A 6th Birthday with a Dash of Healthy Nostalgia

“The days are long but the years are short.”

~Gretchen Rubin

When our daughter insisted a few weeks ago on having her stuffed animals greet her again on the morning of her 6th birthday, I was secretly thrilled. This was a last minute scheme we implemented on the eve of her 5th bday after seeing a clever TikTok my mother-in-law sent. I recall the video featured a toddler opening their door and being blown away by the “stuffy party” waiting for them. My wife and I thought our daughter would get a kick out of it, but we also weren’t sure if she had “aged out” of this kind of thing. Turns out, it was a hit and low and behold, she requested an encore presentation this year.

They say “you blink” and your child is all grown up. I’m aware we still have some years ahead of us, but it’s also not lost on me that time is moving quickly. In September she will start first grade. She’s using language that I’m sure I didn’t teach her. (New favorite phrases include “bro” this and “bro” that. She recently started saying, “duh.”) These phrases seem to come out of nowhere and when I hear them I’m partly inclined to push back and say, “Excuse me? We don’t say that, etc.” While most of me just thinks it’s so darn cute. She still seems so little, and yet, she’s testing new boundaries and limits each day.

Our kids’ questions and stories are getting more sophisticated and harder to answer. And I’m reminded lately there is no playbook out there to help us parents figure out how to guide them…

We are leaving a concert on a recent summer night, waiting for a bus to take us back to our cars, and with the most impractical and improbable timing, she exclaims to my wife, “I’m afraid to die.”
When she comes home hot and sweaty during the first week of day camp and shares that some of the kids are poking around asking why she doesn’t have a dad. They don’t believe her that she has two moms. Her response to them…. “It’s true. I do.” (Sigh. What are THEIR parents sharing–or not sharing–at home?)
We are finishing up dinner the other night and she shares under her breath, albeit a bit hesitantly, that some of the kids were talking at the bus stop about being Christian and celebrating Christmas. Our daughter exclaims to the bus counselor, “I’m Jewish!”

I’m beyond grateful that she is starting to open up about these day-to-day queries. And yet, my chest tightens at the thought of what other questions, disappointments and mishaps lie ahead. Will she share all of them and will we be able to catch all of the nuances and eventual tears?

I’m not ready for elementary school. No thank you. Can we just rewind a few more years?

This year her 6th birthday falls on a Saturday, the first Saturday since the year she is born. It’s summer 2020, the height of COVID. There are no visitors allowed in the hospital and we return home to a dark cloud still hovering above us. How are we going to manage? We leave without an instruction manual, other than a handout on postpartum depression and a “poop and a pee chart.” It seems I’m always looking for signs and “mile markers” to make a connection back to that first year. Ground Zero. We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. (We still don’t most days).

And yet, I wonder if we can look at this time in our lives as a “both/and”? Can we look back with a healthy “nostalgia” for the early days of tracking “poops and pees”? And can we be grateful for the growing independence and testing of limits that come with a slow separation from our little ones. A type of “separation” that I’m realizing more and more defines motherhood all together. As usual, Brandi Carlile nails this contradiction with her lyrics from You Without Me.

So happy 6th birthday, dear one. May you continue to grow into yourself, with confidence and ease and that sassy spirit we all love.

Lyrics–You Without Me

“Oh

Was your smile always crooked? Was the freedom ever free?
Do you kick the rocks between your feet, after all this time with me?
You can listen to your own records now, decide what you believe
You can pray on stars and skip the gods like stones across the sea

But I would know you anywhere, I lost myself in you
Heavy are the hands that you are free to slip right through
Do what you have to do

There you are, my morning star, I wondered when you’d show
Give me just a quick thumbs up, a wink before you go
I never heard that voice before today, I remind myself to breathe
There you are, it’s just you without me

I’m late to another game, I guess I never learned the rules
I showed up with a broken name and handed it to you
I’m not sure if you can fix it now, but if you wanted to
I would follow you around and carry all your tools

I would know you anywhere, I found myself in you
Heavy are the hands that hold the changes you go through
Do what you have to do

There you are, my morning star, I wondered when you’d show
Give me just a quick thumbs up, a wink before you go
I never heard that voice before today, I remind myself to breathe
There you are, it’s just you without me
Without me

As predictable as time and age, but comforting in some strange way
Time makes every one of us an absolute cliché
But when I met you face to face, none of it was true
So who am I if I’m not you?

There you are, my morning star, I wondered when you’d show
Give me just a quick thumbs up, a wink before you go
I never heard that voice before today, I remind myself to breathe
I’m ever just a thought away, if ever you need me
You’re gonna live a lot of life, you’re gonna see a lot of years
God willing, just you without me
There you are, just you without me

Without me
Without me

Mother’s Day Musings

Disney on Ice, Springfield, MA, March 2026

“Be where your feet are.”

~Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn

When do we stop mothering long enough to feel and appreciate the experience of mothering?

Blue skies, green leaves, wind coursing through. A bird’s soft whistle. And I often can’t seem to pause long enough to let my feet feel the dirt on the ground.

On this Mother’s Day, 2026, I want to be grateful for my health and my growing mental clarity.

