6/26/07 10 pm

Today--201 (no, I don't think I actually lost another pound since yesterday, since that would mean burning 3500 calories over what I ate, or whatever the exact number is; I'm just reporting what the scale said because it made me happy. I never thought weighing 201 pounds would make me happy.)

builders bar, milk
iced tea
Gazpacho, tortilla chips, and some fresh mozzarella for lunch (leftovers)
2 squares of Green and Black Maya Gold (first chocolate in more than a month and it didn't make me binge on the rest of the bar.)
seltzer
Snack--can't remember what. Cheese puffs and something else.
water and then some more water--it was hot!
A plate of Mt. A!ry potluck for dinner. This is the thing of a private blog (and, Phantom, yes, it's working at least insofar as anyone lurking is doing so very discreetly): I know you'll know the kind of thing I mean. I went for seconds on the artichoke dip in the brown-bread bowl but didn't finish the fruit-yogurt soup. The sprouted-grain salad was particularly fine. The whole wheat pasta salad was a little on the near side of al dente.
A brownie. A. made peach brown betty but it went so fast I didn't get a shot at it.
A Coke--which maybe was a mistake, except I'm the only one in my household who's not crankola at this moment, so you know, maybe it wasn't.

We were at a sheva berachot dinner for the bride and groom. It was more fun than the wedding or the aufruf--a better scale for hanging out, no one whose face I didn't know, A. was there so I wasn't toddler-wrangling the whole time, and there was good singing.

The coincidence of the two weddings was that they had the same song for the processional--a Shef@ Gold song that A. chose for the wedding in the Berkshires, since she led that processional. And coincidentally, the Philadelphia couple also chose it, and they arrived at the potluck when we did, and someone started singing it, so we entered to the song.

Our host for the potluck said a few words--now, we're indirectly responsible for this couple because they met while the bride was visiting California to work on A. and my chuppah--and in his remarks the host revealed that he and the bride became friends because of a stray comment he made at Z.'s baby-naming. So this was a weekend where the Rhyming Family played this kind of role of being toasted for connections we made not just accidentally but more or less completely without knowing it. It was a useful and happy thing to be reminded of as I'm making my way out of my cave.

So, okay, the sheva berachot are the seven blessings said at a wedding and in the grace after meals in the week after the wedding. Because Z. needed to go home, we only heard them under the chuppah but b/c of the way the couple structured their ceremony, with friends coming up to comment on each blessing (did I mention that from signing the ketubbah to the end of the ceremony was TWO HOURS!?) there was no momentum to them under the chuppah, and I missed them at the wedding meal itself, so I really wanted to stay for them tonight. A. was pretty pooped, but she indulged me, and it was good. The sixth of the seven blessings contains two songs where, in a group of guests that's Jewishly-literate enough (according to A. the guests in the Berkshires did not reach critical mass on this point), the entire gathering will join in and when they're singing it for you it can actually make you dizzy. Not like my own anniversary is next week or anything.

When I first was going to Hillel, when I was converting, grace after meals intimidated me--there's this whole Hillel thing of doing it as fast as possible, and there's a whole intricate thing of which blessings are substituted for which occasions, and I would always get lost. We hardly ever do it at home--we substitute one of several much shorter blessings on shabbat, which is the only time we evver *do* bentsch (=say the blessing after meals), but over the years I've done it often enough that I don't get tripped up much and it is sung with great gusto so it's fun to do it once in awhile. It was fun to do it tonight. It was fun to do it with people I know. It was a social evening, and it was fun, and I went home singing, and when was the last time that was true?

Also, and this is a thing that ties into Helen, and to Z., the bride's stepfather, who is Arthur W@skow if that means anything to you, did the fifth blessing to the tune of "Morning Has Broken" and Cat Stevens was what I listened to on A.'s discman for a long long time in my initial weeks of pumping for Z. (when she was in the hospital and then later in the next few weeks when the blanching and the nipple confusion were so severe that I couldn't have her at my breast). I had that cd with me when I drove up to New York on the Sunday after Helen died and on my way back down I kept hitting replay over and over and over again on a couple of them, that one in particular. There are a handful of other songs I've used that way, to draw something out of me like a poultice. Big Yellow Taxi is one, during some of the particularly bad and drama-prone patches in Adams House my junior year. Naive Melody/This Must Be The Place is another, when my mother had surgery and when Smartest Dog died. So Arthur hit something home there.

