lives, which was in stark contrast to her own house.  She was drawn to them immediately and it wasn't long before she and my dad became engaged and got married.

I don't really remember my parents being in love when I was a kid, but maybe that is just because I saw them through the eyes of a child and that kind of thing was not even on my radar.  When I was young my parents did spend a lot of time together and did things, they played bridge with friends, went to the movies, parties and other things.  They were active in the Jewish community, my mom was President of Sisterhood and was the Principal of the Sunday School for many years and she led loads of different fundraising drives for the synagogue.

There were problems in the marriage sure, but even now they didn't seem out of the ordinary and they seemed way less than what I saw of my friends and neighbors.

I think things really started to change for them when my dad went back to school for his Ph.D. in the early 1970's.  He was away a lot, he took classes in the evening and would spend very late nights in the school library and then he would come home and sleep most of the day, get up and head back to school.  My mom later told me that she felt my dad had entered a whole new world in academia and that my mom felt she couldn't compete with that.  She went to a few parties with him but always hated going and she told me much later it was because she felt like the most uninteresting person there.

My parents didn't know how to communicate, maybe they could have dealt with their problems, but although their youths were very different, they learned the same lesson.  Deny-push it away-don't-talk-about-it-everything-can-be-solved-with-a-3-bedroom-2-bath-ranch-house-and-membership-to-the-pool.  I think by the time they started talking about their problems, they were both so angry at each other and neither one of them had the tools to really work it through.  I think they didn't understand that marriage requires work and is not just something that rotates on an axis like the earth.

When my dad decided he wanted to divorce my mom fell apart completely.   The last 3 years had been visibly tougher for them, they were growing apart and the last year in our house was like living in the middle of a snowstorm, they were either fighting or not talking to each other, except in public.  Around Aunt Naomi or their friends they pretended like everything was okay.  And in retrospect, that was even more hurtful than the fighting or not talking.  Divorce was a lot more prevalent than in Washington, PA and in the neighborhood we lived in my parents were one of maybe 2 or 3 in the whole neighborhood that were not divorced.  Actually before we moved to Miami I had never even heard of divorce.  But most of my friends spent weekends with their dad's going to the beach or going to Disney World or other fun places while I spent a lot of weekends alone, escaping by day to the swimming pool and most evenings I spent at home hoping that night there would be silence and not fighting.  On good weekends I went to Aunt Naomi's (in retrospect I am pretty sure my parents sent me there so I wouldn't have to listen to them fight) where there were always one or more of her grandchildren in tow, and we would swim or Aunt Naomi and Uncle Joe would take us to the petting zoo or to the pool or out for Chinese food.  It was always just happy chaos at her house, where I didn't have to worry about existing in a world of fighting or silence.

To be honest, when my parents decided to separate at first, I was happy.  I think I even hoped that they would divorce.  I wanted to have happy weekends at Disney World and go to the beach, anything to be rid of the fighting and the silence.  It didn't take long before I learned that separation and divorce is anything but happy and my parents weren't able to even put that phony happiness into place.  There were no weekends at Disney World or at the zoo.  What there was were tense, silent dinners, where I tried to find something to talk about with my mom and dad.  My dad was able to put on a good face most of the time for me although he was angry at my mom and talked freely about it to me.  My mom just fell apart completely.  She alternated between anger and misery.  We ended up back in Washington, PA because I wanted to be near my dad and his family and that was probably the worst place for my mother.  She had no family there anymore and although she had a lot of friends in Washington, divorce was ugly and she was both ashamed and afraid that people wouldn't treat her the same anymore if she wasn't Mrs. Michael Gross.  I think that was probably true to some extent but also I think a lot of her friends would have supported her more if she would have let them.  But she turned away, feeling totally isolated and alone.  She was financially dependent on my dad for everything and he used that in order to control her.  She didn't want the divorce and for months he told her they would get back together but as she sadly found out, he used that time to put all his ducks in a row to get her to agree to a divorce or to fight to have enough money just to survive.

When they told me they would divorce they told me that I could choose who I wanted to live with.  My mom told me that she couldn't stay in Washington anymore and that she would go back to Miami.  I couldn't bear the thought of being away from my dad and grandparents.  In Miami, I had Aunt Naomi and Uncle Joe but my mom was just so miserable all the time.  So I chose my dad.

