Clearing space for tiny sparks

I am starting some new habits. Small daily practices, if you will. Until last week the only consistent actions I did each day without fail were brushing my teeth and drinking my coffee after I drop off the kids. Everything else either happened or it didn't. There was no schedule. There were just wide open days that were either productive or they weren't. It felt like bumbling. Made me long for the days when I worked in an office and someone managed me. 

WHAT? Yes, I just wrote that. Because working from home as an artist can feel very sloppy. I am constantly distracted by the laundry, the unmade beds, the thought of dinner and the empty refrigerator, the lives of the three children I manage, the lives of my friends near and far, the news, the gremlins in my own mind that are often mean and outspoken.  And this feeling like it all has to be perfect and lead to a final piece or product so there's no room to play. I know that sounds counter-intuitive - needing structure so I can relax and play. But imagine a room with hundreds of toys on the floor. My kids might jump in but then quickly feel overwhelmed and step to the side. Or more than likely they would look at the mess and whine that there's nothing to do. I need a system to manage the internal and external chaos. I need a schedule. I need deadlines. I need an order of operations. I need daily motivation and daily inspiration. I need all these things to help me quiet the distractions and allow my imagination to breathe.  It turns out the sloppy bumbling nature of my day is making me unproductive and actually stressing me out. So last week I started a daily practice to add more structure and rhythm to my life, the idea being that a daily practice, not related to my creative work, creates a space for ideas to spark. And I tell you, it is working already.

I decided I would wake up at 6 am every morning and do 20 minutes of yoga. A few months ago I signed up for this service called YogaGlo and it is fantastic, when I actually use it. You pay a monthly fee which is less than the cost of a one hour class in some cities and then you can filter the zillions of classes they have by duration, type, level, teacher, area of concentration etc.  Of course, as Murphy would have it, the minute I started waking up before the kids, they started waking up earlier too. So a few times this week I enjoyed doing shivasena with a giggling toddler sitting on my heart chakra. Nonetheless I managed to do yoga five out of five days and I actually looked forward to waking up at that ungodly hour. I'm trying to add other daily habits too. Sketching. Hand-lettering. Learning new tools, new media. Taking field trips. Writing. Sharing it all in a  way that doesn't feel socially spastic. I am finding it very challenging. But little by little I'm hoping the structure will lead to more sparks and the sparks will lead to a big ass inferno.

Coming up roses

I made this little piece while thinking about weddings. In the last month I've been asking my ketubah clients to send me photos of their ketubahs at their weddings to use in my ETSY listings and I just LOVE wedding pictures. Mine. Yours. Whoevers. I don't care. Love them all. Plus I just saw this stunning video and had a good sob. Feeling the love, I guess. Hope you are too.

The passage in this piece is from a famous love poem by Moshe Dor called Erev Shel Shoshanim* and my friend Jill sang it at our wedding as I walked down the aisle many moons ago.  

* Evening of roses
Let us go out to the garden
Myrrh, Spices, and Frankincense
Are as a carpet under your feet

Night falls slowly
And a wind of roses blows
Let me whisper a song for you slowly
A tune of love

Dawn and the dove coos
Your hair is full of dewdrops
Your lips are as roses unto the morning
I will pick them for myself

Mohammad and Me

Turns out there were cabbages under all those weeds.

I met Mohammad about a year ago. Maybe more. It wasn't long after we moved into our house that he showed up claiming to have worked for the previous tenants. A few others showed up and made the same claim. One was a painter. One was a handyman. They all live in neighboring villages and walk into our town every morning through the holes in the fence. Mohammad says he walks right in the front gate because everyone knows him. He's been working here for years. I've even seen him buying cigarettes at our grocery store.

Last year we had him pull out all the weeds in our yard that, over the rainy season, had grown two or three feet high. You could lose a toddler in there. And Mohammad mentioned that snakes like to hide in those tall grasses.  When can you start? So he spent three days yanking weeds and trimming trees and generally cleaning up a very overgrown yard. And I learned that employers are meant to provide the gardener with many cups of strong, sweet coffee, in a small glass, no milk. He also showed up in the fall to pick our olives. We paid him in olives.

He works for our neighbors too. Knows everyone by name. He's a hard worker and a sweet man. He speaks a little Hebrew but it's mostly Hebrew words wrapped in Arabic sentences. And he uses a lot of hand gestures like he's telling a campfire tale. I work from home so we chat throughout the day. Yesterday he asked if he could bother me for a little  hummus for his lunch. So I put some hummus on a plate along with a sliced tomato in olive oil and two slices of yummy walnut toast we had in the freezer. He was grateful. He apologized for not eating the toast. He has no teeth. I hadn't noticed. 