I want to give myself the gift of spaciousness. An opening up of time. Time expanding, the ground under my feet expanding, my heart expanding.

What would it look like for life to feel more expansive while mothering? Perhaps the two don’t need to be in conflict.

May I put down the stop watch that is my mind. May I realize I’m not in a race anymore. Not unless I’m actually running, which is another goal this year!

May I stop and feel my feet on the ground. The sand between my toes. The warmth on my cheeks in the sun, all while chasing a growing child and exhaling after another “can you please say that a little kinder” or “you’re not being safe right now with your body.”

What if I could see and experience the world as though I were a child again, as though the sensory input around me was as scintillating as it often seems to be for my daughter.

What if my whole world could light up when my favorite characters skate out on ice, floating through thin air and electrifying my mind and heart.

Of course, worries and obsessions to “get it right” will always be there. But instead of beating myself up for them, what if I could start to talk back to this childhood inner critic and offer comfort and reassurance that I’m okay now. That now at age 44 these parts that still feel the need to protect me from failure and making a mistake can take a rest. That it is okay for things to get messy (literally and figuratively). That I can embrace the colorful mess that is my life and slip and slide in the rainbow of colors as they bleed together.

On this mother’s day, I wish myself and all the mothers out there a breath of solace and reassurance that we can hold two things at once… a reality packed with obligations AND an opportunity to liberate ourselves from old burdens. Instead, may we all plant ourselves in the expanding sense of space and time that is ours for the taking.

Happy Mother’s Day dear ones. And thank you, for reminding me that we are all in this together.

Mid-Life Musings

Port of Galilee, Point Judith, Rhode Island

“Midlife is not a crisis. Midlife is an unraveling.” ~Brené Brown

I recently read this brilliant post by Brené Brown about what she describes as a “mid-life unraveling” and something struck me. Just as Brené shares that her “mid-life unraveling” hit her during her forty-first year, for me, my forty-third year has been a sort of unraveling. In fact, I think I’m still in it. I’m not sure how long it’s supposed to last or if there is a prescription for how an “unraveling” is experienced, but Brené Brown nails it with this essay. She describes her own battling it out with the Universe. Her resistance and her armor, which she’s built up over decades, is fierce and it has served her well. But at 41, she surrenders and accepts (eventually) that it’s time to let go… to let the layers shed. The layers of insanely strong and professionally manicured armor that she didn’t even realize she was wearing began to burst at the seams and prevent her from living.

I don’t think anyone has ever described this concept of a “mid-life/mid-love” chapter that I now find myself in so beautifully and yet so adjacent to fear at the same time.

In my experience, I learned at a young age, probably around 12 or 13 years old that I couldn’t share my fears. Not all of them anyways. I became astute around this time at playing into other’s vision of “cool,” what I would later look back at and see as a straight, white, cis-gendered femininity and popular girl culture that I needed to blend into in order to survive. I remember masterfully doing a sort of “code-switching,” acting one way when I was with one group of friends and then another way when I ebbed and flowed into other social spaces. For example, I remember starting 8th grade and laughing along with the “popular” kids on the bus, even when their use of the term “gay” was directed at others in a derogatory way. I just wanted to be liked. I wanted to play into the image of cool that I instinctively knew was my best shot at “survival of the fittest” and so that year I began pushing down, really far down, my own doubts, insecurities and vulnerabilities around my own sense of self and identity. My superb skills at “fitting in,” being likable and even becoming known as a sort of “peacemaker/negotiator” among friends have carried me through decades of living and growing and wandering.

I believe on many levels that I am brave and courageous and am worthy of being loved, which Brené professes so beautifully, are all of our birthrights. But until very recently I didn’t know how to shed the armor that has been covering up my ability to see that I don’t need to keep pretending and performing in order to be liked or likable.

The coping mechanisms that so many of us have developed to protect ourselves from getting hurt are keeping us small and stuck in the mud, even when we reach mid-life.

Mid-life is a scary thought. I fight like hell most days to control my surroundings so as to be able to put my feet up at the end of the day and smoke a proverbial cigar and say, “great job,” “bravo,” “you deserve to rest now…” Only to realize as I put my head on my pillow that I never actually put my feet up that day. In fact, I never stopped. Most days I am fighting an uphill battle with the Universe and I don’t think I’m winning. Instead, I am often working myself into a state of burnout, only to get up and keep fighting the same fight the next day.

For those of us who are caregivers (for children or parents, pets or neighbors, for the planet,) how do we wake up each morning and live into our most sacred truths while still making a living and playing this critical care-taker role? How do we allow ourselves to shed our armor and bask in what we really want to be doing without turning our backs on responsibility?

If I could, I would retire now and enroll in a creative writing program. Wake up and write, paint, take photos and live in nature. But alas, I can’t. I must take my dog out, feed my daughter, take her to school, rush to work and make sure bills are paid in order to wake up and do it all over again the next day. All this in a world that feels very, very fragile and chaotic and frankly scary these days.

Brené Brown shares that, “courage and daring are coursing through your veins.* You were made to live and love with your whole heart. It’s time to show up and be seen.”

