Sister-strife

I have one sister.  Only one sister.

She was born when I was six years old, and, unlike my friends now, who encourage their first-born children to hold their newborn siblings within hours or days of her birth, my first memory of my sister was that I was not allowed to touch her, let alone hold her.  I’m guessing it was the norm for the time, maybe a recommendation of the renowned Dr. Spock (Benjamin, not the vulcan) whose book played a role in my upbringing.

My sister and I suffered a chaotic childhood together – moving homes frequently, parents fighting, changing schools.  Later in my adulthood, I realized that, were it not for the stability of our mother’s parents – our grandma and grandpa – we probably would not have come through the experience as intact and successful as we both have managed to do.

We were so far apart in ages and interests that we never really could connect as kids.  I do remember some wonderful times with her when we were small, but there were many more times when we simply weren’t on the same page.  We also tended to separate from each other through our affiliation with separate parents – I was my daddy’s girl, and she was her mother’s support and confidante.  It wasn’t that our parents didn’t love us both individually, but there was a tendency to divide in the way in our family.

When I reached adolescence, my strategy to survive the chaos and uncertainty that was the definition of our family was to leave.  I essentially moved to my best friend’s home from the time I was about 12.  At 16, I left for a visit to London, UK, and stayed for 5 months before coming back to the US, taking the GED to escape high school where I was miserable, and went away to college (and I went as far away from my family as I could manage).

My sister stayed.

She stayed with our mother through thick and thin.

I felt guilty for leaving her.  But, she was 11 or so, and I certainly couldn’t take her with me.  I think I imagined that I would rescue her someday, but, although I tried to help in times of crisis, to her credit, she ultimately was her own rescuer.

The years passed, and we both grew to adulthood, finished school, married, and started families.  I was so proud of her, and always felt that she had overcome more than I did because she had to fight her way out of a very confining relationship with our mother.  My departure was easier.  And, by this time, we seemed to have reached a point where we could now be friends.

Until one fateful day.

I travelled across the country to help out with yet another of mom’s crisis moments.  My sister had begged me to come, as she was struggling with juggling the caregiving role that she continues to assume for our mother (on her terms, now), while also tending to the raising of two beautiful and talented boys.  Not to mention, caring for her husband and their relationship.  I stayed for a week with my sister’s family while visiting our mom daily, and trying to help sort out her situation.  Over the week, I had felt the tension between my sister and me rising, and it finally reached a peak on the morning of my departure.

We fought, and all the old wounds, resentments and pain we had suffered, either from the world, from our parents, through the loss of our father (I was 19 and she was 12 when he died an accidental death), and from each to the other, came pouring out, yelled at full voice at each other on the sidewalk in front of her house.

And, I left.

And, in the ensuing month or two, some very angry emails were exchanged.  They were the kind of emails that we probably each should have written, read through, and then hit the delete button without actually hitting “Send”.  Sadly, the emails were sent.

And a year passed.

We didn’t talk of it.

And, then, my family came out to stay with her family for Thanksgiving.  And, we had started tentatively discussing the possibility of trying to find a way forward from the hurt and pain we had placed on each other and on our selves.

And, that Wednesday before Thanksgiving, we met with a therapist (who is a genius!) and talked through our pain.

And, now, it’s gone.  I’ve left out all the details, and if I thought hard enough, I could remember them, but I prefer not to.  They’re not relevant anymore.  I think I may even have the timeline wrong (as I think about it, the horrible emails may have preceded the dreadful fight by a couple of years, in fact, I think they must have).

I wouldn’t have thought we could ever have become friends after the hurtful things that were said, but, I’m so happy to say that we are.  I love my sister, and I hope she loves me.  And I hope we never hurt each other like that again, because there’s one thing about having a sister – she is the ONLY one who knows what I’ve been through and can really understand it on a gut level.  And that level of understanding is not replaceable.

Hugs and kisses to my beautiful, talented, and extraordinary sister.

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This post was inspired by the novel A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra. In a war torn Chechnya, a young fatherless girl, a family friend, and a hardened doctor struggle with love and loss. Join From Left to Write on May 20 as we discuss Anthony Marra’s debut novel. As a member, I received a copy of the book for review purposes.

Tot Shabbat

Our Friday nights and Saturdays follow a rhythm that varies rarely. Most Friday nights we try to be home before sunset (an almost impossible challenge for us in winter, but achievable in the summer months). We have a nice meal together, in our dining room rather than our kitchen table. The meal is structured with blessings recited over lighting candles, drinking wine or grape juice, and eating our first bite of challah (usually homemade, if all went as planned Thursday night), talking, laughing, and singing. Lately, both boys (although mostly J) like to do a little song and dance for everyone. Saturday morning we walk to the synagogue for services, and then come home, sometimes with play dates for one or both boys in the afternoon. And, when sunset falls, we light the havdalah candles, and mark our transition back to our regular activities. For the boys, the highlight of this transition is Movie Night.

