A Brush with a Choice

When I was about 20 weeks pregnant with my first child, the doctor suspected something might be wrong. A possible genetic problem, large cranium, short femur, could be nothing, could be, well, everything. It was only days before Christmas, and everyone wanted to get out of town, so I would have to wait to find out for sure. 

We had already named our fetus, but neither of us had any illusions about its actual personhood. Actually, as it turns out, we knew very little of our fetus's personhood;  we had assigned it a boy's name and. lo and behold, he was a girl. We were taken aback, momentarily, but we shifted seamlessly (I hate to admit it) into thoughts of a pink-hued and frilly future. 

Like many moms-to-be, I loved the faceless and amorphous clump of cells growing inside me from the moment I confirmed its existence. I had become a mother of sorts, though the thing I was mothering had a long way to go before it took on a human shape. A mother of an idea really, a dream, of boundless potential and endless wonder. I became consumed with the need to protect, unwittingly cradling my belly even before it burst out of my jeans. Which did not take very long at all. 

In the way that only privileged people can -- meaning we had means and education and had figured out we didn't have to take no for an answer when things were really important -- we didn't have to wait, and the diagnostic ultrasound guy found a way to squeeze one more session in before Christmas Eve day. I could barely breathe, much less eat or sleep until we knew, but still, my husband and I tap-danced lightly around the options. The "what-ifs" if the news was "bad." 

An option we never considered was the one proposed by my mother-in-law. A devout Catholic, she told us she would keep the baby if we didn't want to. It was not a command, and it was well-intentioned, but it was horrifying. Yes, Judge Amy Handmaid, horrifying, the thought of carrying my baby -- our baby -- to term and handing him over. He was still a him, somebody I barely knew, but if I knew anything it was that I would never be able to let him go once I saw him. Even to the safest haven of all -- the arms of a loving grandmother. I have never faulted her for her beliefs, for her offer. Her affinity for Rush Limbaugh, well, that's another story. 

It was all moot, and the large cranium and the short femur (and the absence of a penis) meant only that we were having a diminutive baby girl with a big head. (Think Tweety-bird with a pink velcro bow.) And that I didn't have to make the most heart-wrenching of choices -- a choice that would have affected the life of my unborn child and me and my husband and, of course, any as yet un-conceived siblings of that unborn child. And nobody else. As it turns out, I was privileged again, this time by sheer luck. 

I have loved that clump of cells since the day it formed, and, 32 years later, cannot imagine what life would have been like without her, or the two who followed. My guess is I would have loved that clump of cells no matter how she had turned out, had the "what ifs" come to pass and had I chosen to keep a baby with, at the very least, a more uncertain and fraught future than the ones I ultimately had. And  dropping her on someone else's doorstep -- even grandma's. -- was a definite non-starter.

Unlike so many women, I was blessed with the outcome of not having to make the choice. But it was mine to make. That is an issue that should never be up for discussion. 

Full Circle

Saw some old friends yesterday. It's been 17 years, they told me, not since I've seen them but since they moved to Memphis -- where their native Southern twangs no doubt belie the inevitable disconnect of being blue folk in a sea of red. They are, nevertheless, at home and happy down there, and assure me they have wonderful friends and a good life. They are people who, by nature, do not disconnect. They shun unhappiness, and they are generous. They are far better equipped than I to keep their heads from exploding at the mere sight of a lawn sign.

At a wedding the other night, I saw another old friend. She and her husband, two unmistakable Jews from Chicago, sold their place, got an Airstream, and moved to Michigan. Not to Bloomfield Hills, mind you, where the diaspora somehow dispersed many of our ilk, but to western Michigan. Spitting distance from Chicago, or at least from the "Chicago Riviera" on Lake Michigan's eastern shore, but otherwise, well, Mars. The Beverly Hillbillies in reverse, I suggested, trading the stray bullets of Chicago for a smattering of loosely organized but well-armed militia groups. There were a couple of Biden-Harris signs nearby, they assured me. So no exploding heads. Well except if you piss off somebody with a gun and an axe to grind. 