*I want to know how to do this and make sure I’m not late for my 10am meeting.

I guess for now, I will just keep writing, keep asking questions and try not to be afraid of this unraveling that I find myself wanting to speak more truth to. Perhaps as Brené illustrates so well, this unraveling is a sort of re-awakening/re-birth that will hopefully allow all of us to build a new type of armor (regardless of where we are in life), an armor of courage, bravery and risk-taking that we didn’t ingest enough when we were young…When I was that 12 year old girl hiding behind myself. Instead, I will try to live into these questions and be less afraid of not being liked. I think I’ll still always be a peacemaker at heart, but I will also try to stay open to some natural conflict and internal dissent along the way. After all, humanity is imperfection. Humanity is messy.

So as we kick off the summer and celebrate Pride month, may we all wake up a bit and concoct a medicine that gets infused into the water of our young. A medicine that allows bravery, vulnerability and courage to become seeped into our bones. Perhaps armor will eventually become a thing of the past, both physical and virtual. And perhaps we will realize that love and kindness, freedom and truth are ours for the taking.

Meig’s Point at Hammonasset Beach State Park in Madison, CT

Excerpt from “The Midlife Unraveling“: “I’m not screwing around. All of this pretending and performing—these coping mechanisms that you’ve developed to protect yourself from feeling inadequate and getting hurt—has to go. Your armor is preventing you from growing into your gifts. I understand that you needed these protections when you were small. I understand that you believed your armor could help you secure all of the things you needed to feel worthy and lovable, but you’re still searching and you’re more lost than ever. Time is growing short. There are unexplored adventures ahead of you. You can’t live the rest of your life worried about what other people think. You were born worthy of love and belonging. Courage and daring are coursing through your veins. You were made to live and love with your whole heart. It’s time to show up and be seen.”

— Brené Brown (2018)

Winter

Wadsworth Falls State Park, Middletown, CT

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

~By Jalaluddin Rumi

A poem for a difficult season. When the light feels hard to find. And I don’t want to dance as much.

How can I slowly crawl back to my younger self who danced with the wind, who didn’t notice who was looking when she sprawled out in all her richness, creating a world of fantasy as she moved?

I’ve somehow lost that vision lately, or maybe lost it years and years ago. I have felt so burdened and even crushed by all the self-imposed “to do’s” that I’ve forgotten about the moments of life in between.

I started this blog a little over 3 years ago (fall 2021), in another season of my life when I needed to soak up the wisdom contained in slowing down. That was the whole premise of the blog, in fact, to journal and reflect on the benefits of slowing down, even if by 1%. In some ways I feel like I’m right back where I started, at another critical inflection point, unsure of which turn to take next. The growing demands and intensity of work and motherhood continue to push many of us to our limits. Too fast, too much, too packed. And not feeling in control. How do we get that control back?

Lately it’s felt like I’ve been swimming upstream and I know I need to start a slightly different dance.

In this new year, can I stop long enough to find others who will dance with me, alongside me and even mirror me? Can I slow down enough to see all the music and the movements that nature holds in its own dance? Can I slow down long enough to make space for those I love, not for us to accomplish anything, but for us to just be still together?

To sit around a table and enjoy the company, without worrying about who is cleaning up. To do a puzzle together. To play the Bluey Jenga game we gave our daughter for Hanukkah. To sit long enough to watch the PBS New Year’s Eve Countdown 2024 with DJ Walrus and Friends (instead of cleaning the kitchen). Guess what? I watched 95% of it this year alongside her, without my phone in my hand. DJ Walrus needs to get another day job though in my humble opinion. Sorry, Mr. Walrus.

In this new year, can I join my daughter in HER dance and learn more about the true art of slowing down? While she moves a mile a minute, she does focus her attention on just one thing at a time. In the quiet (or not so quiet moments) when she’s playing by herself, may I try once in a while to not fill the time with another chore, but instead to just breathe, soak up the energy of her play and even join in. I know my kid, competitive and playful nature is in there somewhere!

This year, Hanukkah coincided with Christmas and New Years, the holiday trifecta. For the first time in what felt like years, my family sat around the table on the 6th night of Hanukkah (the night before New Year’s Eve) and played dreidel by candlelight. We took turns spinning our own miniature dreidels and laughed out loud as the Hebrew letters were called out. My daughter was the most excited of all and belted with pride as she landed on a gimel (which stands for “gantz” or “everything.” The player gets everything in the pot.)

Wishing us all a quiet and peaceful turn of the new year. May we all find some light and abundance amidst the darkness.

Life Keeps Moving

I’ve been struck recently with how fast time seems to move. My last blog entry was in June 2024 and somehow now we are in fall. The leaves have turned and we are getting ready for Halloween. I wish I could say I feel wiser and more grounded and settled since I last wrote, but I don’t think that would be true. I’m just as confused and overwhelmed with life as ever. (And not to mention, I’ve discovered a few more grey hairs).