Havdalah candle – separates the holy from the mundane

There’s a monthly rhythm as well. And, this weekend, the marker of that monthly variation was that the second Saturday of every month is Tot Shabbat, a special hour-long service for preschoolers and toddlers. We have attended this service regularly for the past three-plus years, and, since last fall, I’ve been serving as the leader!  I got the gig, I believe, because I was a regular attendee with the boys, and an active participant, not because I was the most knowledgeable.

See one, do one, teach one.  That’s the medical school model of learning, and it’s true in many areas of learning.

So, I spent about two years watching my predecessor teach toddlers the order of the service, explaining certain elements of how we prayer in Judaism, using terms like “the Amidah dance” (explaining the three steps backward, then three steps forward, before bending the knees and bowing with the first three words of the prayer “Blessed are you, Adonai…” and introducing the central prayer, the Shema, with a little discussion of the first letter of Shema, the Hebrew letter Shin ש, which you can make by holding up your index, middle and ring fingers.  And, so many other little tidbits to help young kids get familiar with a service largely conducted in Hebrew.

But, the challenge which I haven’t worked out is how to juggle the demands of my own preschooler, who is clearly jealous of my attention to a “class”, and struggles to derail the proceedings, and recover my undivided attention.

And, yesterday, it was particularly bad.

For whatever reason, not only was J unable to concentrate on the service, but our two other regulars were also feeding off the distracted energy that J brought to the group, and they all just got more and more out of control.  Usually, I just sing through it, but J figured out that if he approached our little “ark”, which holds the miniature Torah scrolls that we take out at the climax of our Tot Shabbat service to parade around the room, that I would have to stop what I was doing and deal with him.  So, he did it again, and again, and again.

But we finally got to the Torah service, and after our parade with our little Torah scrolls, we sit down to read a story or two.  And, this week, with the celebration of Shavuot coming up in just a few days, I had selected a book on the 10 Commandments, and also a book that J likes called “No Rules For Michael”, which is about what happens when a preschool class decides to have a day without rules.  The room was completely quiet as I read these two stories, and all the distraction was gone for the 10-15 minutes that it took to read these two books.

But, as soon as we returned the Torahs to the ark, and went back to the closing songs of our service, the nervous energy returned, and I found myself singing the last two songs with a struggling J wriggling in my arms while I sang the last few songs as heartily and encouragingly as I could.

And, today?  My back is in agony!!

Before next month, I need to figure out how to get J on the same page with me, and able to participate in Tot Shabbat, and allow me to lead.  Any ideas?

What a ride!

So, as promised, the second children’s book that we downloaded to review was: “Speeding Down the Spiral: An Artful Adventure” by Deborah Goodman Davis and illustrated by Sophy Naess.

Verdict: we all loved it!!

It’s 33 pages long, with some pages containing some complex and extended text, but our 5yo was engaged and excited about the pictures and the story throughout.  And the bonus was that we got introduced (or reintroduced) to a selection of wonderful modern art.

From Roy Lichtenstein’s Grrrrrrrrrrr!! (1965) to a large pile of black rod licorice candies created by Felix Gonzalez-Torres in 1991, with Picasso, Chagall, Cezanne, and a host of other intriguing artists and works of art in between.  And, it’s punctuated by the tension of the notion of a baby brother in a stroller careening down the spiral to potential doom.  This story is enough to compete with Power Rangers and Super Heroes, and that’s big, in our house!

A particular favorite was a piece and an artist that I was unfamiliar with: Alberto Giacometti, Nose (Le Nez), 1947, cast 1965.

They thought it was Pinocchio!  We kept turning back to this page, and mulling over what it meant.  I love that!

Let alone the fact that I love the Guggenheim Museum, and I can’t wait to take these talented and artistic boys there!

Enjoy the book – it’s available on Amazon here.

Not the lesson on nature or biology I was expecting…

Sometimes the cover of a book is deceptive.  And, I think this may be one reason why selecting e-books can be so challenging.  The cover of this book appealed to me, and the title suggested to me that I and my kids might learn something.  Sadly, I was disappointed.  Their response?  They liked it well enough – but I wonder how much of that was the novelty of a picture book on the iPad.

So, here’s the cover that attracted me:

The premise of the book: “Conceptualized after years of imaginary story telling every night at bedtime. Picking an animal together, the author would tuck her children into bed and create a story where the animals lived and what their world was like all through a child’s eye.” (from the author’s website: http://www.wheredoanimalsgo.com).

But, I was disappointed with the cartoonish drawings, and the tortured rhymes, which do little more than anthropomorphize the animals described.  On one page, birds “soar through the skies to find their nests, where they finally relax, and give their wings a rest”?  And, yet, it seems to me a completely reasonable question, both from a child’s eye, as well as an adult’s, to wonder, what do birds do when it’s raining??  And, i’m sure it’s likely to be information that is available.  Maybe I’m too much of a scientist at heart.