The wedding itself was a marriage of different cultures, a blending of evangelicals with Jews, of reds with blues -- the kind of thing that would have kept my mother's head in the oven permanently. The happiest wedding I've ever witnessed actually, an unadulterated celebration of joy and acceptance. Non-sectarian and multi-sectarian and blended-sectarian. A proud Jew by nature, I am never prouder of my heritage than when I watch Gentiles getting swept up into their first Hora. 

My old friends, the ones who live in Memphis -- remember them? He is one of my most loyal blog fans, and this is for him, really, though a bit of much needed therapy for me as well. He told me, years ago, that what he enjoyed about my blog was never really knowing what it was about until the end. It's kind of like my tennis serve, actually, the erratic spinning thing that seems to have no trajectory at all. Like my readers and my tennis opponents, I too have no idea where things will land, until they do. 

Some of us choose a path that's straight, and some of us choose a wild ride. Most of us end up meandering a least a little bit, even if it's not our first choice. We find ourselves in places we never imagined, in situations no one in their right mind would have planned. Where we think we don't belong. But we land, and on the things that are important, we come full circle, which means, I think, we never left at all. There are the people from whom we can be apart longer than we were ever together, yet when we find ourselves in the same zip code it's as if nothing ever intervened. We settle in, we remember who we are, whom we love, and what matters. The rest, it seems, is just noise. 

Who Wore it Better

The optics are not good. Neither are the pictures coming out of Kabul.

Unlike the armchair quarterbacks fighting for airtime on cable news networks of all political stripes, I don't pretend to know much about military history or, frankly, what's been going on in Afghanistan for the past few years, if not more. The news of the past week or two has forced me to learn more, with the added benefit, of course, of  piling on to my sense of  despair. 

By all accounts, this could have been handled better. Like that's something new here. I wish everybody could just get along, but I know just enough about history to know that's not going to happen. 

The comparisons to the fall of Saigon were inevitable, with  side by side pictures of the last helicopter leaving Vietnam and desperate Afghanis hanging on to the wing of an American airplane flooding social media and the airwaves. A permanent stain on Biden't legacy, this is, or so I've heard. Good presidents before him have made horrible mistakes (FDR sending a shipload of Jews escaping Nazi Germany back to their deaths in Europe comes to mind), but legacies are far more complicated than we make them out to be each time we think we have crossed the line. 

So back to our own house. Cleaning up after four years of the worst president ever -- and I say that not so much as an expert in anything other than being a human for 61 years -- is like cleaning a bathroom with a toothbrush. A large bathroom; a travel sized toothbrush. Half our country buys into the concept that personal "liberty" trumps (pardon the term) public health. Our outgoing president incited a riot and watched with glee as his angry mob beat police officers with flags bearing his name, broke windows, stormed through the Capitol, chanted murderous intentions, and erected a gallows for the Vice President. The pictures from Kabul, for me, called to mind those still fresh images of lawless Americans attacking their own country, my country. Don't even get me started on voter suppression and an entire political party that can, with a straight face, decry the invasiveness of a mask but litigate uteruses they've never met. 

Might I suggest we focus less on finger-pointing and more on figuring out what to do now? The Republicans will do their best to avail themselves of the horrors of the past week to wound Democrats in general, President Biden in particular. Democrats will help, because we just love to eat our own while our impotent center falls prey to recalcitrant wings. Sensationalist photographs get our attention, until the next shocking images make us forget. Journalists and social media influencers will manipulate our focus according to the market and our appetites, and Afghanistan will be the stain du jour until the next telegenic atrocity catches our eye. My guess it will be a homegrown atrocity. Just going with the odds on that one. 

Tall Ships and High Hopes

What I remember most about the bicentennial celebration in New York City was the sailors. As the tall ships from around the world paraded through New York Harbor, past the Statue of Liberty, and up the Hudson, I recall being hoisted up off a ladder onto a ship docked at the South Street Seaport on the East River. My friend accused me of being a flirt. Forty-five years later, I still swoon for a man in uniform. 