One area I’m continuing to reconcile, in which I am perhaps making some progress, is catching a hold of and accepting the contradictions of life, the “both/and” mindset if you will. Just a few examples that come to mind in this particular moment…

Life is scary AND beautiful at the same time. I sit, for example, before this breathtaking fall landscape in Cromwell, CT AND brace for a world that feels more polarized and full of spite than ever before, particularly in the run up to our elections.

Raising my daughter is getting harder and easier at the same time. She is becoming more and more independent AND has the energy of a jaguar on steroids, which seems to rope us in constantly. She resists us whenever possible to proclaim her burgeoning truths. I can remember myself at this age (4 going on 14) and I don’t want to squash her light. (Mine is still coming back on!)

I’m exhausted at the end of most days AND have the yearning to run a marathon, swim a mile or climb Mount Kilimanjaro. It’s a constant push and pull of contradicting and perhaps complementary desires.

Our family recently returned from an epic adventure overseas, celebrating my parent’s 50th wedding anniversary. It was the first time I traveled this far in well over a decade and I was reminded of my 20 something self who only saw adventure and travel in her future. I admittedly feel most myself when traveling. The further I go, the more connected I feel to myself and the universe. To break free from the monotony of daily routines, packing lunches, cleaning, being online from 9am to what feels like bedtime, etc. Travel is the epitome of perspective building for me.

While on our trip, we start in a small seaside European town and I receive a lesson along these lines that I’m still digesting. On our first evening in France, straight off the airplane, my mom and I go into town to try and purchase a new stroller after we leave ours mistakenly somewhere between the gate and baggage claim (the first of several things lost on this trip). The highlight, for me, during the excursion is dappling in my broken, very rusty, once fluent French. Once we successfully secure a new stroller, we find ourselves unsuccessfully trying to wave down a taxi. So we get on a public bus back to the hotel, jet lagged and overstimulated.

However the next day, just as we are about to board the ship, I realize my wallet is missing. We search everywhere. I assume I have been pickpocketed and proceed to ride the waves of resentment off and on throughout the trip. To my utter surprise and amazement, while scanning my emails on the plane back home I find out that the wallet has been discovered! It was a good Samaritan from the local French bus company on that very first night who found the wallet, sorted through it, found a business card and emailed me to come retrieve it! While I unfortunately can’t get back there in person (yet), I’m hedging my bets that it gets returned safely to me in the US. What are the chances! And how can I reframe when I next start to feel that victim mentality/resentment start to build up about what feels hard?

The world is so big AND yet so small at the same time. We are but small microbes and photons floating in the universe and yet, when we choose to, more often than not, we find some commonality with the strangers we encounter.

My challenge upon returning home (and perhaps for all of us), is to live into each moment with even 1% more of the energy I have when traveling. To see people and places around me, with all their hues and personalities. To not give up on my potential to keep growing and stretching when life feels hard, and to keep looking for where the water meets the shore…to see the waves, as we did on our “boat trip” (as my daughter calls it) and to know that we are all part of a vast ocean of life. We must keep moving, because we have no choice AND because we have the privilege and ability to do so. Blessings for the journey. Shabbat Shalom. And may I be with you all again soon.

Southern France, after transatlantic flight

Time: The Daily Stretch to See it Anew

“Time is relative; its only worth depends upon what we do as it is passing.”
Albert Einstein

When you become immobilized in making a decision about how to spend your 1.5 hours of “free” time while your child is napping.

When it feels impossible to transition between the seemingly endless “to do’s” and resting because a voice deep inside you is screaming that you may not have “enough” time to get your “to do’s” accomplished later.

When you call the doctors office at the last minute to apologize that you’ll be running 10-15 minutes late due to traffic, but really you just couldn’t stop cleaning up the kitchen or getting in one last load of laundry before you left (referencing back to scenario 2).

The daily fight with time has been something I’ve reckoned with for what feels like forever. But when I was recently asked by a coach to think about when I first became aware of time as an oppressive phenomenon, I froze. I couldn’t remember when the plague of “time scarcity” began. Perhaps it was in college, when I found myself for the first time, living on my own and making decisions apart from my parents about how to structure and manage large blocks of time. I do remember feeling uptight about assignment deadlines and the like but when I look back on those years, it feels like time was never-ending. The days would last well into the evening, going to sleep for 2am was not uncommon and sleeping to 10am for an 11am class was the norm. No, it wasn’t then. Time flowed like honey and there was always more to be found.

I do have a distinct and sticky memory of becoming aware that time was a construct when I studied abroad in Senegal my junior year of college. I remember when one of my Senegalese professors with whom I became close, shared that in Senegal (and across Africa) there was a completely different rationalization given when people were “running late.” He explained that when a friend or colleague was “late,” it was natural to assume they were intercepted by something that was important and necessitated them taking more time. If a person was late, for example, for a rendez-vous with friends, you might assume that a sick family member needed them. In other words, you naturally gave people grace and a built in buffer. NOTHING started on time and everyone gave one another the benefit of the doubt.

—

More than 20 years later and with the advent of smart phones, I can’t help but wonder if the oppressiveness of “white supremacy culture” in our country has seeped in and made it that much harder to let go of a constant sense of urgency.

