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

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

Step Three:
Figuring out What we Need to be Happy

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Several years ago, I attended a class that changed my life. The rabbi told a story about a mother of twelve kids who ran her home very efficiently and was generally in a good mood. When this rabbi asked her how she managed to be in such high spirits considering all of the responsibilities upon her, she explained to him that many years before she had decided that if she was a single mother, she would do what she needed to get everything done. And this switch in attitude, to deciding that she alone is responsible for her own home and happiness, changed her life. She sat down, and decided what she needed to do in order to be effective as well as happy in her life as a mother, and she did it.

After I heard this story, I made a list of what I needed to be able to mother my children, manage my home, and still be a happy person. I wrote down that I needed a cleaning lady once a week, I needed to spend two hours at the library every Thursday reading the Torah portion, and I needed to stop making a cooked dinner on weekdays (what a relief to realize at the age of thirty that the nutritional content of food is not determined by its temperature).

While these requirements for happiness have evolved over the years, taking responsibility for my own home and emotional state have improved my experience of motherhood tremendously. On a smaller level, at stressful times like the day before school starts or the morning before Rosh Hashana, I find it helpful to take a minute to do a happiness check. Usually I realize that what I need to stop feeling like a martyr is simple: I need to take a fifteen-minute nap, I need to buy a honey cake for the holiday instead of making one, I need to put the baby in the carriage and go on a walk through the market to get some fresh air and buy a few green peppers.

We have all heard the prayer, "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference." While this prayer is especially popular among recovering alcoholics, it is an extremely important prayer, as well, for mothers like you and me. For us, as well, there are aspects of motherhood that are undeniably tough and that we will have to learn to accept one way or another, but there are many other difficult, draining aspects of motherhood that we can change, and often fail to do so.

The greatest gift we can give our families (and ourselves) is a mother who is thriving physically, spiritually, and emotionally. The essays in this chapter describe hard times- being run-down, depressed, exhausted and frustrated…and it also suggests ways to pull ourselves and our families out of the darkness.

Blaah-Busting Tidbit: A Jewish Mother's Highs and Lows

by Rebbetzin Feige Twerski (Reprinted with permission from Aish.com, a popular Judaism website)

I am having a very difficult time right now. I feel almost as if I have hit some sort of spiritual plateau. I am an observant Jew who didn't grow up in a religious home. I spent a year learning at a seminary in Israel, came home and got married. And now I am the lucky mother of two. While I love my children more than anything, I can't help but wonder about my new role in life. I feel like I just don't know who I am anymore, or what I am supposed to do. I used to enjoy praying; now I struggle every morning just to recite the morning blessings. I feel very discouraged, and I feel like I am failing as a Jew. And I don't feel like I am all that successful at being a mother either. I do not understand how a busy mother can still have a close relationship with God. I know the woman has a special role in Judaism... but right now I am struggling greatly in understanding it. Please help.
-Anonymous

One of the occupational hazards of the "seminary experience" or any extensive and intense learning endeavor is that it is often difficult to translate it into day-to-day living.

The transition from the halls of study, from the enchantment of dreams and aspirations, to the reality of neverending mundane tasks and responsibilities is, as you describe it, a very rude awakening. It is a most daunting challenge to find coherence, congruence and cohesiveness between the lofty halls of spiritual learning and the pragmatic, less than inspired existence that a young mother finds herself struggling with daily.

I cannot offer you a panacea, but I can tell you that what has to drive everything we do in life must respond to the simple question, "What does the Almighty want of me?"…

Transitioning into the nurturing role of wife and mother, creating a home where the focus is on the thriving of others, requires a total paradigm shift - from the focus of "me" to "them." The adjustment can be quite traumatic and might feel as though one is losing herself and her identity in the process. Compared to the productive pre-family days, our mundane oriented days may feel like a waste of time and, as some women report, like a softening of their brain power. Indeed, the legitimate question is, "What did our glorious education prepare us for? Diapers? Dishes? Vacuuming? Sitting home as our men walk off into their daily spiritual horizons and leave us behind?"
Establishing a happy home is the hardest job. It is a counterculture move in a narcissistic society. A contemporary thinker put it this way, "How do we access the nature of essential obligation in a society that sees only personal freedom?" Focusing on home and family requires a paradigm shift from the ideal to the practical, from the talk to the walk. It requires mobilizing all of the inner strength and resources available to consciously and deliberately, with unflinching determination, make every day a good day. When we succeed (and nobody is successful all of the time), in spite of the resistance of both the culture's alien values and the treachery of our inner ego, we will feel the exhilaration and the true joy that can only come of being in the right place and doing the right thing.
I suggest, my dear reader, that you consider the following:

