Learning moments

We didn't think much about the cold temperatures in the kindergarten classrooms Saturday night, when we went to our daughter's class presentation. What really stood out for me that evening was the homeless man walking up and down Devon Avenue with a cardboard sign asking for help. My heart was wrenched by the sight of this poor man out in sub-zero temperatures. Let's get him something hot to drink! I demanded of my husband. We pulled into the Dunkin' Donuts and ordered up a large decaffeinated coffee and a bagel with cream cheese, and rushed back to deliver them to the frozen dear. My children pelted us with a million questions. "What are you doing?" asked my confused kindergartner. "What's going to happen to him?" asked my terribly sensitive son. "I wan' Donut!" demanded the toddler.

But when we arrived back at the intersection, he had already moved on. I made my tired and beleaguered husband park and enter the seedy stores nearby. We drove around for ten or fifteen minutes, as the coffee went cold. Finally, we went home, our hearts heavy with concern for the homeless man.

I didn't give much thought to the cold classrooms that night, but I've thought a lot about them since then. The entire school closed down over the last couple of days to repair the faulty heaters. Monday wasn't so bad. The baby was in day care, and big brother was at a friend's working on a school project. My husband and I tag teamed with the Diva, who was kept blissfully preoccupied by the Sound of Music and ballet class. By Tuesday, I was beginning to panic as I envisioned spending my entire week of winter break keeping my children entertained.

My husband had his own problems to contend with, namely, a dead laptop computer. His computer began to randomly shut down right before final exams. A repair man replaced several crucial parts, but that made it worse. He shipped it into the service center, and they returned it in even worse condition. A repairman was sent out again, weeks later, and this time, it wouldn't even turn on. My husband spent hours on the phone with tech-support, but to no avail.

"They want me to send it in again!" He told me, incredulously. "If it doesn't work this time," he reassured himself, "they'll send me a new one. But that could take weeks."

They've replaced everything there is to replace! What more can they do? He shrugged, and looked up the corporate headquarters on our desktop. "I'll go straight to the CEO if I have to."

In the meantime, classes had started weeks ago, and mid-term exams were looming not too far over the horizon. He reluctantly began to search for a new computer to get him through the semester until the issues with the old one were resolved. Fortunately, he found one on sale.

The next morning he approached me with puppy dog eyes. "Do you need the car? I want to go pick up the new laptop." Not really, I answered reluctantly, As long as you can take the baby to daycare, but who's going to pick her up? You have a late class tonight.

"Nobody. She'll have to stay home with you."

Aaaeeeiii! Trapped at home with three stir-crazy children and no car?! I panicked. My mind raced for a solution. We'll drop you off at the law school! We'll drive you there!

To my great relief, he agreed. He dropped off the baby, picked up a new computer, and rushed home. True to my word, I had the kids dressed and bundled, his lunch, dinner, and snacks packed up. I even packed a few snacks for the kids, and as promised, we were downstairs waiting with misty breath in the 20 degree temperatures for him to pull up.

Halfway to the law school, it dawned on me that it was getting close to lunch time. How far is the new Wolfgang Puck Kosher Cafe at the Spertus Museum from the law school? Before I knew it, an adventure was born.

From the parking spot at the law school we caught a city bus down Michigan Avenue. Let me take your picture! I gleefully squealed. It's your first trip on a city bus! My son just rolled his eyes. "Mom, we've been on a bus before. We take the school bus every week." I took the picture anyway.

We missed our stop, but got off a few blocks later, only to be greeted by a homeless man addressing my children as "prince and princess". I whipped out my bag of snacks and proffered bags of pretzels, string cheeses and a diet soda to the man. My impulse to nourish cold strangers was assuaged for the time being.

A couple of blocks later, we found our way to the newly remodeled building. At the cafe, I felt pressure to adequately feed my children, knowing I had just given their snacks away. The offerings were elegant take-out: Thai chicken wraps, cold salmon fillet over a bed of Asian noodles, fancy salads. I despaired to find a kid-friendly meal. The roast beef sandwich looked like a possibility until the children opened them up and grimaced.

"Ugh! What's that?" My finicky eaters sneered. I scrapped away sauteed purple onion and chili aolio, and tried to present a delicious meal, but they weren't buying it. I became desperate, knowing that in an hour my children would be whining non-stop about being hungry, and I would have nothing to give them. Please, I begged, just try it. I watched in desperation, as they picked at the bread, and assiduously avoided the meat filing. At one point I offered a bribe.

"What's a bribe?" my suspicious son asked. He adamantly refused to entertain the idea, but little sister jumped, and opened her mouth wide, taking a small but adequate bite. I reached into my purse, and handed her a crisp dollar bill. She gloated, and continued to nibble. "It's good!" she said, sounding surprised. My son remained stolid, but I couldn't let it go.