It was inspirational and aspirational, that majestic display in 1976, the summer before I went to college, when I still believed that the world was mine for the taking. When getting caught up in a celebration of my country's 200th birthday meant little more to me than enjoying a sparkling summer day and a few winks from young deckhands as innocent and ill-prepared for what lay ahead as I was, starched white caps notwithstanding. 

To the extent I ever thought about it back then, I was proud to be an American. I'm sure I even felt superior. Why wouldn't I? I took for granted the torch bearing lady rising out of the water off Manhattan's southern tip, the beacon of freedom who had welcomed my ancestors but who, to me, was just another New Yorker. As I got older, I realized what that must have meant to people sailing in from other places, where people like me could not have imagined the simple joy of just existing, without fear, on a July afternoon. 

Fast forward, which is how everything seems to happen now that I am no longer sixteen, even though I could swear I just was. I watched some unofficial fireworks from my window the other night, as spectacular a display as I've ever seen though the Fourth of July was still days away. It is a fitting time for celebration, in some ways, as we emerge from the surreality of the pandemic. The Chicago lakefront is packed again, as are the bars and restaurants. Gone are the plexiglass barriers and the signs requiring masks, though I marvel at how so many have still refused to shed the face coverings. I, for one, am all in with the science, vaccinated and more than willing to expose myself to whatever germs humanity is spewing, because to live in fear of the air, to me, seems inconsistent with living. Pending variants and further notice, of course. 

When it comes to celebrating America's birthday though, I proceed with caution. Notions of liberty have been twisted, and a frightening segment of the country has bought into what I and every right thinking person I know believes to be utter lunacy. Dangerous lunacy. We are at the mercy of forces of indecency and evil, and playing by the rules seems to render us powerless. The rationality of the center has given way to extremes on both ends, and to the most ruthless of the extremes go all the spoils. We are spiraling downward, and as much as I cling to hope, I tend to despair. 

We are hovering at the edge of a precipice, and I pray for salvation. A young sailor in a starched white uniform to lift us up, an armada of tall ships to remind us of who we are supposed to be. An aspirational Fourth of July, perhaps, to bring us back. 

Gold Stars, Then and Now

My mother told me this morning that she removed the gold Star of David she always wears around her neck and placed it safely in a box, in her drawer. For now. Out of an abundance of caution, I suppose.

I was born 14 years after the Holocaust ended. I remember when my mother explained to me, in whispers after an elevator ride with our neighbor, Mrs. Schachner, the tattoo on her forearm. I knew that my mother's uncle and his family had perished. Over there. In a place far away, in a time that seemed much more far away than it actually was. 

Growing up, I knew our long history of persecution. Still, I never felt it, living in Brooklyn, surrounded by Jews, Jews who lived freely and well. As they did, you know, in Poland, say, a century ago. When anti-Semitism was always there but tucked neatly under the rocks, manifested more in a disdain for "otherness" than outright hatred. Live and let live, just keep your distance. 

Fast forward 75 years, generations after any European Jews who survived could rip off their yellow stars, or the prison garb that hung on their gaunt frames. American citizens have actually put into office some ignorant and hateful people, one of whom is particularly loud. The only things that set her apart from so many are her shamelessness and her ready podium. She verbalizes what all too many among us still believe. That Jews are evil. That black lives don't matter. That Asians shouldn't be here. Or Muslims. Or Mexicans. Or anybody with a tinge of otherness. 

Haters are gonna hate, and that's bad enough when they do it on their own time, in their own heads. But give it oxygen, and fuel (thank-you social media of all stripes) and, well there you have it. My mother removing her gold star; me, relieved that she did. 

There's a tragic absence of nuance in our country. Last week, a highly educated MSNBC news anchor asked when President Biden is going to demand that Israel stop bombarding Hamas. Really? Hamas isn't Palestinian children. In fact, Hamas is more than happy to bask in the optics of dead Palestinian children, and it has an uncanny ability to place them in harm's way. If Israel is to be believed, it bombed a building in Gaza -- with warning so that there would be no loss of human life --  that housed Al Jazeera and other press organizations because it also housed the machinery of Hamas. Hamas doing what it does best -- creating great optics. My hunch is that the Israeli bomb did far less damage to the free press than our past president managed to do in four years of an insidious terror campaign against democracy. 