People have been working and raising families for millennium. How has technology become so all-encompassing and resulted in us being more tethered to time than ever before?

An irony is that I stopped wearing a watch years ago. I rely on my cell phone to monitor the day and time for me now. We have and own more things than ever before, and yet time feels scarcer than ever before.

As a “newer” parent, I’ve noticed just how many references to time fall into our vernacular when talking to our children…

“Running late,” “must be on time,” “wasting time,” “time is ticking,” “we can’t be late,” “on time is late,” “respect my time,” “time is precious.” When I catch myself using time vernacular in these contexts I try to divert myself and say something different. “It looks like you need some help before we go, let’s keep moving, or we need you to participate.” It’s fascinating and sad in a way that we superimpose our construct of time on children, who are blessed (we hope) with not needing to be fully aware of it (yet).

I remember picking up the book, Einstein’s Dreams (Alan Lightman) in my early 20’s and my mind being blown away. Lightman imagines dreams that Einstein might have had in 1905 when he was dreaming up his theory of relativity. Each dream portrays a world in which time works differently. In one world, for example, time is circular and people repeat their highs and lows over and over (not too dissimilar from the concept presented in the movie Groundhog Day, which also fascinated me at the time). In other worlds, time moves backwards and people’s journeys unfold in reverse order. This journey is also fleshed out in movie form in the film, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. I was equally fascinated by this story and have found my mind wandering back to it over the years.

—

In the end, I wonder if the way we relate to time is relative to our human complex with mortality. After all, time is finite. Our days are numbered, and even if we are Benjamin Button, getting younger with time, we eventually become absorbed back into the universe. The material things we surround ourselves with, the busyness we become immersed in…might all of this be an illusion and a distraction from our fear of the inevitable?

The many colloquial expressions about time are steeped in truth. Time does move faster as we get older. Not literally, but relative to our spirits. We are more consumed with responsibility, and our bodies forget or become disillusioned with the present, even to the point of becoming disembodied. How can we fight back against this, so that we don’t blink and find ourselves looking back at years of “wasted time?”

Perhaps one helpful concept which flips time on its head is Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest. It occurs each week from sunset on Friday through sunset on Saturday, and is celebrated by Jewish communities around the world. I remember starting to incorporate it into my life spiritually and therapeutically as a graduate student. Living in Washington, DC, and swimming in a culture of political and professional networking mania, time became all-consuming. I remember finding it particularly challenging to “turn off.” I felt pressure to always be “on” or working. As part of my therapy, I began instituting certain boundaries for myself on Shabbat. Over the years, this concept has become trendy. The idea of a “technology shabbat” has been coined, but for me, it has been a lifeline to sanity.

I’ve experimented over the years with observing a form of Shabbat, from shutting down my phone to not allowing myself to check email or be on any screen. I find it is a welcome respite from the noise of the week. In fact the only day I often give myself permission to slow down enough to write creatively has been Shabbat.

How can I give myself permission to incorporate a “tech Shabbat” on other days and in other moments of the week? In the hybrid world of work we now live in, it has become even harder to create these boundaries. Access to “work” can literally be in your pocket or in your ear bud at any point in the day or night. We must reset our own priorities as no one else will do it for us.

—

I’d like to close with the concept of “Ataya” or the three-cup ceremonial tea drinking tradition I learned about in Senegal. Ataya, which in Wolof translates to the “preparation of tea,” is an integral part of Senegalese culture. “Each cup represents the growth of friendships or the stages of life. The longer you wait for your Ataya, the stronger and sweeter friendships grow.” Whether it’s the start of a family visit or a business meeting, or even rounding a street corner on your way to the market, you can always find someone making Ataya.

Slowly, over the course of the six months I lived in Senegal, my body and spirit acclimated to slowing down and engaging in this ritual. Often sitting on cushions, friends and peers gather around a tray of small glass cups and boiling water, waiting for the tea leaves, mint and sugar to simmer. The act of pouring the tea back and forth, from cup to cup, slowly building and creating a foam lather, is a form of meditation in and of itself. You finish your tea when…you finish. Time isn’t in control. Instead, it is the tea and sweet moments of connection that call the shots.

—

My eyes flutter open after taking a short nap while my daughter sleeps. I take a deep breath and sigh. It is Shabbat again and I’ve given myself permission to rest and write. A sweet gift that I don’t think I will ever take for granted again since becoming a parent. I know the laundry waits. Emails are likely piling up. And I’ve got a list of errands to run and people to call back. But for right now, I will practice surrendering my time to the universe and being grateful for the early spring trees outside my window, slowly swaying in the cool wind.

The highest version of myself comes out in these moments. Her voice is quiet but I can feel her trying to speak. She’s saying, “shhh, quiet down now, just be sweet girl, resist the urge to move and do and accomplish. Your life awaits in the present moment. You have my permission to play.”