You are sooo brave! I complimented my daring daughter. You are like Nachshon ben Aminadav! I gushed, referring to the figure in this week's Torah reading who showed tremendous courage and faith by jumping into the Red Sea as the Hebrews fled the Egyptian army, causing God to split the sea in two. You had faith that you mommy wouldn't feed you something terrible, and you jumped in!

"For a dollar." Glowered my son, pointing out the obvious flaw in my analogy.

The museum, like the cafe, was not kid-friendly, but it did keep them mostly entertained for an hour. It kept me on my toes. Nope! This isn't very nice to see. Let's move on!

That evening we barely acknowledged Tu B'Shevat, the Jewish holiday celebrating nature, with a barley and dried fruit concoction I invented on the spot, and steak. Not exactly the Kabbalistic-laden repast most Sephardi families would have enjoyed, but it was better than nothing.

School's on tomorrow. As much as I enjoy my adventures with my children, I look forward to a couple of days of quiet and calm. I don't have much planned, but lots to accomplish.

While I'm praying for the well-being of homeless people everywhere, I'll include a small entreaty for the well-being of the school's heater, too.

Tough stuff

The temperatures have plunged into the single digits. I walk around my house in long underwear, shirt and skirt, sweater, and the heat cranked up to the high 70's. My husband is sweating. I'm despairing of ever being warm again. It's our winter ritual.

I am avoiding going out as much as possible, but Chicago is a tough city. It takes a lot to get them to shut anything down. The kid's school has opened during blizzards and sub-zero temps. In San Antonio, we joke, the sighting of two snowflakes, they don't even have to stick to the ground, shuts the entire city down for the day. It always seemed perfectly reasonable to me.

Shabbat was brutal, with a high of 4 degrees. The kids and I didn't budge. My husband braved the elements, but we stubbornly stayed put. I would have been happy to stay indoors, hibernating the best I could, but life goes on in Chicago. Even during the wickedest of cold nights.

Saturday night was one such example. My Kindergartner had a special program at her school with arts projects and a small performance. We bundled up and braced ourselves. I made my husband warm up the car for us.

It was nice to socialize and even nicer to see my sweetie in action, but it was below zero. I'm still not convinced it's a good idea to take anyone, let alone a child, in that kind of weather. If God had meant for us to live in these temps, he would have given us fur like Siberian huskies, no?

The next morning I had to go out again, this time for piano lessons followed by swimming lessons. Thankfully, neither held the drama of last week's classes; no eight year old boy melting down at the side of the pool. Still, I would have rather stayed in bed, under my down comforter and hand-knit blanket.

One side affect of our winter seclusion has been the growing mess in our apartment. The kids, stuck indoors all day, have thoroughly trashed the place. I finally had enough, and swore that by the end of the day, every single toy would be removed from my daughters' room.

True to my word, I reshuffled around my living room furniture, cramming the sofa, table and chair onto one half of the room, and made the other half the girls' play area. I spent hours clearing through toy chests, boxes and drawers, reorganizing, throwing away the garbage, and reuniting sets of toys. This, naturally, led to a complete reorganization of their clothing drawers, too. Once all of the toys were comfortably nestled in their new living room area, I started pulling out old, outgrown, stained, or torn clothes, filling up a large garbage bag as the clean, unfolded laundry piled up on the couch.

By the time the children were snuggled soundly in their freshly made up beds, I shuddered. My attempts at gaining a modicum of control over my chaotic, hectic life, only opened up a Pandora's box. The girl's room is finally clean, they have their play area in my living room, but now I have to go through all of the board games and puzzles and toys that have migrated from their original storage places, and I have to repeat the whole process in my son's room and his desk.

Oy, his desk. You don't want to know. Suffice it to say, the boy is allergic to throwing away anything. His backpack is a cemetery for old, crumpled paper airplanes. Dozens, if not hundreds, have found their final resting place there.

As have crumpled pages with calligraphy. I know it sounds odd, but my son, the left-handed kid with the worst chicken scratch excuse for handwriting this side of a the American Medical Association, has decided that handwriting is his absolute, A-number one, favorite class in school. I can't explain it. This is the same boy who I make rewrite his homework countless times until it is barely legible. Yet, handwriting class has tripped his fancy. I've seen his notebook, too. They're learning cursive, and it's more than legible. His cursive script is quite, dare I say it? Lovely.

As a result, Grandma and Papa bought him a beginners calligraphy set. He has been plowing through it at recess, collecting scraps of various fonts, letters, and lines, teaching himself to write like a Medieval monk.

Yet, he still can't print worth a farthing.