1) "Grow where you are planted." Recognize that the life you have is not arbitrary, but orchestrated from above and hence is, at this moment, the context to which you must bring your finest efforts.

2) Make a list of the blessings in your life and post them where you can see them. They will help you gain perspective in your low moments.

3) Think in your mind's eye of how you would attend to your given role if you loved it and try to behave that way. Invoke the never failing principle that "internal feelings are shaped by external behavior."

4) Join a study group consisting of women like you and continue to learn. It will energize and invigorate you and provide the balance that we all need.

5) Long sessions of prayer may not be in the cards for this season of your life but you can fill your abbreviated encounters with feeling and concentration. Be assured that [many] Torah authorities…state that the mother of young children fulfills her formal prayer obligation with the recitation of the morning blessings. Carrying on your own extemporaneous dialogue with the Almighty throughout the day is a wonderful means of connection. "Know Him in all your ways" has been rendered to mean, "connect [with God] every step along the way -- while dressing the baby, baking a cake, vacuuming the living room, shopping for clothes, food marketing, etc." Any and every moment is an opportunity to connect.

6) Take care of yourself physically. Eat well and set aside time for some form of exercise, a walk around the block, etc. Breathe fresh air. Align yourself with the beautiful world of nature around you. There is indisputably a mind, body, and spirit connection. If the body is tended to and healthy, the mind and spirit function is enhanced as well.

7) Credit yourself for all the victories, big and small. "The task of building eternity in the medium of fluid transience" is a mega-huge challenge. In order to maintain our perseverance, given all the stresses along the way, we must give ourselves credit for the daily victories even if they appear miniscule in our sight. Keep a list of all the times you are able to get a momentary clear glimpse of what will ultimately matter despite all the factors that work overtime to cloud your vision.

8) Take it from someone who's been around the block a few times, enjoy and make the most of these wonderful years. They go by so fast. Before you know it, you'll be revisiting this stage, these young formative years in your family's life in picture albums alone. Your heart will ache with nostalgia for the "good old days," days where you can be everything to your children, the smartest, the best, the most beautiful, etc.-- times when "my mother says so" makes you an authority on everything. As you know, we can never turn the clock or the calendar back. Despite the demanding intensity of your current household, do your best to relish the moment. Keep a notebook handy to record the cute and often insightful remarks of your children. Share them with your husband, and take delight together.

9) I guarantee you that, with God's help, there will be seasons in the future that will allow you to do all that which attending to your first priority now does not allow for. Be careful not to squander the "now" of your life. It can never be replaced.
In conclusion, I'd like to leave you with two thoughts. A noted authority remarked that situational depression is a product of when "time is passing and the journey is not progressing, the soul feels the cold hand of death. Depression is no less than a minor experience of death itself. That's why it is so painful." Recognizing that you are making the right choices and engaging the appropriate journey is the only effective antidote.

Secondly, the Zohar, the classic Kabbalistic work, offers the following guiding insight. Commenting on the verse in Genesis, "and He called the light day," he suggests that all of us can choose to transform even darkness to "day" by the light that we infuse it with. The challenge for all of us is to bring the light of joy and positive affect to whatever season of life we find ourselves in. Let us try our utmost not to give darkness any claim to the precious moments of our life.

Parenting Class Happiness

This past Sunday I woke up to a disappointment. It's probably not what you would call a major disappointment, but when you expect something and hope for it with all your heart, and then you find your hopes go kerplop, two-year-old got into the fridge and dropped the egg carton on the kitchen floor style, it's so hard to maintain perspective.

