Braced for Impact

Sometimes
I'm riding the bus
And I notice
My knuckles are white
Marks pressed into my palm
And my whole arm aching
From holding on so tight
To a bar
That I don't need
To be holding
At all.

Sometimes
I don't notice.

Me and the Mother of Prayer

We are coming up on five years since I first heard the story of Hannah chanted.

No one with neurological and trauma issues deals well with crowds.  From my first steps into an observant life, my custom was always to celebrate the first day of Rosh Hashanah with my small Renewal congregation, and the second day with the few day-two diehards of my Traditional congregation.

That meant I never got to hear the one time of year we chant out loud the haftorah story of Hannah, mother of our way of praying.  Renewal gatherings skip the haftorah, and at Traditional services there's a different haftorah on day two.  And as the years of infertility wore on, year after year, not being able to hear the story of barren, blessed Hannah cut deeper and deeper.

So finally, I gave up my little Renewal Rosh Hashanah and braved the crowds to hear Hannah chanted from the bimah.

And the next year, I did it again, sobbing in the back row as a friend on the bimah sang verse after verse directly to me and my swollen pregnant belly.

My son was born, whole and healthy despite all my battles with disease, during Lekh Lekha, the third Torah portion of that new year.

I have not heard Hannah chanted again since.  It's hard doing High Holy Day services with a baby, with a toddler.  It's hard when you don't live in the neighborhood, it's hard when your partner cannot be by your side.  You come for what you can and let the rest go.

Last week I opened the story of Hannah for the first time in years.  My son will be a preschooler, in programming, and I will alone in service once again, and I will hear Hannah for the third time.  
My eyes trailed over the course of the story as they did when I was a child, and I relieved my childhood agony at the way Hannah wanted a child so badly and then let him go.  Hannah's story has always been my Akedah; my faith shaken to the core by the question of how the Lord could ever accept the sacrifice of the weaned son and the mother who walked away with her arms empty again.

That's when it hit me.
Hannah brought Shmuel to his adult service after he had stopped nursing.
This is the first Rosh Hashanah since my boichik stopped nursing.  And that is why I will be in services-- because I will be alone.

Our time to have our time has ended.

And So It Begins

Today is boichik's first day of preschool, which is to say his first *full* day of school, as well as the first time he is spending any real length of time away from me that is not with kith and kin, and it should be mentioned that the times he has ever spent any real length of time away from me at all can still be counted on the fingers of one hand.

In other words, first day of preschool today should have been its own priority, all by itself.

Except, the synagogue and morning services are directly on the route to preschool, and for five years, I have been trying to get back into morning services. Keeping up with morning services while getting my degree was a top priority for me, and it did not happen.  Bringing my son to morning services and having him grow up hearing the prayers was a top priority for me, and it did not happen.  Morning services have been the single biggest missing chunk of my pot-holed life, because there simply has not been reliable transportation and money for it, and now-- 
morning services are directly on the route to preschool.

So, Priority #2 becomes to make my son's first day at preschool our first day in the saddle as morning minyanaires.

But, wait, that's not all!  Because there is still the small matter of reliable transportation and the money for it-- i.e., discovering how close to their printed schedules the buses actually run in reality and whether a single disabled fare will, in fact, get us from home to the shul, from the shul to the preschool, and then me back home again, or whether I'll be paying twice.  And since we do not actually have the money for me to pay two fares a day-- one to drop him off and one to pick him up-- we are going to be in a lot of trouble if it turns out I have to pay three fares a day.

Thus leading to Priority #3: find out whether it is at all possible to pull off this double-barrelled morning run on a single fare.

It was raining at dawn.  Not the hammering rain so rare here, but the kind of steadily soaking rain that Seattle tends to reserve for darkness.  My sleepy son went into his school-clothes like a kitten getting dressed up, all limp weight and awkward joints, and managed to sit up long enough for teeth-brushing, but was too cold to move quickly enough for us to catch the first bus of my choice.  We ended up at synagogue in time for the Amidah, and I set him up beside me blearily munching a banana and watching me wrap my poor battered tefillin.  Right before the Amidah is not the best time to step into service with a very little boy who has been promised services as the new time for the long cuddly cuddles with Eema that have been the central feature of his waking hours up 'til now, but he coped.  He coped spectacularly, passing out on my chest as the Torah service approached, raising his head briefly for a long, solemn look at the scroll itself during the aliyah I wanted so badly for myself for this parental rite of passage.  The service was everything I could have wished for, a solid minyan trickling in, the usual meshugas over unprepared volunteers juggling the necessary rites and roles, friendly faces with familiar names all around.  Oh, the things I could tell you, my son, if you were awake.  Did you see it's Uncle R leading services?  D who is chanting Torah for us came to our house to hold you in her arms when you were only a few days old. You don't know the tall man beside us at the bimah, but I do because I met him when my grandfather died and he came to me when I was in shiva.  Lift your head again now-- look-- M is lifting the Torah up!  That is M who sat next to us just this past Shabbat dinner, as we celebrated together, and oh, someday, b'ezrat HaShem, may you lift the Torah just like that.

