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One Baby Step at a Time: Seven Secrets of Jewish Motherhood

by Chana (Jenny) Weisberg (Urim Publications, 2007)

Step One
Learning to Value our Mothering Accomplishments

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Step One Introduction

When I was in high school and college, I thought that it was fine for a woman to pursue motherhood as a side dish to career, but certainly not as the main course of life. Women who did so, I believed, were oppressed, unfulfilled, or, at the very best, woefully unliberated.

When, a few years later, motherhood and home did become the spaghetti with meatballs of my life, I had to learn from scratch how to value the way I was spending my days. In the coming essays and excerpts, you will read how I as well as other mothers have learned to ignore the Betty Friedan quoting Women's Studies professors who refuse to evacuate our brains, and have chosen, alternatively, to turn up the volume on what the Torah has to say about the importance of mothering- for the future of our children, the Jewish people, and for our own personal and spiritual growth as well.

Blaah-buster Tidbit: Restocking our Spiritual Tool Box
by Pessy Leah Lester

Being a wife and mother is hard work; harder than any job I've ever had. As a young mother, I felt the truth of that old saying, "Man may work from sun to sun but a woman's work is never done." I was running so fast just to stay in one place. I thought the day would never end.

Over time I gained valuable home management skills from friends, relatives, role models, and counselors. I also gleaned valuable advice from books and magazines. These helpful hints included such things as menu planning, play groups with neighbors, shopping lists, writing it all down, the portable phone, getting as much cleaning and babysitting help as you can…and making time for yourself.

But even after getting organized physically, I still wasn't able to get through the day happily. These management tools may help organize your day, but if you don't have a good attitude towards [managing a home and raising a family], then all the tools, techniques, menus, and lists won't help organize you: body and soul.

I used to resent the amount of work I had to do in the home. I thought being a mother meant I would be eternally doomed to loads of dirty laundry, tied to the stove with ball and chain, and forever changing diapers. But that's not necessarily the case. I realized I could be the kind of wife and mother I choose to be. I could be a happy mother or a miserable mother; it is merely a matter of attitude. An older and experienced mother in my community with a dozen or so children once told me, "You can get through the day laughing or crying. It's easier (and nicer) to laugh."

…Well beyond physical help and management skills, most women today in their early childbearing years also need a mental and spiritual tool box. I used to pride myself on how well I could fix things around the house and looked fondly upon the box of tools my father assembled for me before I went to college…but I came to realize that my mental tool kit was bare, so I started to assemble some suggestions and reminders to keep me going, one baby step at a time….

Mindful Motherhood: Four Tools for the Prevention of Emotional Orphans by Chana (Jenny) Weisberg

When I was a student at Bowdoin College in Maine just over a decade ago, I had a few friends who were education majors. I would tell them that I would never want to be a teacher, since I was certain that whatever I would be doing in the world, it would be something BIG- involving nationwide policies, working in the Congress, or (this was my real dream) influencing and ultimately saving the whole entire world. In my sophomore year of college, Thomas Pickering, a Bowdoin graduate who was at the time the US Ambassador to the United Nations, came to speak with the undergraduates. I don't remember a thing he said. I only remember how inspired I was by his presence, and how he represented the fulfillment of my highest possible aspiration- that one day, many years from then, I would stand behind the podium in that same auditorium, and be the kind of person that college students would also dream to become.

To this end, I majored in Russian and Government, and became fixated on the Soviet Union- traveling many times to Russia, memorizing the intricate hierarchy of the Soviet government, and spending hundreds of hours watching the Soviet news via satellite with a notebook balanced in my lap to mark down new vocabulary words. I thought that after graduation I would work for the Foreign Service, or the State Department, or something like that, and climb my way up. Well, needless to say, my life has followed a very different path from the one I had envisioned for myself.

My life as a mother is not only not big- it is absolutely microscopic. My life centers not around shaping countries, regions, or even cities, but rather around my teensy weensy daughters, and watching them grow, ever so slowly, into infinitesimally more grown up human beings, And this process is often as slow and as thankless for long stretches of time as sitting and waiting on Friday afternoon for a ten-liter pot of chicken soup to boil.