“The world has our hands, but our soul belongs to Someone Else. Six days a week we seek to dominate the world, on the seventh day we try to dominate the self.”
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

Waves of Anxiety, through the Generations

Sometimes the most healing thing to do is remind ourselves over and over and over, other people feel this too.
Andrea Gibson

Stranany Cemetery, Michalovce, Slovakia, March 2011

My alarm goes off most mornings around 5:30am. I hear the familiar vibration, followed by a paradoxical “sing songy” instrument that I think is meant to be soothing. I immediately hit snooze and then proceed to do the same thing 10 minutes later, and sometimes 10 minutes after that, and so on. I know research says this is not a healthy way to start the day. According to headspace, “We add to our stress by starting our morning in a fight with our alarms, where we eventually concede defeat.” It’s a bad habit and I find myself often spending the next 20 minutes or so repeating mantras in my head in an effort to convince myself that everything is okay…That I am okay. That I am strong and brave and wise. These are also the same affirmations I tell my daughter most nights, hoping to instill what has often been hard for me to accept for myself.

What is anxiety really? It is distinguished by the American Psychological Association (APA) from fear, which is considered an “appropriate” response to “a clearly identifiable and specific threat.” Despite this distinction, I think it’s still fair to say that fear is at the root of most anxiety and that anxiety plays out in all of us to some degree. While society has made tremendous progress in terms of normalizing anxiety and other mental health conditions, it still doesn’t welcome these emotions at the proverbial “table.” It’s still taboo, for example, to talk about anxiety and depression at the lunch table, with your supervisor or at your child’s parent-teacher conference. And therefore, too many people suffer alone.

I’ve been in and out of therapy to treat anxiety for over half of my life. This is hard to admit and yet, I think important to normalize. And I know today’s youth are struggling at even younger ages. The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on youth, for example, has only exacerbated an already horrific downward trend.

With the international climate aflame with strife and violence, I’ve been spending a lot more time thinking about Epigenetics, intergenerational trauma and their impact on mental health. The idea that environmental factors or traumatic events can affect your genes and the way “your body reads and responds to your DNA” is hard to wrap your head around. And yet, I’m seeing it unpacked more and more, not just through a scientific lens, but within the arts, spiritual spaces and even counseling settings.

Now working for a Jewish organization whose mission is to fight hate and antisemitism, I’ve been spending a lot more time thinking about my own family lineage. While I’m sure my anxiety can be attributed to multiple factors, both environmental and genetic, I do wonder if my nervous system is responding, not just to perceived threats in my own life, but to those real threats that my ancestors battled with and against for centuries. How long have ancestors from within all of our communities been fighting off threats such as hate and bigotry and how does this dynamic play out in our bodies today? I wanted to know more. And so, I turned to literature.

I recently finished the novel, The Many Daughters of Afong Moy, by Jamie Ford, and am struck by how the role of Epigenetics is being explored through historical fiction as well. An Asian-American author, Ford unpacks the role of inherited trauma through the female lineage of Afong Moy, the first Chinese woman to set foot in the US in 1834. Ford beautifully weaves together stories of Moy’s descendants, including a nurse in China serving with the Flying Tigers in WWII, a young girl quarantined during an epidemic of bubanic plague in San Francisco in 1900 and Washington’s former poet laureate, Dorothy Moy, who is raising a daughter and fighting for her mental health in 2045. In pursuing an experimental treatment designed to mitigate inherited trauma, Dorothy Moy intimately connects with past generations of women in her family tree. While the novel weaves in elements of mysticism and science fiction, it is beautiful and heart-wrenching and feels very, very real.

When I was living overseas in France in 2010-2011 in my late 20’s, I decided to take advantage of my proximity to Eastern Europe and explore first hand where my family emigrated from and why they might have left. I am the first person in my family (that I’m aware of) to have taken the pilgrimage back to the tiny town in what is now Eastern Slovakia where my family lived, before emigrating to the United States in the 1880’s. Thanks to Wikipedia and the stories passed down from my grandfather with whom I was extremely close, I know that my great-great Uncle, late Rabbi Joseph Hertz was born in Rebrín/Rebrény, Hungary in 1872. This town is presently part of the village of Zemplínska Široká in Slovakia. Hertz emigrated to New York City in 1884 a year or two after his older brother, Emmanuel (my great Grandfather) and their father, Simon came looking for better opportunities, in the face of rising antisemitism at home.

Joseph went on to become the first graduate of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 1894 and would go on to serve as a Rabbi in New York and South Africa. He served his final post as the Chief Rabbi of Great Britain and the Commonwealth from 1913 through two world wars and until his death in 1946.

Every few years I go back and re-read aspects of his story and discover something I didn’t know before. In my latest reading, I learned that in 1920-1921 Rabbi Hertz was the first chief rabbi to undertake a “pastoral tour” of the British empire. His pilgrimage would take him over 40,000 miles and to over 40 Jewish communities around the world, including in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Canada. Just reading this is a reminder that the Jewish diaspora is wide and nuanced, built upon waves of complexity and layers of history, going back to biblical times.