He's also missing his left eye. Apparently a family member took it out over a money issue. I think he said 70 shekels but that can't be right. It happened eight years ago. And he was supposed to go to court over this matter but the court date was postponed. But he can wait because he's planning his revenge, which means he will take his cousin's eye. It says that in the Koran, he told me. Yes, I'm familiar with the passage. We have one like that too in the Torah, I think. He told me this same family cut his son and then he motioned to his abdomen for which there was some retaliation, though like all of Mohammad's stories, I only caught about 40%.  Mohammad has five sons and five daughters. He married off the last one six months ago. I told him I thought it was crazy to plan revenge for his eye and that the man who did this needs to pay him money and sit in jail for his crime. Because with all due respect to the Koran, an eye for an eye only leads to more violence. You're a smart girl, he said. Maybe you can help me plan my revenge.  I think I saw his good eye wink.

Today I gave him a bag of old toys for his grand kids and he was delighted.  He asked my name. It's Susie. Like ex-President Mubarak's wife. He nodded. Mubarak was taken down, he said. He has three tons of gold sitting in Tunis but he lost his power. Same will happen to Assad. Maybe not tomorrow. Or next week. But it will happen. The big men always have power and we starve. It won't last. Then he turned his foot in the dirt he'd just cleared like he was squashing a bug. When he asked if I had any lunch for him today I said we were out of hummus so I would ride up to the grocery store and get some more. He asked if I could get some softer bread too. I smiled. So did he.

Yep, no teeth.

Note to self for future birthdays

I live between cultures. I grew up in America and raised my kids in America, or started to anyway. I have an Israeli husband whose parents are American. And now we live in Israel and while there are some days when I can kid myself into feeling like I belong here just as much as I belong there and it's all good, there's nothing like hosting a six year old girl's birthday to make you remember you are a stranger in a strange land.

We had asked our daughter weeks before what she wanted to do for her birthday. I mentioned that we could do something fun, just the family and she seemed to be on board with that idea. I lobbied heavily. But then two weeks before her birthday she told us she wanted to invite everyone from her kindergarten. Now, I'm no dummy. I know that is a recipe for disaster, but I also know that Israeli teachers are hung up on this idea that you have to invite the whole class or either the boys or the girls.  So I said we could invite all the girls and the moment that sentence was out of my mouth the panic started to set in. What would I do with them for two hours? I considered hiring someone to entertain, as most parents here do. I had seen magicians and fairies and storytellers. I even had a number of someone to call. But we've never hired people for our parties and it just didn't feel right. I decided I could manage on my own. We would do a rainbow themed party because I had seen super cute rainbow cupcakes on Pinterest and a friend of mine had shown me these beautiful puffy rainbow tissue paper pom poms that I could make for decorations. And since Purim was coming up we could decorate masks with all kinds of sequins and felt and feathers and then play some games like the one where you run toward the bin of clothes, put something on and run back. I had visions of little girls wearing all kinds of hats and boas and tutus running around giggling hysterically. This vision kind of got me excited about the party and I started planning everything. Rainbow fruit skewers and a rainbow vegetable platter. Rainbow cupcakes. Rainbow pom poms and balloons. The dress-up game. Simon says. Mother May I. Musical chairs. It would be old school and I liked it. Mr. Rosen was on board, although it's hard for him to muster up the enthusiasm required to pull this kind of thing off and me with my conversational Hebrew, well I knew it would be challenging to wrangle in a group of six year old Israeli girls. I didn't know it would be Dante's inner circle.