(Thunder coming, blogging could get iffy. The grid in these parts is a little shaky and prone to brownouts and blackouts.)

But anyhow, I think that this wedding could well be the impetus I need to get back into the social swing of things. I know that I'm about to be out of town for two weekends in a row, possibly three, and then Harry Potter, so it's not exactly like I'm about to commit to getting to shul on time for another month or more, but, you know, not a bad evening.

6/23/07 11:20 pm

hoo boy.

I think I'm sticking to menu reporting right now--though I will say that I did manage to put together a shabbat dinner yesterday night at which we FORGOT to bless the challah. It was as if it was not on the table. And I forgot to bless my kid, too. It will be good when A. comes home.

Today, what we mostly ate was challah-based snacks. Toast w/cream cheese and cinnamon sugar for breakfast, a peach for me, an apricot for Z. Lunch was something or other--oh, leftover ravioli for me; Z. ate the rest of the extensive snack leftover from shul (really, I had packed her a full lunch: almonds, goldfish crackers, apricot, string cheese, water). We had lots of limeade. We slept for 3 1/2 hours. Both of us. And I'm still tired, because I sabotaged my bedtime last night. Z. had almonds and honey bunnies for snack when she woke up. For dinner, we had peanut-butter-and-honey sandwiches with milk, apples, and cheese, because there was nothing in the pantry to cook because I didn't make it to the co-op yesterday. For some reason Z. is resistant to bread, so she opened up the sandwich to get at the honey, made toothmarks in the apple, and feasted on smoked gouda. Ice cream for dessert.

There was fruit at the wedding event we went to in the evening. Which was past Z.'s bedtime and I was, err, ambitious and guilt-ridden to even try it. (The bride is someone who I used to be much closer to and most of the initial fault for our drift is mine.)

Umm. Yeah. Right. That was buried in there. I went to shul this morning. Because of the aufruf (=bride and groom are called to the torah, everyone throws candy). It was the first time other than Z.'s birthday that I didn't leave in tears since I can't remember when, but it was also more of a party than really services. A low-davenning day. And the bride's stepfather, a Nationally Prominent Rabbi, did this thing of after each aliyah he interpreted the portion in English, which was LONG. I spent almost the entire time on the playground, anyway, and it was jumping. We had San Francisco weather today--no humidity, 70's, balmy--and there are no kids' services for the summer, so the playground minyan was the place to be.

6/19/07, one shower later

The other heavy piece of yesterday's session was telling about how a few months after she was born, we took Z. to a post-wedding meal where there was a lot of singing and by coincidence more male voices than she was used to. She was bopping along, in her element--from her earliest days, Z. was always happiest where there were 40 people in a room, infant extrovert--and the singing started and her face crumpled and she fell apart into tears. We didn't understand it. It happened again a little later, at friends' house for shabbat dinner, she was playing on the husband's lap, happily discovering facial hair, when he started singing and again, she crumpled. We did an experiment, and when he sang in falsetto she stayed happy. She also had a little sunsuit with a cow on it, and I would push the cow like it was a button and low. Crying. Just "moo," no tears. Lowing, tears. Finally I figured it out--the low, resonant singing, the lowing, sounded like the moans I made in labor, for three days.

Think about how unbelievably scared she was to be born. And then she was alone in a plastic bin for a week.

6/19/07, 7:20 am

I'm trying not to blog while my mother's here, but it's obviously not working well. Both here I am falling off the bandwagon, and also I went to bed last night feeling fairly rotten, I think because I just didn't write enough yesterday and I had a rough therapy session that involved explaining to Dr. L. how after Z. was transferred I had the thought "well, so much for that pregnancy" and also how I couldn't recognize myself in the mirror. I saw myself haggard and grey and haunted and thought, "this is my mom face." So, not an easy session and I am only now writing about it in the most half-assed fashion right here, trying not to go back and edit much. Blah. So take this as what it is, more or less of a brain dump with no filters. Few filters.