So I knew that this was a Sunday morning that I definitely had to go to Rebbetzin Talia Helfer's parenting class for a serious pep talk. I've been going to Rebbetzin Talia's classes for about three years now, and every single week it is a huge struggle for me to give up a morning at the computer in order to go. There have been weeks and even months at a time that the sneaky voice that lives inside my head has convinced me that really I am doing just great as a mother, and that I'm certainly not in such bad shape that I need to give up a precious hour-and-a-half of prime kidless writing time to go to a parenting class. But over the years I have learned to identify the voice's wily ways, and over and over I have learned the hard way what longtime classmate Yikrat Friedman expressed so succinctly: "If you don't go to Rebbetzin Talia's class, you gain the morning, but you lose the afternoon."

Years ago, Rebbetzin Talia told us that every mother has days when she is on top of the horse, a maternal Napoleon mothering her children with confidence, enthusiasm, and joy in her heart. And there are other days when she is on the ground, underneath the horse, feeling down, or low-energy, or lacking in self-esteem, and it is on those days that she is in serious danger of being trampled by that same horse. That is, if her children don't get to her first. I see over and over in my own life that staying on top of that horse is the greatest challenge I face in my life as a mother, and every week, when I manage to pull myself away from the computer for that hour and a half, I come home from Rebbetzin Talia safe in the saddle for a few more days.

I am especially in need of Rebbetzin Talia, and these frequent boosts back into the saddle, because I grew up believing that a dignified, impressive, intelligent woman was by definition a career woman: a lawyer, a clinical psychologist, the chair of a sociology department. And when I see Rebbetzin Talia, her very presence reminds me that today I live in a world where mothers are considered some of the most dignified, impressive, and intelligent women around- the future of the Torah and the next generation of the Jewish people in our hands. Every week that I go to Rebbetzin Talia, she picks me up firmly by the scruff of my neck, removes me from that old world, and plants me firmly in this new one. Through her eyes, she makes me see myself differently. When she looks at me I remember that I am not just a mother, I am a MOTHER.

By the end of each class, Rebbetzin Talia has gotten me so worked up that I rush home to pack up all my kiddies for a festive Rosh Chodesh trip to the science museum, or to start a new sticker chart to encourage putting cereal bowls in the sink. Under Rebbetzin Talia's tutelage, my highest aspiration becomes making my children's lives into an ongoing theme party- with Torah and Mitzvot replacing ballerinas in pink tutus and Ninja Turtles.

So, much in need of a pick-me-up, I spent this past Sunday morning learning from Rebbetzin Talia about the importance of instilling in our children a sense of malchut, or kingship. She explained, first of all, how a king is never lacking anything. When he sits down to eat he is never lacking salt or a salad fork or his bottle of ketchup; he lives with a profound sense that he has everything he wants and needs. And this is how we need to live as well, and how we should raise our children- with the understanding that the lives we are living as Torah-observant Jews are the best lives on the planet, lives of abundance and fun and light.

She talked about bringing this kingship into our homes and the daily life of our children. She described the kitchen cabinets overflowing with food- even if that means stocking up during the sale on generic cornflakes and vanilla wafers. She described the kitchen table set aesthetically for lunch with a tablecloth and silverware, grapes arranged above the peanut butter and jelly sandwich in a rainbow. And who cares if the dirty dishes from breakfast and last night's dinner are piled on the porch? She described telling the boy in his tsitsit [ritual fringes], and the girl with her shoes on the right feet, that they are really looking the part of prince and princess to the greatest King.

Rebbetzin Talia told us that she used to live in a neighborhood where hers was by far the strictest family in terms of religious observance, to the extent that her children were socially isolated and very different from everybody else around. Her grown daughter, who today is already a mother of several children, told her recently that when she left her house each day, and climbed the thirty-six steps leading up to the street, she would feel prouder and prouder with each step as she thought of the home she came from.

At that point, Rebbetzin Talia gave us a fierce, rousing look and told us that as Jews, we live lives full of "Light and Life!" That every day we must fulfill the verse, "Yismachu b'malchutcha," "They will rejoice in Your kingship." All the people in the whole world are living in the house of the King, but how many of them are actually aware of it as we are (or at least try to be, at least from time to time)? If we had to choose any life to live, this is the one we would choose.