We passed out invitations five days ahead of time having made the mistake of giving advanced notice with our son's birthday and people showing up a week early. Israelis don't plan ahead. I mean, what with the threat of total destruction at any moment...but I digress. I asked parents to RSVP. Of the sixteen girls we invited, four mentioned to me that they were coming. Then on the day of the party only eight girls came which should have made me happy except that we had planned on twice as many so we had too much of everything and I hate excess. But I had rolled out the red and white polka dotted oil cloth that I'd purchased for the occasion which looked as festive as Minnie Mouse's underwear so this party was ON. As the girls arrived their parents left by wishing us good luck. I should have known we were in for a nightmare.  I sat the girls down at our fully extended dining room table teeming with crafty notions of every variety to make their Purim masks. The party was soon in full swing. The Purim music was playing. It was festive. But then twenty minutes into the craft, the girls were mostly done. They wanted to know what to do next. So I collected a bunch on the floor of the living room and attempted to play telephone with them while other girls were finishing. Some girls didn't feel like it and lumped themselves onto our couch. In fact I didn't ask what they felt like, I asked them to sit down in a circle. But that's how the party went on for two hours. I'd introduce the next game/activity and invariably several girls would say they didn't feel like it. Um, I'm sorry. These games are not up for a vote. Just stand in two effing lines you whiny little apple-cheeked turds.  This isn't YOUR birthday party. It was maddening.

Here is what I came to understand. Israeli parents (maybe this happens in the States too but we have had our share of successful birthday parties over there so I'm not sure) have mostly thrown up their hands at birthdays. They pay for entertainers and feed the kids candy and now they expect it. They come into the house knowing they will sit down and watch a clown and when there's no clown, and the party requires their active participation, they are confused and become listless and lump themselves onto the couch. The two hour party felt like a six hour party in a parallel universe where planets don't rotate around a sun and time stands still. And the kicker was that my daughter was no better than the other girls. She's turned into one of them. Despite my near constant reminders about manners and about how we host people graciously in our home, she was pouty and "didn't feel like it" either. She would have rather had a magician. I would have rather been the magician and made myself disappear.

But no experience is without its life lessons. Here is what I learned:
1. I will never host a large group of kids from school at my house again.
2. We will have borthday parties only every other year.
3. Birthday parties will only be with family friends who have similarly-aged kids.
4. Off years will involve a fun dinner or hike or play or concert for family members.

The irony is that the pictures I took convey a group of delighted, cheery little girls and, truth is, thirty years from now we'll look at those pictures and remember how much fun we all had.  And my adult daughter and I will wonder what the hell is wrong with kids nowadays. So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.*

* I wish I could claim I'd written that last line. Alas, it's the last line of The Great Gatsby. I could probably use it to end every one of my posts.














 

Now we are six

Dear Sugar Bee,

I'm writing this to you on Valentine's Day, a holiday I never much cared about. Neither when I was younger and we had to pass out those store-bought snoopy valentines. Nor when I was older and not dating anyone. Nor when I was dating or married to your aba. He never remembered and I never cared enough to remind him. But you know what? Now it means the world to me. Because yours was a labor of true love, starting on Valentine's Day and ending bright and early on the 15th of February, thus guaranteeing a lifetime of half off roses and candy for your birthday.

I can't say this has been an easy year sunshine, what with you trying to push me off a mental cliff and send me to an early grave having pulled out all my hair. But it's not really all your fault, I mean, you being a kid and all. I can think of a lot of situations with you that I would have handled differently. But these last few months have been a good stretch, wouldn't you say? More love. Less sass. But you are a sassy little miss aren't you and I have to admit I like that quality in you. We just have to harness it and direct it toward other people besides me. And maybe you could work on being less compulsive about your high ponytail. Just a thought.

You have had some pretty big accomplishments this year too, Sugar Bee. Namely you stopped sucking your thumb. That was TOUGH since it's attached to the rest of your hand. And you also lost two teeth. The tooth fairy apparently knew where to find us in Israel. Lucky break. And you started to write letters in Hebrew and English. Just the start of all that but it's nice to see you're interested in writing. Maybe when you're older we can have long impassioned conversations about fonts.

For this next year I wish for you many blessings. I hope you continue to love your family the way only you can. Because it's kind of a drug for us now. We need the daily dose. Especially your baby brother who thinks even your farts are magical. Your big brother thinks you're pretty awesome too, when you are not tormenting each other. As for me and Aba, well we marvel at the bright, witty, helpful, loving girl you have become and the clever, wicked, chaotic, snarky girl who peeks out too. Indeed we love every part of you. Happy number six.

