Sweet, Bittersweet and Painful

First, the sweet: Jack turned 40, sounds as good as ever, hosted Haveil Havalim this week (the carnival of the Jewish blogosphere), and called my post Pros and Cons of Self-Hosted WordPress useful! Thanks so much for including me in this week’s carnival, even though I didn’t submit anything.

Bittersweet: Today is Mother’s Day, and my mother is not around for me to wish her happy mother’s day. You can read the posts I wrote in the past about my mom, Elaine, z”l. My kids, however, have various plans for me, like my youngest wants to make a mom cake, and the middle one wants to bike with my husband to the kosher Chinese food restaurant in Manville, New Jersey called Lin’s. From there, they will call us so we can drive over for dinner. My eldest said, huh, wuh, Mother’s Day? And we joked how in high school they don’t have him make the little cards for mom anymore?

Therapydoc wrote a great post called You Only Have One Mother. Whenever there is a holiday, there are some people who struggle with the day, for whatever of their own personal reasons. I was always close to my mother, but the relationship did not always go smoothly. Others I know had incredibly difficult times with their moms. For them, Mother’s Day is distressing, a reminder of what they don’t have, even if they physically do have a mother.

Painful: a young man died last week. It turns out he was from my cousins’ yishuv in Israel. The yishuv (means “settlement” in Hebrew; it’s a group of families that settled in a beautiful area in the Lower Galil) has more young men buried in their tiny cemetery than people who led full lives. My sincere condolences go out to the family. Noam Adin Rechter Levy was twenty years old.