What a difference this awareness could make for us and for our children as well! Imagine what it would be like to grow up in a house where the mother feels that she is raising princes and princesses in the house of the King, versus what it would be like to grow up in a house where the mother feels that she is surrounded by a bunch of runny-nosed pests in an overpriced three-room apartment with a nasty landlord?

It's like our Sages teach us- everything is from God, except for fear of God. God sends us our children, our financial situation, our spouses, our realities, our disappointments, and our joys- but it is totally up to us to see God in what happens or not. We can go around life feeling deprived and taken advantage of, but what we are supposed to do (and I am finding this very hard to do at this disappointing moment in my life) is to see God not only in the "miracles" and the amazing coincidences and the things that work out so amazingly at the last minute, but also to see God in the heartbreaks, and in the things that discourage us to tears, and that make us feel totally and absolutely alone in the Universe.

I have learned over the years that perceiving God's role in my life, seeing that I am living in the house of the King, is one of the greatest challenges I face as a Jewish mother. I was thinking about this yesterday afternoon when Dafna and I went on our own to the Western Wall. Taking the children on outings one on one is one of my favorite things in the world, and yesterday afternoon I loved being able to listen undistracted to Dafna's running commentary on everything we saw, buying her an ice-cream as tall as her forearm, and feeling her warm little hand tucked firmly inside mine as we walked down the steps to the Western Wall plaza.

At the security check, we ran into a group of about a hundred Americans in their early twenties, and I started talking with one young woman from New Jersey who told me this group had come with Birthright, the incredible program that has brought tens of thousands of young people to Israel for the first time on a free trip.

So I asked this young woman if she had ever seen the Wall, and she said, "No." And I was just so moved to be with her at that moment. A Jewish woman who had never even seen the Western Wall! But the fact of the matter is that she didn't seem especially excited, and in general few people have such moving, cathartic experiences at their first visit to the permanent residence of the Divine Presence. I remember going to the Old City for the first time twelve years ago and feeling like the Jewish Quarter was totally plastic, like it was an Epcot Center version of Jerusalem. It left me colder than cold. It left me frozen.

Other people remember being harassed by beggars their first time at the Wall, or being yelled at for wearing a halter top, or generally having absolutely no idea what the big deal was all about. And now, a decade later, I just approach the Wall, and my heart already melts. But it has taken a decade of learning and praying and motherhood in order for me to sense the holiness that resides among this pile of rocks that is overgrown with caper bushes and that, if you get too close, smells more like sweat than incense.

Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach used to tell a story about a man from a small village in Poland who moved to Jerusalem because a visiting Jerusalem rabbi had said that there were diamonds and rubies lining the streets here. After a few months, the man tracked down the same rabbi, and told him angrily that since he'd moved to Jerusalem he hadn't seen even one opal or emerald anywhere. And the rabbi just smiled and said, "Oh, but you will." And it was true, a few years later he also saw the diamonds and the rubies that the rabbi had told him of so many years before.

But at that moment, when life is just happening, and moving by, it's so hard to see that we are living in the house of the King and raising His children, to see the jewels lining the streets. At the moment that I am microwaving veggie hotdogs, or that my wallet has just been stolen, or that I am on my way to buy a loaf of bread and breathing in car exhaust, I just don't see it (yes, even in the Holy City). Even though, I know on a theoretical level that God is out there somewhere, I spend the vast majority of my life feeling like I am totally, absolutely on my own, on a solo mission to 120 with my husband and kids. On rare occasions, after the fact, sometimes I do figure it out. A few hours, or days, or years later I start to get it, I get a little dose of clarity, a glimpse of God's role in my life, before I fall back into a thick swampy fog of existential solitude.

And, wow, is it hard to see and feel the Kingship all around us like Rebbetzin Talia shows us to. To see the diamonds and the rubies on the streets of our hometowns, in our homes, and in the eyes and the words of these children God sends us. And in the disappointments too, all the emeralds hidden inside the yolks of the eggs that go kerplop on the kitchen floor.

Also in Section Three: personal essays "Burnt Out Mommy in a Treetop" and "Gaping Black Hole" as well as readings from Sarah Chana Radcliffe and on coping with postpartum depression