This week, Rebbetzin Yemima Mizrachi reminded us in her class on the weekly Torah portion that the Torah says that Abraham died when he was "zaken ba b'yamim," [Genesis 24:1] which literally means "old and coming with days." The Sefat Emet explains that the phrase "coming with days" refers to the fact that when we die, each one of our days will come along with us to Heaven, to testify whether we actually got the fullest potential out of every day, or whether we just let the Heaven sent opportunities in our lives slip through our fingers. The Sefat Emet explains that Abraham's days came with him when he died, and testified that he succeeded in finding the point of light hidden in each and every day, the mini-mission from God for that particular day- to give charity that Thursday, to preach monotheism to a nomadic tribe the following Sunday, and so on.

In some ways, "coming with days," getting the most out of every moment, has become much easier since I've become a mother. With my writing in the mornings, for example- I know that I have exactly two and a half, maybe three hours of writing until my baby wakes up, so I am efficient. I don't make phone calls in the middle, I don't even run downstairs for an apple despite my rumbling belly. I write as though I am half-way through a final exam, and there is only half an hour left to go. This is in comparison with the dreamy distraction with which I used to write my college papers- taking a break to go to the student union to buy a package of Doritos, or to skim an unrelated article in a journal from which I was quoting.

The same is true when I attend my weekly class on the books of Ezra and Nechemia. Early every Thursday morning, I take my baby to a babysitter, take my kids to nursery school and kindergarten, and, boy, do I enjoy that morning of classes. You can't even compare the intensity of that enjoyment with when I was single and spent a few years learning Torah every day for the entire day. All Thursday morning I am sitting on the edge of my seat, utterly fascinated, afraid to miss a single word. And I spend the rest of the week thinking about the class and telling my husband about all the amazing things I learned about the Persian Empire and the construction of the Second Temple during those four short hours.

I was also in a "coming with days" mode last Thursday when my mother-in-law, who is visiting for a few weeks, offered to watch the kids so that my husband and I could go for the night to Tel Aviv. This is the first time in five years that we have gone anywhere overnight totally on our own, and the intensity with which we enjoyed each other's company and appreciated the treat of this rare solitary outing was off the charts. We walked on the beach, and then through the market, pointing out all the ways in which our neighborhood market in Jerusalem is superior to the one in Tel Aviv, and then stopped at a restaurant where they served our meal in old frying pans, and we just talked and joked and had the greatest time. We used to go to Tel Aviv once every few months when we were dating and newly married. It was also fun, but you can't even compare the fun we had then with the fun we had on this trip. This was eat the chicken, lick the bone clean, and suck out the marrow fun.

On the other hand, there are ways in which "coming with days" is infinitely harder for me now that I am a mother- in particular, when I come back from my brief getaways at the computer, in class, and to Tel Aviv, and find myself face-to-face with my children. On my worst days, I am eating lunch with my two-year-old and reading a magazine, my kids are in the living room and I am cleaning the kitchen, my four-year-old is telling me about her day, and I am telling her to wait just one moment while I make a phone call.

I am not saying that I aspire to always be totally focused on my children when they are home. It is important that my children develop patience and learn to respect my need to engage in activities during the day that are not connected to them, such as filling the dishwasher, returning a call from a friend, or saying my morning prayers. What I am referring to is getting into a mothering pattern where I am never ever really with my children even when I am with them. At times, I can go through a whole day of motherhood and realize that there was not even a ten-minute span during which I was totally tuned in and listening to each one of my children. Ten minutes for each child during which I was fully focused on what I am trying to accomplish as a mother- in my life's mission as educator, role model, and spiritual guide for my children.

The following are ideas that I have collected from teachers, books, and friends that I maintain at all times in my brain's glove compartment for frequent emergency retrieval. These reminders have helped me (on my good days) to maintain an inspired "coming with days" mentality- meaning a present mommy, a mommy on a mission, a mommy I can feel proud of being.

Reminder # 1: Before You Know it, they'll be Grown Up

I find it helpful to remind myself that the intensely demanding period of mothering young children is crucial to our children's development and over far too quickly. I am the worst kind of mother when I focus on the eternity of hours and minutes that I will spend taking care of children in the coming decades. When in this mode, I approach my days as obstacles to get through with as little effort as possible, each and every day a stretch of supermarathon through rural, frostbitten Northern Ohio.

Something I do to pull myself out of this uninspired, distracted state is to think about the amount of weekday hours I actually spend with my kids. Even as a stay-home mother, I figured out that between nursery school, and time spent with dad, I spend only fifteen hours a week with my two older girls.