Like my mom, I wear a Star of David around my neck. Hers is from Tiffany's; mine comes from a small town in the south of Mexico, the last place I would have expected to find such a treasure. It is a mix of gold and silver, crafted in a country that is largely Catholic, purchased by my husband when we were already in the midst of our own tiny warfare, because my daughter told him I liked it. It means a lot to me, that gold and silver star. I choose to wear it, this blended metal pendant, a symbol of my heritage, from a place of "otherness," at a time of  personal ambivalence. Nuance, hanging right there around my neck.

Almost every weekend now, carloads of young Palestinians wearing keffiyeh ride up and down the streets of downtown Chicago, their wrapped heads poking out of sunroofs, their shouting incomprehensible, at least to me. I was parked at a light, and I imagined that a few of them peered in at me as they sped by. Imagined, because I don't really know, but I couldn't help but wonder whether I should be afraid. For me, my children, for everyone. I mourn all the dead children, the innocents caught up in all the hate. 

After talking to my mother this morning, I unclasped my gold and silver Star of David and stared at it for awhile. Haters gonna hate. I put it back on. 

Home

For years, well-meaning friends have asked when my son is coming home. Or, more recently, if. For years, I've shrugged. 

When I moved to Chicago over 35 years ago, it may as well have been Japan, as far as my mother was concerned. Just as Japan, for me, when my son headed there almost a decade ago, may as well have been the moon. I don't know when I stopped saying I was "from" New York, or even adding it in as an explanatory footnote when somebody asked, but it's been a while. I'm guessing Matt still has to add the footnote when somebody asks him, if only because his distinctly Caucasian features are a dead giveaway. 

As I write this, I am propped up on a sleeper sofa in what used to be my bedroom. The old twin bed with the bright swirls of color on the bedspread is long gone, as is the worn red carpet. The distressed wooden wall hangings are still there, though, painted images of a young boy in a sailor outfit holding a kite behind his back, and a young girl in a printed dress holding an empty bird cage, a discolored knot of wood nestled into the crook of her foot like a soccer ball. I never flew a kite, never owned a bird, never played soccer, but my gaze still clings to those wall hangings when I visit. Comforting relics of a home so otherwise out of reach.

It's been 13 months, a long 13 months, since I last visited, and I find a city that is deeply scarred. Mobile morgues and body bags piled on the street will do that to a place, I suppose. On a beautiful and warm early spring Friday on the lower west side, the path meandering along the banks of the Hudson River were startlingly empty. The gleaming post-9/11 buildings and landscaping seemed to cry out for attention. There were more dogs than I remember, though. The pandemic puppy boom is universal. I remembered walking these paths with my son years ago, when he was at NYU, when I thought he would just stay there, make New York his home, pick up where I had left off. 

The other night, I had a dream that I was being chased by a tsunami, like the one, I suppose, that wreaked havoc in Japan just before Matt went over there, for what I had assumed would be a brief stint. As I ran through my dreamscape, I kept looking for Matt; he was the only one I couldn't see in the chaos. Everybody assured me he was fine. 

As it turns out, he is more than fine. He is engaged. He emailed us -- me, his dad, his siblings -- to tell us the news, fearful, I think, that we would be disappointed. That he is not coming "home" any time soon. But we are thrilled for him, and for our soon to be daughter/sibling, Haruka (spoken with an accent on the Ha, like Hanukkah, oddly). Mazel tov, Matt and Haruka, or, as they say in Japanese, according to Matt, congratulations!

No more shrugging necessary. Matt is home. 

Bracing For After

Maybe I always knew, deep down, that jeans and bras and wrinkle cream are unnecessary. And lip gloss. And hugs. And leaving the house.