My mom left and the divorce went through and by that summer my dad had bought a new house for us in California, PA, about 25 minutes from my grandparents and about 15 minutes from our store.

During high school I saw my mom during the summers, where I would go visit her usually for about two weeks.  I wanted to spend lots of time with Aunt Naomi, Uncle Joe and the rest of the family as I did miss them very much, but in 1981 my mom remarried and they didn't spend much time with mom's family.  In hindsight, my stepfather who was only 28 at the time they married was young and  and was too afraid of the power of my mom's "old life" to really develop a relationship with her family.  My mom, ashamed of the divorce because my mom's family all were nuts about my dad, was afraid that they wouldn't accept her or her new husband, so she withdrew.  She stopped coming for holidays, stopped calling, stopped doing anything with them.  So when I came to visit mom she would tell me how the family wasn't interested in her, but if I wanted to see them I should call and arrange it.  And most of the time I was too afraid to make the call, too afraid my mom was right and that they only reason they would want to see me was because they felt sorry for me.  And when I did see them I felt so sad most of the time because they were still this happy, all encompassing, loud, brash but intensely loving family and now I felt like an outsider since I wasn't there for the birthdays, the holidays or the weekend dinners.  So while I wanted to desperately be one of them again, every time I was with them it just reminded me more of how I wasn't one of them.  After a while it just got easier not to call.

The time I spent with my mom was okay, we went to the movies, out to dinner and shopping and she tried to make the time pleasant.  My stepfather was nice but I didn't feel all that comfortable around him and of course I resented my mother having another man in her life. Mostly I just tried to get through the weeks in Miami and then get back to life with dad.

My mom's and my contact throughout the year was sporadic.  We went through periods where we talked on the phone every couple of days but there would also be months where we didn't talk at all.  My parents had no contact at all with one another and my dad just let things happen as they did and when there was no contact he would fault her as a mother and tell me not to let it get me down.  My dad and his family gave me a lot of love and support in those years, they really tried to give me everything I had lost but of course they couldn't.  My grandparents were not big fans of my mother but they never ever said a negative word about her and my grandfather especially told me that I should not cut off contact with her.  When summer rolled around after not talking to her for months a few times I said I didn't want to go visit her in Miami, my dad said it was my choice and it was fine with him.  It was my grandfather, though, my Pepe who told me I should go.  I remember sitting in his office at the store and he told me that yes, it was my own choice to go but that he wanted me to choose to go.  When I asked him why he wanted me to go, when I knew that he didn't like my mother, he told me it didn't matter whether he liked her or not.  She was my mother and the only mother I would ever have.  I protested, I told him how I didn't like being around my stepfather.  He said that he knew it must be hard, but that she was still my mother, the only mother I would ever have and that I wouldn't ever be able to get this time back with her.  He asked me to try and go.  He told me that if it was terrible or I wasn't happy, all I had to do was call him collect and he would get me on a plane back home the next day, no matter what.  I had an out if I wanted it, but he wanted me to make the effort and go.  So, I agreed.  I never made that collect call, but just knowing I could made it easier.

After I turned 18 and went to college I didn't see my mother much.  Summers were busy catching up with friends and our contact was more few and far between.  There would be times she would drop off the radar for months at a time, where there was nothing but her answering machine and after a while I would give up.  Then she would reappear as suddenly as she would disappear.  In hindsight I know that she was not happy in her life and there were just times where it was too hard for her to go through the motions and honestly for me it was often easier not to be in contact with her.  Then I didn't have to have those uncomfortable feelings and to be honest I was going through my own stuff and that combined with the selfishness and self-absorption of youth didn't help to keep my mother on my radar.

I think from her end (as I learned later) she was unhappy but she was also racked with guilt for leaving me even though she knew I would be better off with my dad and his family.  Still though as a mother she felt like she had abandoned her children, particularly me who at 12 still really needed a mother.  My brothers who were older when they separated were already on the way to their adult lives and she rationalized it all by saying that she had not been much of a mother to them or me in the last years we were all under one roof.  Her angers and sorrows led her to make some lousy choices as a mother, she was blinded by her own sorrows and was not strong enough or wise enough to rise above that to be a mother that built her children up.  She often made the choice to tear us down, because I think that was how she was parented and she was always reacting in her life instead of understanding and moving forward.