The first time I realized this, it was quite an eye-opener, realizing that I have only fifteen hours with my daughters over the course of the week to educate them, to hear about what they have on their minds, to actively get nachas from these amazing girls who far exceed my wildest pre-motherhood dreams. And this knowledge makes me really focus on getting as much mothering into those few hours as possible- making an effort to consciously enjoy their company while we are together instead of ignoring them the whole afternoon while I peel carrots and rearrange the fridge.

If I'm maintaining the right frame of mind, then I find it much easier to give my children my full attention, giving them my mind and heart, and not only a head that nods and a mouth that exclaims "wow!" to their stories while my mind is wandering around the outer stratosphere. When I am in a present and mindful state, and Tiferet reminds me with wide-open eyes about the volunteer at the Zoo who wrapped the boa constrictor around her neck, and told her the tragic life story of the bird with the broken wing, then I find I am able to really listen to what she is saying, while remembering what an incredible thing it is that God gave me a daughter who is so curious and enthusiastic about the world around her.

Another thing that I remind myself is something that our parenting class teacher, Rebbetzin Talya Helfer, told us- that these few years of baby and toddlerhood followed by nursery and elementary school are the time when mothers can have the most influence on their children in terms of values, education, and love of Judaism. She reported from her own personal experience as the mother and grandmother of a large clan, that, "Before you know it, they'll be home less and less- playing at friends houses, going off to high school, and then getting married. When they are little is your chance to make a difference in their lives!"

Mental snapshots can also be a helpful tool. If, let's say, I'm eating lunch with my kids and I'm in a blah, distracted mood, I find it incredibly helpful to take a mental picture of us sitting there, in order give myself a self-administered high-dose injection of nachas. This causes me to realize something along the lines of, "Wow, this is a truly incredible moment. What a wonderful thing it is to have this quiet time together with Tiferet and Nisa, just the three of us schmoozing and eating tuna sandwiches on whole-wheat pita for lunch."

Or, at other times, I imagine a snapshot of my husband and me sitting on the sofa by ourselves in thirty years, sort of happy to have earned a few decades of relative rest and quiet, but also sad- missing all the little people who used to share the house with us, the way they used to sit on our laps during Shabbat dinner, and never failed to give us something to laugh about.

Reminder # 2: Connect Mundane Mothering Moments with Long-Term Goals (i.e., Secrets of the Madwoman Mutterer)

Rebbetzin Yemima taught us this week that when the Israelites were running away from the Egyptians, the Torah says, "The desert closed in on them," [Exodus 14:3] but the same verse could also mean "The speaking closed for them" (Midbar read as Medaber). When our ancestors were in Egypt, and when each one of us finds herself in our own personal Mitsraim (literally meaning closed-in narrow straits) - in depression, anger, fear, powerlessness, despair- then we can often release ourselves from this difficult situation by opening up our mouths, and speaking to God.

Yemima says, "The Israelites did not have time to breathe, they were working so hard. They didn't even have time to sigh! Their mouths were closed, and so was their connection with God. Today we are in a similar situation to those slaves in Egypt. We spend our days fully occupied with work, children, school, the dishes, and the laundry, so that we can barely lift up our heads to breathe. Also our husbands are working at slave labor of various kinds. And, for many of us, our ability to speak is essentially in exile. We don't have the strength to pray, and to request, to speak from our hearts with those around us and with God." So, the ticket out of Egypt is to speak, to just talk to God while we're going about our days, from the depths of our hearts- or even about whatever little splinter of a thing is under our skin at the moment.

Yemima also taught us that the word mitzvah is related to the word "tsavta" or together, because when we do a mitzvah, we form a team with God. Therefore, one of the best, most effective times to engage in this spontaneous prayer is when we are involved in performing a commandment, and the truth is that it is pretty hard to catch us Jewish mothers involved in anything else. It's a mitzvah to do anything involved in taking care of children, taking care of our homes, or even making money in order to support our families. You holy pregnant women are the best, since you are at all times fulfilling God's first command in the history of the universe, "Be fruitful and multiply!" This means you could be sleeping, or getting a manicure, or even just standing in line at the post office, and you are in a constant state of mitzvah, a starting player on God's All-Star team.

Therefore, I often find myself muttering like a madwoman- when I'm making ponytails in the morning, I call out: "God, please help Nisa to stop biting the other kids in nursery school." Or, when I'm folding laundry, I plead: "God, please help Dafna to get to sleep earlier so that she won't be so tired and grouchy in the morning."