So, I don’t recommend this book as a great work of children’s literature, or a pleasing collection of pictures.  But I feel badly about bashing a book which is being sold as a fundraiser for what is likely a very worthy cause: The Painted Turtle is a year-round camping facility and program that gives children with medical conditions the chance just to be kids and have fun in a safe camp environment.

There is a link to donate to the Painted Turtle without purchasing the book.  An option I may consider.

Reading electronic books

There’s been a lot of discussion on the news and on the web lately about the influence of e-books on our brains, and on how we read and how we learn.  And the net is so ephemeral, that I can’t find, now, an article that I read and found fascinating just a couple of days ago (I’m going to keep looking).

But, recently, I started downloading electronic books to read to the kids.  Scholastic books has a proprietary app called Storia, which I have used, but have some issues with.  It’s clunky, bookmarking is difficult and not really intuitive, and the font is not modifiable, like most e-readers.  Particularly for picture books, at least on an iPad, the page becomes too small to see the pictures well, or read the text easily.

I have recently downloaded some kids’ books from NetGalley, which I have joined as part of my membership in the blog www.fromlefttowrite.com. I’ve been delighted to receive books to read for the club, but, particularly if i’m not sure I’ll want to reread the books, if I have the option to get an e-book version, I’ll take it.  And, as I was browsing around, I noticed that NetGalley has a lot of kids’ books.  So, I’ve downloaded and few, and I’ll likely be reviewing them here, both from the perspective of me, the mom, and the responses of the kids.

The first book we read struck me as appealing and educational:  ”Where Do The Animals Go When It Rains?” by Janet S. Crown with illustrations by Daron Rosenberg.

And then we read: “Speeding Down the Spiral: An Artful Adventure” by Deborah Goodman Davis, illustrations by Sophy Naess.

Big Brother Poetry…

We found two pieces of paper in S’s red folder (the folder that facilitates communication between home and school).  Dad had read them already, and was upstairs doing the bedtime routine when I found them.
I read these in the kitchen, while cleaning up the dinner dishes, and couldn’t stop laughing!

S said from upstair, “They’re poems, and you don’t have to use capital letters, or punctuation!”

Then he asked me “Did you laugh so hard that you couldn’t breathe?”

My reply: “Almost!”

Story of a tooth

I haven’t broken a single bone in my body, in my whole life, except for my upper right front incisor.

And I’ve broken that one three times.

The first time I don’t actually remember, although I remember having a direct memory at seem time, but now it just feels like hearsay. It was on one of those spring-mounted horses that we used to play on, which have since, for the most part, been outlawed by the safety-conscious parents and playground designers. I knocked out my front upper baby tooth, but, of course, it was replaced b an adult tooth, and all was fine.

But, then, when I was 11 or 12 years old, and we were up at camp in the California, on Mount Shasta, I think, spending a glorious afternoon sliding down these natural water-slides that connected potholes of accumulated rainwater, I slipped, and my head came down and my front teeth collided with the granite rock. My tooth didn’t withstand the impact, and I had a broken front tooth.

My best friend’s mother had dental insurance, and she coached me to say that I was her daughter (ie I was to pretend that I was, in fact, my best friend) and we would get emergency care fro my tooth. The dentist covered my tooth with a clunky silver cap, and I came back home with a huge piece of metal in the front of my mouth.

My home dentist made a nice crown for me, and left me with a decent approximation of my old smile.

That crown was revised once or twice, and then, just a few years ago, I stumbled down our stairs onto the front landing of our home, which had slate tiles. My face hit first, and my crown fell out. It was a Sunday morning, and my darling husband brought me to an emergency dental clinic, who again covered up my raw nerve with a temporary cap, until my regular dentist could install a more permanent crown.

And, all was good until last year, when I went in for my routine dental visit, and my dentist, Dr. G, came in and wiggled my front incisor, and said something to the effect that “There’s too much wiggle in this tooth, and that it could come out when I bit into a sub sandwich, and we should reinforce it by attaching it to a veneer on the adjacent front tooth.

And, I hated that idea!

We were going to shave down a perfectly good tooth, in order to attach it to my “fake tooth”, to reinforce it? That sounded crazy!

So I ignored that advice, until this year’s routine visit came around, and Dr G again wiggled my front tooth, and made the same declaration, and I thought “Maybe he’s right, and I really should go ahead and do this.”

So, I made the appointment for the veneer fitting.

Before:

That squarish tooth on the right is the “fake”, and the one on the left is my “real tooth”.

After:

And, now, both front teeth are “fake”, but the alignment is better, and the color matches better.

I still feel a little anxious about biting into things – I can’t imagine biting into an apple, but I hope to be able to do so someday.

I’m having to retrain my bite – at first I couldn’t figure out how to bite down, without hitting my front upper teeth with my lower teeth, but that’s getting better.

I feel some sadness about losing my “real tooth”, but I guess it’s helping out my “fake tooth” so it’s all for the best.

And, I hope I don’t have to go through this again for many years!!! I do hate the sound of that drill!