For a loner and a comfort hound, the perks are alluring, and I'm not sure I'm all that prepared to give them up. It's been more than a year. Upwards of 525,600 minutes. A half-million deaths. I've been one of the lucky ones. I work from home anyway. I have a dog so I have to go out at least three times a day. I lost my father long before simply being elderly was dangerous. My mother, who just turned 90, survived the worst days in New York and has received her second vaccine. She has learned to Zoom. Pretty much everybody in my orbit is fine. Even though we can't hug.

Some years are more ordinary than others, and my Covid year was as ordinary as they get -- no school-aged children, no missed graduations, no lost college years, no weddings to plan and then re-plan, no new grandchildren not to hold. No Zoom calls with dying parents. No lost employment. A solid and loving bubble to help keep me sane. Ish. I turned 61. As nondescript an age as there can be. I had eked in a 60th birthday blow-out months before it all started. I had gone to New York to celebrate my mom's 89th, celebrated at one of the last "real" weddings, even squeezed in a vacation with a week to spare.  

My friend's mom, in her nineties, told her that when she got her second vaccine, she felt as if it was the first day of the rest of her life. Yes. For her, and for my own mom, the rest seems particularly precious.  Theoretically, they don't have the luxury of enough time to make this year, this 525,600 plus minutes, become nothing more than a blip. Theoretically. My mom wants to put on her elegant clothes and have her hair done and put on make-up and go out. She has worked hard, all these years, to be healthy and active and always beautiful, and she has earned the right to enjoy what she enjoys. She has earned the right to be in a room with her daughter so they can breathe the same air. To be three-dimensional. To be within reach. 

I cannot wait for that, even though I'll have to wear a bra and put on make-up and wrinkle cream and leave the house. And zip up jeans. Be careful what you wish for, I suppose. We all have much to look forward to, but for the people who have suffered the most during this extraordinary time, I hope the recovery is equally extraordinary.

But for us more ordinary folks, for whom this has been more of an inconvenience than a tragedy, it is time lost, time that cannot be recovered. I would gladly trade my sweats to take those precious minutes back, time to do whatever it is I liked to do, before.

Truth Laced with Kool-Aid

Yesterday, I was drawn into a comment war on a friend's Facebook post. My friend had voiced what so many of us were feeling the morning after, the shock, the horror, the despair. He, like most of us, was not saying anything new or particularly insightful. Like most of us, he was seeking whatever it is we seek when we come together in a community of shared grief. A virtual shiva call. 

I won't go into the details, but there was at least one snide challenge, the "whataboutism" kind of challenge to which we have all become accustomed. As if condemnation of a mob of largely white thugs unleashed upon our Capitol by our president -- our president -- meant we believed looting and violence over the summer were perfectly all right. I tried to explain the concept of false equivalency, that the particular protests to which the guy had referred were peaceful, and that I will always support that sort of thing, whether or not I believe in the cause. He told me he disagreed, and I was happy to let it go. 

Someone I know of but don't really know picked up the thread. Again, I won't go into the details, but the gist of her contributions was this: four prominent Democratic women have incited violence, and, at long last, the righteous, the downtrodden, the always victimized real Americans had justifiably snapped. And she had evidence; a montage of four pictures, each one of a woman (only one of them white and named Nancy) caught in some version of a scowl, superimposed upon a backdrop of what appeared to be hellfire, captioned by a quote. Images of Nazi propaganda sprung to mind, the evil and hideously long-nosed Jew counting money. Your money.

She was outraged by my suggestion that the images were inflammatory propaganda, and insisted I do some research, because "they really said those things." I had little doubt that they said those things, within some unknown context, with some different facial expression, without towering infernos raging behind them. It took about a minute to confirm my hunch, and I sent her the link to the fact check. She had no need to read it, she told me. She knows the truth. 

The truth laced with Kool-Aid. It's infuriating, but, again, I let it go. Why bother? Why bother on Facebook, anyway, on someone else's post, someone who was simply seeking to grieve in a shared community. But if we let it go, how do we bridge the divide? After all, all of our truths are laced with something. 

What we call Trumpism has existed for ages, and will survive the impending fall of this deeply flawed man who grifted his way into our national consciousness. Could it be that we owe him a bit of gratitude, for showing us what we had for so long failed to see?