I saw her a few times in my twenties and while they were always enjoyable visits, they always centered around things we did well together.  Movies, shopping, books, gossiping, going out for dinner.  We never touched on the hard subjects, I wasn't ready to face it all yet and she couldn't.  She did try to be supportive in her way, she always tried to respect where I was in my life and she did little things like sending me books she thought I would like or cutting out interesting things she read in magazines or newspapers and sending them to me every month or so.

When I was 30 I moved to Israel and then we emailed pretty regularly, at least a few times a week.  She enjoyed hearing about my life there, especially since nearly 30 years before she and my dad took us and we moved to Israel.  She loved hearing how much Israel had changed since that time.  When they moved with us there my mom really went from a life of suburban comfort to a life of depravity, not even able to buy a mop or a lot of things which were taken for granted in the US at that time.   She really suffered during that 6 month period they lived in Israel and even though she couldn't hack living there, she loved that I did and that I could embrace it in a way she never could.

She was also a great support to me in a time when things had gone sour with my dad.  My dad and I were not in contact and I was alone and scared, on my own for the first time in my life and petrified by the loss of my moral, emotional and financial anchor.  She was great then, she understood what I was going through as she actually went through something similar after the divorce, she knew how hard it was, what a force in someone's life my father was, and how hard it was to live in the aftermath of that.  More than anyone else she really understood what I was going through.  She also told me to forgive myself for the stupid mistakes I had made with my dad.  She told me that the only way things would get any better is to forgive myself, that we all make mistakes, some of them big ones.  She told me not to be like her, paralyzed with sadness and fears, making choices out of fear instead of what she wanted.  She begged me to have the courage that she never had.

When I met Leo and got married she was very happy for me.  I think like the rest of the family they had sort of given up on me finding someone and getting married.  It had been many years since I had a serious relationship and even I said that I thought it just might not be in the cards for me.  But out of nowhere Leo showed up and things changed quickly.  Getting engaged after just 5 weeks and packing up the life that I loved in Israel to be with a man I loved in the Netherlands.  My family, including my mom thought I was a little nuts (of course they thought I was nuts when I wanted to move to Israel on my own too) but they knew I had to march to the beat of my own drum and they loved Leo.

We continued to be in close contact throughout my pregnancy with Maya which was very difficult, with me having to have my gallbladder removed at 14 weeks after a month-long hospital stay for dehydration.  I basically didn't eat for a month and I felt terrible.  And after Maya was born my mom was a godsend.  I was your typical hormonal new mother, elated on the one hand, wondering what the hell I had done on the other.  I was insecure, I had a rough pregnancy and a rougher birth and on top of that Leo had to get his gallbladder removed when Maya was 3 weeks old.  I was worried about Leo but also petrified to be alone with Maya.  I literally felt like I was alone on an island with her.  She wasn't sleeping, she was colicky and she screamed half the night.  I was hormonal, over tired, breast feeding, and shut up all by myself 24-7 with an infant.  Pretty much your typical new mother.  Poor Leo who had post operative fever which kept him in the hospital for 5 extra days was more worried about me than about himself.  I would call my mom when Maya woke up in the night and I couldn't get her back to sleep, usually around 2 AM, I'd put her on speaker and she would just stay up with me while Maya screamed, telling me, it's okay, all babies do this, try putting her on her belly, try putting her on her side, wrap her in a blanket, put her in the stroller, you're doing fine Dana, it just takes a while to get to know what your baby needs, she'll sleep.  And she wouldn't get off the phone until Maya slept, sometimes it happened just as the sun was coming up, but she never complained about it.  She just encouraged me.

We took Maya to visit my mom when she was about 6 weeks old which I think made my mom's year.  Maya was my mom's 4th grandchild but the only one she had seen as an infant and my mom was so grateful to me but mostly to Leo for taking the trip to bring Maya to her.  Leo, who has one of the most pure hearts out there told me that what happened in the past didn't matter, that we owed it to Maya to let her grandmother be in her life, that maybe my mom could right the past through Maya somehow and we had to at last give her the opportunity to try.

And Maya was the center of my mom's existence until the day she died.  My mother was not a happy woman but when she laid eyes on Maya that all went away from her.  Somehow with Maya she was free from her sorrows and her demons and was able to show the joy and love which was locked away deep in her heart.  Every time we visited she literally took Maya from me and wanted to do everything for her, I saw much more Aunt Naomi's style in her than grandma's and it was so nice to see my mom happy.