As cold as it is, the snow isn't yet piling up outside. But indoors, the messes of small children are, and I have attacked the piles of papers, stickers, doll clothing, and stuff with vigor. The more I clean, the more hidden stashes of junk I find. It's a small apartment! Where's all this rubbish coming from?

I finally vacuum up the last shred of something from my girls' room, and hustle my son into his bed. I finish up the last load of laundry, relieved that at least the kids will all be in school tomorrow so I can plow through the detritus of my son's desk, when I get a phone call.

"Did you hear? School's been cancelled! The heaters aren't keeping the whole building warmed up enough."

Hmph. I sneer. What wimps.

Birthright

A friend just called to invite my son to her daughter's birthday party. It's a lovely gesture, more so because the birthday girl is my son's best friend and he's the only boy invited. There's one small problem: it's an ice skating party, and my son has never skated on ice in his life. Normally, I wouldn't be so preoccupied, after all, the child was quite successful and proud of his ability to pick up in-line skating at school, but this is different. His confidence is already shaken.

For the past three summers I have invested in swimming lessons for my two older children. My father taught me at a very young age. The Jewish Sages charge parents with the responsibility of teaching their young to swim. For me it is up there with reading, writing, arithmetic, and music. It's simply not a choice. My children must know how to swim.

This past week my husband signed up the older two children for swimming lessons at a local high school. Today was the first day, and after piano lessons, I rushed them out the door proceeding to get hopelessly lost. It was an inauspicious beginning to the endeavor. After three summers of lessons, my son still can't float, however, I was determined that this time would be different. But when his piano teacher turned to him and said, "You do not like to be corrected!" I should have packed it in for the day.

My son doesn't just dislike being corrected, he is outright resistant to learning at times. He reluctantly got into his swimsuit, and after hearing the instructor ask him to swim out ten yards and return, he simply freaked out. He clambered out of the pool, and refused to budge. Do you want to get dressed? Do you want to go back in? I asked my shivering boy with the mixture of anger, disappointment, and fear on his face. I tried to comfort him and coax him back in. I finally got impatient and told him to stop fighting everyone.

I know it was a terrible thing to say. The poor boy was terrified. He didn't need me to make him feel worse. But the frustration and impatience that has been plaguing me for what seems like ages crept up again like a nasty virus. In a nutshell, this is what I find so desperately difficult about parenting: we try our best to give our children the tools they need to be happy and successful - a good education, healthy meals, music, sports, swimming, a nice, clean environment to live in - and they resist it at every step.

Children don't want to do homework, they reject the healthy foods we offer, they mess up their rooms. Generation after generation of children have consistently rejected their parents values, and lovingly passed on lessons, to beat out the most difficult, trying paths of their own. Why shouldn't my son fight me every step of the way? I fought my parents, too. My father wanted me to learn to play tennis. I refused, and I am kicking myself today that I didn't listen to him then. My parents paid for countless piano and percussion lessons. I never practiced. My parents urged me to make careful and rational decisions about my education. I got a masters degree in Irish History.

The list of wonderful skills, lessons, and values that my parents tried so hard to pass on to me, like a cherished gift, is endless. The number I summarily rejected is depressingly endless, too. And every no made my life that much more difficult. I see the same stubborn, defiant streak in my son, and it scares me. And each and every time I make the same mistake of fighting it, which predictably makes things worse. It's as natural that I want my son to avoid the many mistakes I made in life, as it is for him to want to make them. At eight years old, it's already his independent, unique, special life.

Once again, I find myself envious of my husband. Why can't I be more accepting? More patient? Why can't I step back and see the bigger picture? In time, he will learn to swim. He will allow himself to openly profess love for the music that has him so secretly taken in. He will grow to be a wonderful, smart, caring, kind young man (b'ezrat HaShem, ptui, ptui, hamza, hamza, hamza), if I only step back and let him.

I dream of passing on the best for my children: the study habits I never acquired, the athleticism I fought for years, the creativity, and good sense I somehow missed out on. Instead, I'm passing on the worst: the stubbornness, the impatience, the insistence on doing it all his way.

I know many wonderful things came out of my master plan. I have experienced many unique and magical moments in my life that would not have been possible if I had been the "good girl" my parents did their best to raise. Like me, my son will, God willing, land on his own two feet, regardless of my best intentions for him. He will make his way his way, not mine. And because he is smarter than me, he'll most likely make better decisions.

I'm not nervous that he won't be able to ice skate. I know that kid can do anything he puts his mind to. I worry, as always, that he won't allow himself to try.

More importantly, I have to let him make that decision for himself.

Holding on

My amazing revelation of the day: there are muscles in my love handles. I know this because I have pulled one. And smack dab in the middle of my left calf muscle, which I not only know exists but can also tell you is called the gastrocnemius, I have pulled another. My rhomboideus is a bit sore, but no real damage. And my big toe nails are a lovely shade of purple. It can only mean one thing.