My own personal pilgrimage to the village of Zemplínska Široká in the spring of 2011 took me to a small town that was completely wiped of its Jewish population at the turn of the century. To get there, I took a 10 hour night train from Prague to Košice, a bus from Košice to Michalovce and another smaller bus from Michalovce to Zemplínska Široká. I had arranged beforehand to meet a local historian in Michalovce who was kind enough to drive me to an old, overgrown and abandoned Jewish cemetery outside of town. I wanted to see if I could find the grave of my great aunt’s grandparents who were believed to be buried in that town (hence the photos above and below). While I didn’t find their specific tombstones I did find one with the same family name I was searching for (Friedman). It was remarkable to be that close to my own family story and yet to know so little about what they went through to pave the way for my family light years away.

And here I am in 2023, raising a family of my own in Middletown, CT. As I write these words I question if I am struggling with some existential desire to answer an unspoken cry from my ancestors. What am I in search of that they never found? What inherited trauma has been passed down to me that I must embody and then let pass through me, so that it doesn’t get passed down the family line even further.

How does inherited trauma continue to play out in our own bodies and become experienced as anxiety?

I’m not sure where this search will lead, but I know that I must take a pastoral tour of my own, to understand why and from where our pangs of unworthiness, fear and anxiety stem. I know I am not alone. And I know that the answer lies in 1000 different places.

When I wake up tomorrow though, and find myself at battle with my snooze button, I will try and be just a little kinder to myself and lean into the strengths passed down from generations of ancestors who were likely all just trying to do the same.

לְדוֹר וָדוֹר, l’dor vador, “from generation to generation”
An ancient concept in Judaic scripture generally interpreted to mean that we have a responsibility to pass on teachings from one generation to the next.

A Poem for my Fellow Humans

“In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
Martin Luther King, Jr

I am thousands of miles away and I feel your pain. Your aching. Your cries. The shame. The deafening silence of the world community as you were pulled from your beds, from your homes, last Shabbat and brutally hunted down, literally and figuratively.

I cannot watch the videos. I am living them inside my body. The stories. The sounds. The smells. I am trying to feel them. To bear witness in my own small way.

I am waking up in cold sweats, imagining images of ISIS style torture and beheadings and picturing my child or her friends as victims. The agony. The fear. The insanity.

In my lifetime I have not truly felt the pain of being a Jew until now. Of being hated so deeply that you could become nothing overnight. I’ve been teased, I’ve been mocked and I’ve been laughed at. But I’ve not felt the pain of a massacre in my bedroom. My home. My town. My Synagogue. My most precious spaces.

As bomb threats in the US reverberate online… “you all need to die. If you die, I’ll be happy.” Likely a child who wrote this. A child who has learned to hate. Hate that starts at home. With the jokes and the taunts and the jeers. How young do they start to feel this? Our children. Our babies. How young is a child who feels hate towards a people they do not know. Towards a human who could have been their friend.

What has the world become? That we could feel so desperate, to not just take a life, but to savagely dehumanize a life into mere ashes, in front of their family. Where do we go from here?

A friend sent a quote to me this morning, “the Giants of our past have taught us how to be brave. Jewish persecution is as old as time, but Jewish valor is eternal.”

Shabbat shalom, my friends. May we not rest completely until humanity is restored and our children are safe.

Letting Go

“Healing may not be so much about getting better, as about letting go of everything that isn’t you- all of the expectations, all of the beliefs- and becoming who you are.
Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D.

Sometimes the best thing we can do in life is to take our hands off the steering wheel and let someone else drive. There is a Yiddish expression, “Der Mensch Tracht, Un Gott Lacht,” which translates to “man plans and God laughs.” I have received a lesson in this wisdom over the last month. Less than two weeks before starting my new job, I had an absurd, freak accident which left me with a fractured ankle and what felt like an impossible situation to maneuver. Instead of planning my commute to work, I was planning a pathway to surgery and renegotiating a start date to allow for recovery. Life stopped. And the millions of little things that one moment had been in my control and seemed so important were suddenly whisked away.

Since surgery to repair my ankle, I’ve had to relearn how to go up and down the stairs. My daughter is now getting a kick out of me descending and ascending on my butt like she used to do when learning to become mobile. We are both learning to put on socks and step into shorts together. It is not straightforward. I can empathize with how tired she gets when trying to do it by herself and just wanting to give up and ask for help. Well, now we can help each other.

There have been countless lessons in this “pause” that have inconveniently inserted themselves into my life. I don’t even know where to start. For one, resisting reality or grasping for something different makes everything harder. When the Physician Assistant (PA) in the ER came in to tell me about the results of the x-ray, I was in disbelief. I started rattling off all the things I had planned for the summer and asking if I could still do them. I had plans to take my sister to NYC the next day for her 40th birthday…could we still take the train? Could I still participate in the sprint triathlon I signed up for in August? I had finally found the time to get my bike tuned up after years of it collecting dust in our garage. The PA looked at me funny and said, “well if you want to show up on the day of the race and see how you do, go for it.” (Instead my training of late has consisted of doing light ankle stretches and circles). Okay, so what about this concert or this trip or this baseball game or this adventure, etc? I immediately looked at what I was losing. Perhaps this is fair. There is a lot of loss. Not to mention, money and time and the incredible burden this places on my loved ones to pick up the slack.

But what of the gain? What do I gain from a setback?