Then we are outside, in the exquisite color and freshness that is Seattle's morning face, waiting at the mercy of Metro with half a dozen other riders smiling without seeming to be aware of it.  And of course the bux takes forever to arrive, of course it stops at every single stop, of course he keeps sleeping, a dead weight into my numbing arms, and of course my eyes crossed staring at the passing minutes wondering if we were actually going to be on time our first day after all.  Then there's the beautiful young redhead asking the bus driver for the right stop for the rail downtown, the bouncing school boy at her side who must be her little brother, but he isn't, he's her boy, he has an appointment downtown and she doesn't know the way or any of the routes because they are all here from Alaska because her tiny baby girl is in the hospital here and they're all going to be here a long time now so they have to start learning.  

We get off the bus with her, a crowd of us, kind of like a minyan, half having heard the story and walking with her intentionally.  Boichik and I have another route.  His head is up as we hit the open air and I have time to point out the fountain shouting its joy to the sky, the same fountain that I ran to see as a freshman on this campus, over twenty years ago.  I tell him the mountain isn't out today and he demands to know why, and I tell him it's hiding.  I think again of the joke I keep making, that today is my son's first day at university, and I carry him through the wonder of the deeply wooded path by the Forestry Department.

I cannot carry him any longer by the time we reach the hospital.  His preschool is in the human development research center, right behind the main building, but we must move at the speed of very little legs all the way around the perimeter of the great hospital, under the broad bridge to the surgery pavilion, down past the construction, down the flights of steps and at last in past the lobby where we are greeted by name by the miracle worker at the front desk.  Here's your own cubby with your own name, your own teacher, look at the kiddie toilets, look at the kiddie sinks, and here I thought I would be signing you in but instead you are handed a sheet with your own short name printed on it and a crayon and asked to follow the lines and by the third letter you are actually making an effort to do so.  Then it's time for hugs and kisses, and I'm gone.

Another mother was beside me in the hall, double-checking and triple-checking the pick-up time.  Her child, like mine, will be here all day, and this means that she is in the low-income program.  The city council mandated that reserved low-income slots will all be fulltime slots, trying to keep the same families from having to "double-dip" into separate preschool and daycare funds.  As much as I understand the logistical need from the civic point of view, for me, as for the many parents and grandparents who are unable to work because of disabilities and language barriers, the mandatory all-day preschool for our low income children feels like a punishment.  It feels as though a choice has been made that, because we are poor, because we are unable to work, the less time our child spends in our home, the better.
And the reason that hurts so much is because some days, I think that, too.

The other mother and I caught each other's eyes as we turn our heads to both glance into the observation room.  Because this is a research preschool, the big mirror along one side is a window through which graduate students will learn while watching our children play. Parents are also welcome to come and watch, and learn about their own children as independent persons.  The little room is crowded now with morning drop-off parents drinking in the sight of their little ones playing with one another, the little ones they will be reunited with in a little while at lunch time.  Will my boichik be sad or frightened when family members come to collect his playmates and he is one of the few left behind?  "Work," whispered the other mother as she turns away, and I have to hightail it back to the bus, Priority #3.  We who will not have our children in our arms again for hours also do not have the freedom to watch through the mirror and reassure ourselves: time is money, and we have neither.

I made my way out through a scattered influx of running parents half-dangling small children as they descend from every direction except the most obvious one that is blocked by construction.  I knew that someday I would need to take the time, and money, to explore all the possible walkways, but that day could not be today, as I was trying to get home on the same dollar.  I took the route closest to the line the crow flies, and attempted to cut straight through the hospital.  That is to say, I entered the labyrinth.  One would think that with as much time as I have spent in that hospital, I would have either learned my way about or learned better, but neither is the case.  It is amazing how quickly one can become disoriented in an interior without windows, or passages of equal size, and as I came across landmarks that showed I was direly off-track my ambitions dropped from reaching the front lobby to simply seeing sky as soon as possible.  

Outside, everything was familiar again, Alice back up from the rabbit hole, and I was able to cross the street in time to catch the bus right on time.

Which charged me another dollar.

Okay, then.  On to Plan B.

Kith and Kin

Let me explain kith and kin since we all know what it sounds like but not many go digging up what it means anymore and it means an awful lot to me.  Your kin are your blood relatives, your kith are your chosen family.  The friends so close that your children call them "aunt" and "uncle" are kith, the mentors that you could not have become yourself without are kith, the survivors that made new roots because you helped them grow.

The idea of chosen family is not new; it is nothing new.
The idea that chosen family and the family you were born with must be kept separate, reserved for different times and spaces of your life, is the newfangled notion.

Life is with people. Happiness is our ability to love. Kith and kin were always meant to work together.

About Last Night

About Last Night

Somewhere the homeless man
who found a piano at Value Village last night
and sat down and played and played
for all the years since he'd last touched a piano
is starting to face the day today.
Somewhere the woman in the ballcap
who gave me a fist-bump for sitting on the thrift store floor
with my little one in my lap to read to him
who pulled over honking after we left
and threw herself out of her car crying
Could you not afford to buy him a book?
is starting to face the day today.
Somewhere the all black all poor 33rd Ave basketball boys
who knocked out the best game of the summer
in the pot-holed little parking lot somebody put up a hoop in
and spent five solid minutes chanting Game Over, Game Over
just so the game wouldn't be over and home to bed
with school in the morning
are starting to face the day today.
And so are you.
Be gentle, day