I'm fencing again.

I'm not training to regain some former glory. Once a week I'm showing up at a Bulgarian coach's club in the basement of the Polish National Alliance to be cannon fodder for tall, thin, leggy teenage girls with no vowels in their names. My ego can take it. Little do these hot shots know that they lunge upon these hallowed strips, but for the likes of me and my generation of women saber pioneers.

It's a good kind of pain I'm feeling. It is the pain of moving dormant muscles. It's the pain of regaining my youth, reclaiming my old energy levels, and rekindling the spark in my spirit. Not bad for a two hour commitment once a week. I bear the pain in my love handles with pride! In a year I'll be eligible for veteran's competitions. Ten years ago those women seemed so old to me. Serves me right.

This winter break has been all about reclaiming my youth. This past week my family and I journeyed through white-out conditions to the Wisconsin Dells to attend a family winter camp at the Perlstein Resort. The five of us arrived, after a harrowing journey, minutes before candle-lighting time. In a frenzy of unpacking and dressing, we prepared for Shabbat. We didn't quite know what to expect. All I knew was that for five days I didn't have to cook a meal, wash a dish, or make a bed. Everything else was just icing.


My expectations were vastly surpassed. The days were packed with fun-filled activities for my children, including sledding, arts and crafts, and Gaga. In the evenings they had family activities, including a juggling show, New Years Eve parties, and movies. After hours, they provided babysitting for the children while parents were treated to a poker tournament (my hubby came in second place!), a concert, and a New Years party of our own.


We took advantage of the prime Dells location to take the kids snow tubing and to a waterpark. Both were intrinsically weird experiences for me. Tubing conjures images of blazing hot summer afternoons floating down the Guadalupe river in a big rubber tire, getting dehydrated and burnt to a crisp. Snow figures nowhere in my memories. But there we were dragging snow tubes to the foot of a hill where a young man with a beard and a woolly knit cap hooked the tube to a lift which dragged us, our behinds bumping on the tightly snow-packed ground, up to the top of the hill. A second young man unhooked the tube and rushed us out of the queue. "Other people need to get off, too" he'd admonish me as I tried to hoist my less-than-sprightly keister out of the oversized tire. We dragged our tubes another couple of feet to the top of the hill, and jumped in. The tube would whizz and veer down the path, and ten seconds later, we were at the bottom doing it again.

My camera battery pooped out on me before I could take a single picture. The kids lasted an hour.


We lasted considerably longer at the indoor waterpark. The kids had a blast, and I, surprising myself, did, too.


After we pulled off layers of jackets, hats, mittens, long underwear, and a deep-boned chill, we put on our swim suits and jumped in. The girls and I played for hours in the toddler section, sliding down small slides and splashing in slightly warm fountains. Before long, the baby and I were shivering and turning blue. We found the heated spas and thawed out there for ten minutes before meandering down the lazy, artificial, indoor river.


As warm, wet, and wild as we got, I couldn't help but shiver every time I peered out into the snowy scene outside.

My son was oblivious to the obvious contradictions. He just wanted his Mommy to take him on the fastest, wettest, and craziest slides. I was thrilled to drag the oversized two-man tubes up four flights of stairs, and clench my son between my ankles as we tore spiralling down the rushing waters, or cradle him on my lap as we zipped down splashing slides.

I gladly snorted gallons of highly chlorinated water up my nose to hold my growing boy so tight.

But, as I'm constantly reminded, all good things must come to an end. Camp ended with a small bang. The kids each had their own New Years Eve bash, complete with streamers, balloons, noise makers, and a DJ party.

The noise was a bit much for my son who played in an adjacent room. My party princess didn't leave the dance floor, except to make herself a proper tiara.

The grownups had a party, too, with a college pride theme.

My husband wore his colors proudly, as did I.

The baby got into the spirit putting up her index and middle finger and declaring, "Hooka Horns!"

The dining hall was festooned with streamers, balloons, college banners, and a couple who made the unfortunate choice of showing up in togas. A DJ blasted us with predictable party music, and several couples obligingly danced, but not us. "I'm not comfortable with mixed dancing" my saintly husband informed me. None of the other orthodox husbands were, either, so the other long-skirt draped, head-covered women and I stood on the fringes longingly swaying to the beat, singing along to the party tunes. This party needs a Mechitza I muttered, referring to a divider to allow women to dance apart from the prying eyes of men. My new friends nodded in agreement.

Finally, we had to say goodbye to our new friends,

The snowy lake,

The piney woods,

And our vacation.

All good things must come to an end, but some things I'll try to hold onto a little longer, like the memories.

Maybe even something more concrete, like my glorious fencing career, if my quadriceps will let me.