In the last month my mind and body have slowed down, literally and figuratively. I’m not able to think much beyond what is right in front of me. At any moment I need to know where my crutches are, what I need to grab in order to sit down, whether it’s time to ice or elevate, etc. I’ve been forced to slow down in a way I didn’t think was possible, and life has not imploded. It’s gotten a bit more confusing and there are additional puzzle pieces we need to maneuver but I’m able to keep up at a pace that feels more realistic.

So what happens in a couple weeks when I can start bearing weight again, when I can commute into work or go for a walk to the mailbox? Yes even getting the mail is a formidable challenge now. Will I start piling things back on slowly, until I can’t catch my breath? Truthfully, I probably will at first. But perhaps this time I’ll connect with the ease of keeping things a bit simpler. After all, it’s not what I’m accomplishing or checking off that dictates my worth, but instead it’s in the “letting go” that I stand to gain the most. Blessings for a smooth week ahead and may you embrace the bumps and cracks along the way.

Meditation on Change

“Open the window of your mind. Allow the fresh air, new lights and new truths to enter.”
Amit Ray

Aging is a funny thing. It happens constantly. In every moment. While we are awake and while we are sleeping. Most of these moments just pass by, unnoticed. It is a natural and inevitable part of life and yet we often fight it. Or at least I fight it.

The gray hairs that start to slip through, harder to hide. Wrinkles on my face. An increase in aches and pains when I don’t work out as much. Or when I do work out. I’m growing older. Most of us don’t have too many outlets to make sense of this process. Instead we buy our way into stopping the aging process. Try this beauty service. Use this jade roller. Meditate more. Eat lighter foods. All of these recommendations on their own are perfectly reasonable and ones we could likely benefit from, but taken together, they feel overwhelming and at times counterproductive.

Our six year old Portuguese water dog, Halligan (aka Hal), was recently diagnosed with aggressive liver cancer. He was given a prognosis of about 1-2 months, if we pursue treatment. And if we don’t pursue treatment then we are looking at weeks or even days. Of course no one can say for sure and the research is spotty but either way you look at it, we have very little time left with him.

How on earth do you process something like this? One moment he’s seemingly healthy, running 2 miles in the woods with us and the next we are talking about comfort measures and how we want to talk to our toddler about mortality. (Tips on this are welcome by the way.)

As I remain hyper vigilant to Hal’s symptoms, I notice that so many of my waking hours are spent in a state of subtle scanning. I think I’m channeling my ancestors and looking for a fire to put out or a threat from neighboring tribes. I’m almost always in problem-solving mode, planning out my week ahead or doing the math on how I’m going to get to my new job on time while “lightly” guiding my daughter through her morning routine. (She’s rounding 3 years old and the concept of “threenager” feels apt.)

As I prepare to return to work full time, I’m asking myself, how did this happen again? I took the last year a half to step back and find a sense of calm and balance from the the frenzied pace I had been moving at. And, yet, if I’m being brutally honest with myself, I think I’ve recalibrated bit by bit so that I’m still following the same patterns just a little less intensely. All of these behaviors I’m sure are adaptive and in place to protect me from unseen threats. However, they are still getting in the way of me being in the here and now.

In this next phase, as I return to work, I want to reflect on what I’ve learned since “Taking a Pause” 20 months ago. In no particular order…

Our relationships are sacred. Our partners, our children, our parents, our colleagues, our neighbors, our friends…They are primary and deserve to be elevated above all else. No work stress or drama or inconsequential, petty argument is worth jeopardizing the connections we’ve built with those around us.
Parenting is hard. Full stop. Give myself grace as the journey continues to unfold.
When I feel cynical, which I do often, try to reframe or consider a new perspective. How am I learning, growing, and stretching through this hard thing? What is another way to look at this moment?
Dream. Imagine. Rest. Allow myself space for rest and creativity. Having just finished Tricia Hersey’s, Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto, I’m moved and saddened by how consumed many of us are by “grind culture.” The oppressive nature that white supremacy and capitalism have on us is dripping in plain sight and yet we can’t see it because we’re too busy grinding away. It’s in our blood and our social makeup, but it doesn’t have to be our fate. We can resist.
It’s okay to not have it all figured out. Multiple times throughout the past year and a half I thought about making major career and life changes. I researched schools, ministries, organizations, yoga teacher training programs, etc. I shadowed, I prayed, I asked for answers.

And…now….I find myself returning to something very familiar, to an organization for which I worked previously. I think my search and quest for change has ironically (or not so ironically) brought me back to where I started so many years ago when I first moved up to CT.

Perhaps though, while I have come full circle in some ways, I have changed in the process. I have grown and surely aged (as is evident by my greys). And hopefully I’ve garnered a little more wisdom about what matters.

In this next chapter for myself and for all of us, may we go easy on ourselves and others. May we see the world for all its beauty and all its pain. May we stop for snuggles and cuddles and belly rubs and know the sky will not fall if we don’t send that last email. Perfectionism is dangerous and a form of violence and is perhaps the biggest threat of all to this messy and sacred process of living.

Sending love and blessings for whatever small or big steps lie ahead.