Now I'm stalled.

Last night and in fact for the past few days my head has felt like the top of it, where my cerebral cortex should be, there is a white blank space, like cotton batting or a white linen curtain. I think it may still be Helen's memorial and that whole weekend settling in, and also it may be the result of the beginning of work on my sleep deficit. I'm not sleeping well by any means, but I'm trying so hard not to do the 1 and 2 and 3 am things I was pulling off a few weeks ago. I had an acupuncture session a few weeks back, a gift from a friend who's building her practice. I think that some of the shifts in energy I've had recently do trace back to that, but as A. was saying about her recent thyroid medication, it comes at a time when a lot of things were lining up in that direction anyhow, so it's hard to tell for sure.

But after that session I felt completely sluggish and wiped out, the way an intense massage can make you feel, like your blood really is full of toxins like they say and you should just drink hot lemon water and stay near the toilet until your blood has had time to cleanse and replace itself.

I need time to catch up with myself.

6/13/07 8 am

I managed to daven shacharit two mornings in a row, yesterday because I was up so early, today because A. is staying home to grade and took Z. to school. ("Daven shacharit" means "pray the morning service" in a combination of Yiddish and Hebrew as imported into American English. So a very Jewish phrase.)

When I was studying for my adult bat mitzvah, on the advice of my tutor I began praying daily. It complemented the work we were doing in tutoring and it helped me learn the service. I felt very shy about it at first--my Hebrew was lousy (still is) and it took me forever to sound everything out, I went over to the English for a lot of it, for a long time all I did was birchot hashachar, (the morning blessings, the preliminary series of blessings said upon waking) because that took me so long. And apart from bat mitzvah prep, I wasn't entirely sure what I was doing it for.

I don't know if I exactly ever figured that out--the "what" part. God? Tradition? Community?

But eventually I was doing it because the rhythm of doing it moved me and grounded me and elevated me. There are a few key mornings when I remember pouring everything into the service, praying it in my head, trying to get unstuck.

I stopped praying daily long before Ziv was born. I can't even remember why. Partly, it seemed more like A.'s thing. Partly, once A. moved in our commute became complicated so I was waking up earlier. But I was still going to services on Saturday morning and shacharit was still part of how I felt connected to the world and myself.

When we were in Madison, services were so truncated and Jewishly illiterate that I started leading them out of frustration. When we returned home, I was willing to keep it up--and here I need to backpedal a little to explain that our home minyan is the ur-congregation of Reconstructionist Judaism. It is where the staff and students of the Recon Rabbinical College daven, and the staff of the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation, and all of the Recon rabbis who have settled in Philadelphia doing chaplaincy or non-profit work. Over half of the committee that assembled the siddur for our movement is in the congregation at our minyan.

But after Madison I loved shacharit and I wanted to lead. I also felt that I knew a few things about how to use the prayerbook that the congregation had lost or forgotten over the years. So I was leading about every two months. In my womb, Z. would dance to pesukei dezimrah (verses of praise--drawn from psalms--the introductory part of every service).

I stopped leading after Z. was born and settled into the the nursing mama corner of the room, but I still went more often than not.

What changed was the store. At first it was that it was so exhausting. It's still often so exhausting. But gradually it became more about the times when I did go--everyone would ask me how the store was doing and that is the one question that terrifies me. I don't want to be found out as the disorganized fraud that I am. Also, thinking about "how the store is doing" on shabbat pretty much eliminates shabbat from my life. My work is worrying about how the store is doing and I don't want to fucking do that on shabbat, thank you very much.

So I have disappeared from services. When I do go I feel like I am slinking, spiritually. I am losing a large part of my community and my spiritual grounding because of this, but I am still letting myself do it.