I spoke to my mom every single day and every day she wanted to know everything, how Maya slept, what she ate, what she did all day, she would ask me to put the phone in bed and listen to her sleep, and she would sing to her.  We took loads of little movies on our digital camera and emailed them through every day.  My mom took all the zillions of photos and busied herself making scrapbooks for Maya to have when she is older.

It took me a long time to forgive my mother for the past, to let all that go.  I did, when I finally came to realize that not forgiving her wasn't hurting anyone but me.  That living in fear and risking nothing emotionally would do nothing but make my deepest fears live and that the only chance I had was in letting it all go.

People have their limitations, I have mine, my dad had his and my mom had hers.

Some people are able to take the crap that life hands them and turn it into something good, sometimes even something great.  My mother was not one of those people.  Her pain and her sorrows lived with her and in her, her entire life.  She tried to escape them by escaping them.  She was not strong enough to reach for the only escape possible which is to face them and let them go.

Which is why when she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer a little more than 5 years ago, there was not even a question about fighting it.  The doctors told her with chemo she could try to prolong her life for a year or two but it was iffy.  She didn't hesitate for a second and she said, just keep me out of pain and send me home.  My mom was a nurse, she knew what chemo would do to her and she knew it wasn't worth it only to maybe live a year being very very sick.  But I also think dying was a relief for her, it was a release from a life which was largely sorrowful and a disappointment for her.  She understood that life was of her own making but she also knew she wasn't able to break free of it and she had been in pain for so many years.  She saw this as a way out of pain and she took it.

I think it is hard for many people to understand this but I think the thought of dying was a comfort to her and there was just no way she was going to fight the cancer.   It is also hard for me to understand but I tried to respect her decision.  I think it was the only way for her to finally let go all the sadness and disappointment of her own life.  The only conversation I had about it with her, I asked her if she was sure that this was the path she wanted to take, that if she wanted to try and fight it, I would do it with her.  She told me that the only reason to fight would be if she could live to see Maya grow up and she knew with this kind of cancer that couldn't happen.  So I told her that I would support her in her decision and do whatever she wanted.  She asked me to come with Maya one last time so she could enjoy being with us, but she asked me then to leave as she didn't want us to watch her die.  So I agreed and we went to her and spent 10 days with her there.  My brothers came too and we realized it was the first time since 1978 that all 4 of us had been together in one room.   My mother never attended any of our weddings or other family events, she just couldn't face my dad or his family or the mother she had been.  When we sat in the living room, which had been turned into her bedroom so she wouldn't have to climb the stairs, watching our old super 8 movies which had been turned into video, my brother Gary mentioned that the last time we had been together was in our apartment in Washington, PA during the separation, 28 years before, the last time our family had dinner together before my mom left for Florida.  We all got quiet for a moment, I realized how stupid it all was, how much time we had wasted and then my mom smiled and started laughing and we all started laughing uncontrollably, giggling like little kids until we couldn't breathe anymore.  When I caught my breath, I looked over at my mom and she was happy.  


She died 6 weeks later on December 30, 2006.

I miss her.  I miss talking to her every day.  Even now 5 years later, my evenings have a little void in them, that hour or so after Maya has had her bath and we would chat, while I folded laundry and snuggled with my girl.  Maya has grown up so much since my mom died.  I often think of how much she has missed and how much she would have loved seeing Maya at 4 at 6 and now at 8 years old.

As there are two sides to every coin, there is a blessing that she is not here as well.

My mom died before Maya was diagnosed with autism, actually before we ever started to put together that Maya had problems.  When my mom was alive Maya was a typical toddler, hitting her milestones with the whole world of possibilities wide open.  I am grateful that is the Maya she knew, that the rest of it is something she doesn't know.  I don't know how she would have reacted to Maya's diagnosis and while I really try to look for the positives in her development and try to be realistic while keeping doors open, I know that my mother was not that sort of person.  She would have viewed it as another sorrow, something to be sad or despondent about.

It wouldn't have changed her love for Maya one bit but I am grateful that Maya's autism is not another sorrow in her life.

You have to take your blessings where ever you can find them.