Here in Highland Park, New Jersey

I’ve been doing the therapy thing since I was 17. OK, so now I’m 45, so that’s: 28 years. Many 17, 18 year-olds have a hard time. I had a horrible time. Maybe someday I’ll feel gutsy enough to blog about that. For now, let’s just say I spent my twenties on a roller coaster ride of moods, trying to figure out who I am and what might make me feel good. Because in my teens, I mostly felt lousy.

When I lived in Cambridge, MA, someone (who was from England) told me about how she was at a Friday night dinner with about eight other people. “What’s with Americans and therapy?” she said. It turns out everyone at the table was in therapy, except for the postdoc from Belgium.

A friend once told me that with all the money I spent on therapy I could have bought a car (this was ten years into therapy). And another friend, a psychologist, responded: “And you could have taken that car and driven it off a cliff.” Sometimes you just gotta do certain things in life to keep yourself going. For me, therapy has certainly kept me going. It became extremely important again when I had two little boys and a dying mother. How does one cope with all those emotions?

Therapy is a bit like learning to type. In the beginning, assuming you open up to the therapist, you can make lots of strides forward. Lots of someone getting your stuff, stuff that may have been lingering, festering for years. Then you reach a plateau. You show up, your life is going OK, no longer in a crisis, and you are not sure if you need the therapy anymore. Actually, that’s usually a good time to dig deeper, when you are not in a crisis.

Sometimes I mimic how a therapist talks when I am listening to someone’s emotional issues. The thing is, I can mimic, but I have no idea how to be therapeutic. So don’t let all my good acting skills fool you. See a real therapist.

Have a great day, boys and girls. Enjoy the fresh spring air.

Here are the flowers on my neighbor’s dogwood tree.

Here’s the whole dogwood tree.

I learned from Gail that the cherry trees bloom first, and then the dogwoods show their flowers.

Name the only country in the world that has more trees in 2008 than in 2007. To find the answer, go here.

  

Mother’s Day is a hard day for me. I really miss my mom. My husband is nice; he usually buys me a new cookbook or another book I might like on Mother’s Day. One year he bought me a nice metal watering can that I cherish. And my father brought me some flowers on Friday and wished me Happy Mother’s Day.

But it’s not the same as being able to call your mother and talk to her. Just for a bit.

On the right is my maternal grandmother z”l, whom we called Baba. That’s Russian for grandmother. The slim woman next to her is my mother, Elaine, z”l, may her memory be a blessing. When my mother became a grandmother, almost twenty years ago (eeks! is my niece going to be that old?), my sister-in-law thought she would want to be known as Baba. No, she said, there was only one Baba. So my mother became Savta.

My mother was born in Leningrad, Russia in 1924. When she came to this country (USA) in 1929, she had never tasted a banana. It tasted like a funny potato, she said. Her father, whom I never met because he died when my mother was 14, was already here in the U.S. He was born in Lithuania, came to America as a teenager, and went to Russia as a salesman for some American company–was it Ford? I’m not sure. There he met my grandmother, my Baba, whom he married. At some point they were separated; he came back to America and supposedly pulled strings in the State Department to get his wife and daughter to join him in New York.

When my mother was in kindergarten (same age as my daughter!) in New York City, she knew no English. So her father pinned a note to her shirt. When she needed to go to the bathroom, she was supposed to point to the note. It’s hard to imagine my mother not knowing English, as she later became a technical writer, corrected English grammar errors, and wrote an essay about mothers and daughters in Jane Austen.

There are a lot of stories about my Baba that I would like to share in future posts. My father once said she had experiences by the age of 25 that most do not have in a lifetime. She lived through the Russian Revolution and what was known as the “starvation period”, when people would have to walk many miles in the bitter cold just to get a frozen potato to eat. My Baba told me that the rabbis said it was OK to eat non-kosher food; you ate what you needed to stay alive. If you looked in the back of her mouth, you could see the shiny gold that replaced the teeth she lost during this period. Gold was easier to come by than food.

Enjoy your Mother’s Day, and as always, thanks for reading.

Ever wonder if your blogging can have effect? This morning I woke up and found this:
Remembering in New Jersey

So I felt I should share with you the next day as well, the annual RPRY Yom Ha’Atzmaut parade, which is always a lot of fun. This year, the sky was rather cloudy. But out came many people: students, teachers, parents, neighbors. We march around the block.

I enjoyed talking with some other moms about my chauffeuring 5 teenage boys to Teaneck on Tuesday, and how as a mom of a teenager you are “not supposed to say anything in the car.” No adding your own jokes, no reflections on the conversation.

In the end, it did rain on our parade.

But I had brought my daughter’s treasured umbrella, and she enjoyed sharing it with a friend.

Some of the littlest children went for shelter on a porch:

We had live musicians
accompanying the parade, too,
to add to the merriment.

The younger children returned to their classrooms, and the older children, such as my boys, continued the celebration with dancing in the gym.

On my walk home, I was tempted to take some photos of some of the homes with Israeli flags. Instead, take a look at all the flags in the Tel Aviv area here.