Any program without clear goals, whether in education, marketing, or self-improvement, will get far off track or flop altogether. The same is true about a family. Spontaneous prayer is the main way in which I stay in touch with my goals, so that I don't lose my days in a morass of nonstop demands and details unfocused by my ultimate dreams and aspirations for my children and for the kind of mother I hope to be.

Two thumbs up for madwoman muttering- it makes the time fly, makes your life better, and I can personally testify that it truly works wonders.

Reminder #3: Recognize your Mothering Accomplishments

If I actually had become the Ambassador to the UN (even though, today, the image of myself in a power suit with a briefcase instead of in a spit-up spotted denim jumper with a diaper bag over my shoulder seems impossibly ridiculous) my days would have been marked by accomplishments such as successful meetings with the dictators of small African countries, convincing interviews with CNN, and maybe even an occasional promotion to head a subcommittee or two.

But as a mother, my natural tendency is unfortunately to let my day flow uncharted from the first diaper change of the day to the last peanut butter sandwich for tomorrow's lunch packed away five minutes past my bedtime. Let's look at the year 2001, for example. That was a year during which I did not give birth, that I was not pregnant, that I was home with baby Tiferet. In short, I remember absolutely nothing about the year 2001. It is a year during which I am certain that I nursed Tiferet thousands of times, and washed thousands of dishes, and brushed thousands of little teeth. It is a year that has absolutely disappeared into a black hole somewhere behind my cerebellum.

In more recent years, I have been combating this life disappearing into black holes phenomenon through my writing. I dedicate a morning to describing a certain struggle, a difficulty, a fleeting mothering victory, and it makes it real for me. It makes me feel that within the blur of pregnancies, births, and mothering that the last six years of my life has been, that there is form and shape and, even, upon occasion, a bit of progress.

To give you an example, I have been struggling with a terrible problem for the past year and a half. My three-year-old loves her baby sister so much that she constantly wants to pick her up and carry her around. The problem is that, from time to time, the three-year-old remembers that she also a little bit hates the baby, so she drops her. That means that the baby is hysterical whenever her sister picks her up, since she is so terribly afraid that this will be one of the few times when she gets dropped.

I am also a nervous wreck whenever the older sister is holding the baby, since the baby screams, not without justification, and I am scared for her. I have been at a total loss about what to do. Telling the older sister never to pick up her sister is not a good solution, since almost all the time the three-year-old is very good with the baby, and I do so want them to learn to get along. I asked a bunch of older, more experienced mothers and parenting experts about what to do, and I prayed a lot for a solution, and then, last week, I realized that it had been weeks since this pick up the baby till she screams scenario had played itself out. I don't know when it stopped, or why- whether I finally followed the right advice or whether my kids simply grew out of it, but I realized that these two girls now play very nicely together, and that their interactions don't stress me out like they used to.

This is something that basically turned every afternoon of my life into a stress-fest for a year and a half, and despite that, it has disappeared with absolutely no fanfare. I mentioned this transformation to my husband in passing over plates of lasagna, and felt a bit happy about it for a moment or two. But there was no real recognition for something that, for me, was way up there as an all time success and revolution in my brief but intense mothering career.
Dr. Miriam Adahan, therefore, suggests that mothers should make a point of commending themselves for a job well done. You got everyone to bed without losing your cool, you managed to clean the kitchen even though you are tired and pregnant, you taught your toddler to identify her nose as well as her bellybutton, then you should commend yourself with a note, an ice cream cone, or just a nice silent word to yourself (and husband?) on your accomplishment. Because, the fact of the matter is that if you don't give yourself a bit of recognition for a job well done, nobody will. And my way of commending myself is that I write about it, as I just did here, and it makes me feel like, upon occasion, I'm doing something right.

Teacher Leah Golomb gave me another idea about how to commend ourselves for our teensy daily accomplishments. She told me that when she was engaged to her husband, she and her friend Dina stood together as Dina set out the white cloth she was going to use to make Leah's wedding dress. Dina took the scissors in her hand, and as she cut into the fabric she declared, "L'shem mitzvat hachnasat kallah" or "In honor of the mitzvah of marrying off the bride." Leah describes how this simple statement moved her so much that it brought tears to her eyes, seeing how Dina's declaration transformed the mundane tasks of cutting and sewing and embroidering into mitzvot, infusing Dina with awareness of the holiness and greater purpose of what she was doing.