Mieces to pieces,
Mommy

Perspective

She hasn't had her coffee yet either.
The Americas Wing, Israel Museum

I was having one of those mornings. First day of the week. House still wrecked from the weekend. Kids lunchboxes still packed (and stinky) from two days ago. Dishes piled high. Frowny McSnotFaucet indecisive about breakfast. That is, until he decidedly poured the soup crackers still on the table from last night's dinner into his bowl of cereal. All of them. My son and daughter are tormenting each other in the way only they know how. My daughter can't find her favorite shirt. Head is pounding. I ask tell everyone to be quiet. My daughter shouts back that if she has to be quiet then so do I. I tell her to "be careful of me". That's a real phrase in Hebrew that parents use and I'm glad I'm allowed to use it too. It means "don't fuck with mommy." The other phrase I like is "I forbid it". Very direct and culturally sanctioned. I get the baby dressed and go to tackle the dishes and lunches. The baby pours a bag of almonds on the floor. Mr. Rosen takes the baby far away from mommy to daycare. The little girl is still mad that she has to be careful of me. The boy is singing. He has not stopped singing since yesterday. We get in the car and drop him off. Little girl says sorry and feels better. We hug and walk to school Lavern and Shirley style. I get home feeling dizzy which can mean only one thing. I have not yet had coffee. I see my neighbor friend walking her dog and she can tell I am having a morning. And she giggles because she remembers those mornings. Her boys are teenagers now and she looks back on soup crackers in the cereal with an aching fondness. Her oldest son who is sixteen just got his first draft letter. I guess kids start getting the letters two years ahead of time. And there are many meetings and placement tests and physical exams leading up to the day we all dread. The day that even coffee can't wash away. And I think, you know what? I will happily endure many more years of piled dishes and morning tantrums and snotty toddlers and teasing siblings and spilled almonds and the kinds of things easily fixed by a little coffee and a little perspective.

All good

 
"Arise My Love" available here.

I used to write in a journal when the mood struck. Trouble is the mood struck only when I was either high as a kite or bottom of the barrel and mostly the latter. As in, just met the love of my life! Love of my life hasn't called...Love of my life and I are getting married! Planning a wedding is torture...Got into graduate school! Graduate school is torture...I'm having a baby! Babies are torture...you get the idea.

Well same goes for the blog in a way. Obviously plenty on which to report, Seinfeld style. What is the deal with pomelos? Do they have to be that difficult to open?  And I don't go five minutes with having a comment about something, Chandler style. Could it be any colder in my bathroom? But what can I say? We have settled into a nice little groove over the last month so the blog has been neglected. Still, a good blogger would find time to write which I have not and I am remiss. So here is a round-up of a few things slightly more interesting than excessive fruit rind.

1. I started selling at the Bezalel Art Fair on Fridays in Jerusalem and it has been mostly fantastic. I get out the house early in the morning and spend the day with other artists, chatting with tourists and locals, talking about myself and my work, and making good money! Not bad. That is, until last Friday when someone stole my phone right off my table while I was looking down at my sketch book. A story for another time.

2. It snowed! The second week of January it had been rainy and freezing. We were all starting to feel rather cooped up. And then we woke up on a Thursday morning and everything was white! It was amazingly beautiful and peaceful and pristine. And it was like a half foot of snow which is very rare over here in Jerusalem so you can imagine it was like everyone was sprinkled in fairy dust. Smiling kids and parents. Mr. Rosen even pushed the kids down a hill on his snowboard, which hasn't seen the light of day in many many years. Of course it melted the next day but we had one day of magic and that was plenty.

3. I have been painting. A lot! And it feels pretty good. I've been missing my watercolors having mostly painted with acrylics over these last few months. I have this vision of making dozens of tiny watercolor pieces and having a group show, not unlike The Enormous Tiny Art Show, complete with festive, catered opening and twinkly lights. Not exactly sure how I will make this happen but it's on my mind. If you own a gallery or rad space in Tel Aviv, lemme know.

4. We had elections and in a strange twist of fate, I think most people are satisfied. Imagine an election when everyone kind of got what they wanted? Weird, right. Well the people who like Bibi got him again. Ugh. But he might become Bibi 2.0 if he decides to create a coalition that doesn't include any ultra-religious parties, which might be possible since centerist party leader Yair Lapid, a former journalist/talk show host/actor and newcomer to politics managed to get 19 parliament seats for his new party (half of whom are women). And the lefties got a bunch of seats and don't seem to mind Lapid (it appears most people kind of like him. It helps that he's nice to look at). And in this strange new world order maybe, just MAYBE, the ultra-religious might have to start serving in either the army or some kind of civil service and the government can redirect the funds formerly used to subsidize an entire community of unskilled torah scholars toward training and entry into the workforce. And those kids might even integrate a little into mainstream society and we can finally live as one nation while we figure out how to live next to another nation. And maybe my kids won't know from the peace process. They'll only know from peace.