And we as mothers can do the same thing in order to appreciate the bigness of the small acts of our mothering lives. As I walk to pick up Dafna from kindergarten, I can say, "L'shem mitzvat gemilut chasadim," "In honor of the mitzvah of Performing Acts of Lovingkindness," as I fry up scrambled eggs for dinner for the third time this week, I can whisper into the frying pan, "L'shem mitzvat ahavta l're'acha kamocha," "In honor of the mitzvah or Loving Your Neighbor as Yourself," as I sew a button onto Tiferet's favorite Shabbat dress, I can declare to everybody in my household, "L'shem yichud Kudsha Breech Hu v'Shchinatei" "In order to unite the Holy One with the Divine Presence"- the mystical result of every good deed we perform.

Sounds silly? Probably. Will it work? It does for me. This is one of the best ways I have found to remain present throughout my day, and constantly (or at least occasionally) aware of the importance of the smallest acts of mothering kindness.

Reminder #4: Time Spent with Children is a Luxury

Most of the mothers I know are married, stable financially (or at least managing to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table), and able to invest a good part of their day to being loving mothers towards their children. It's in this kind of environment that it's probably easiest to take the simple pleasures of motherhood for granted. Recently, though, I've been hearing some things that have made me realize that this normalcy I take for granted is far from normal. A recent study on the modern family from Yale University, for example, reported that just over a hundred years ago there was a huge increase in babies born out of wedlock among Christians in Europe, which resulted in a sort of large scale state-sponsored policy of infanticide.

In the year 1850 in Vienna, for example, half of all babies were born out of wedlock, which meant that those babies were almost universally given away to orphanages, where about 60 percent were expected to die as a result of substandard conditions. In France of the same period, nursing was thought to be very damaging to the health of mother, so the majority of babies were sent out for the first year of life to be wet-nursed by poorer women. The problem was that these poorer women lived in drafty, unsanitary houses, and as a result 40-60 percent of these wet-nursed babies ended up dying. The writer of the study quips about how this served as a way to limit population growth despite the high birth rate. Beyond horror.

Then this week I met a social worker who works with prostitutes in Berlin. There are tens of thousands of these prostitutes, who are often mothers from Southeast Asia and the former Soviet Union, who leave their families behind in order to earn money to support them. Often, these women think they are coming to Berlin to work as waitresses, or nannies, and then are forced into prostitution. Others know they will be working as prostitutes, but do not realize that they will be confined to their rooms, beaten, and cheated out of the money they earn by their pimps.

When the social worker talks with these women, she offers them the possibility of asylum in a safe house, or the opportunity to press legal charges against the traffickers who misled them. But what these prostitutes fear most of all is being deported by the German authorities, and the hunger and terrible poverty that awaits them and their children if they return home empty-handed.

And there are all the heartbreaking stories with which we are all too familiar: the poor mother who has to place her child in unreliable daycare from morning till night in order to make ends meet, the armies of women who are never able to have children, or who never get married despite years of searching. Not to mention the millions of tragic deaths every year from hunger and AIDS- over five million children dying in 2004 from malnutrition, and 500,000 children dying that same year from AIDS, which has already left fifteen million children orphaned of one or both parents.

 

From the little secluded world that I call home, my life feels extraordinarily run of the mill. But it's really not ordinary at all; a happy, healthy child, and a happy, healthy mother who is able to take care of her child is increasingly becoming a deviation from the norm, nearly a freak of nature.

In short, the best advice I got on preventing our children from becoming emotional orphans was from the rabbi of our synagogue, Rabbi Aaron Leibowitz. He said that if you look closely at the prophets in the Bible, you realize that they focus less on predicting the future than on seeing what's happening in the present in a clear way- seeing what God wants them to be doing at that very moment, as well as that action's long-term impact on the Jewish people. So, I bless all of you mothers that we should always be able to see the present clearly, to see the opportunities for Jewishly educating and connecting with our children hidden in each of our mothering days, as well as the long-term impact of these days on us, on our children, and on the future of the Jewish people. And please bless me too that I should always remember that even though my college will absolutely never invite me back to address the undergraduates, that what I am doing with all these days of mothering is in fact very, very big.

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Also in Section One: Personal essays "The Heroine in Everywoman" and "Sitting in My Garden" as well as inspirational readings from authors Sarah Shapiro and Gila Manolson