Last Week: A Homecoming?
On feeling at home lotsa different places. And nowhere.
Dear friends and fam,
It’s been a little over two weeks since we got back from Israel, a little over a month and half since I last wrote to you. Over those weeks and days, I thought a lot about writing a newsletter. I’d start writing one in my head — musings about what was happening in our completely crazy day-to-day, thoughts about the state of the world — but then about ten more insane things would happen. I couldn’t keep up. Both in the physical sit-down-and-write way, and in the spiritual, emotional way.
Going home was a powerful experience. Which is great. But it was a powerful experience every minute for a month straight. According to Google, that’s 43,800 minutes.
Basically, what I’m saying is I’m exhausted and more than a little confused. With that in mind, here are some ideas bouncing around my head these days.
Part I: My family is not like other families.
Of course, all families are different. There’s no such thing as a monolith of “other families.” And all that jazz. Still, being a neurodivergent parent of a neurodivergent kid on a trip way outside our comfort zones is very, very hard1. Nay, near impossible. The longer we stayed in Israel, the more difficult it was for Big Kid to hold it together. The more she lost it, the more I lost it.
Maybe I’ve written this before, but I often think of my ADHD brain as a kind of specialized, vintage car that needs regular care and specific motor oil. If you throw just any ol’ oil in there, you’ll get smoke coming out of the hood pretty soon. It’s a cool car! Anyone would stop you and ask about it! It takes a lot of maintenance to keep it purring along, though.
Our Big Kid is the same way, but without a prefrontal cortex to manage literally any logical thinking or impulse control. We’ll have to wait a while until she gets one of those; in the meantime, it’s Impulse City around here. Sometimes, the impulse is throwing an actual book or screaming one’s head off.
Things that help regulate Big Kid’s (and my) neurological processes include, but are not limited to:
Consistent sleep schedules
Limited sensory stimuli
Regular exercise
Predictable schedules and routines
Access to comfort foods and/or well-known foods
When traveling to a new place, these are all hard to achieve. As a result, despite feeling a belly-deep relief at being surrounded by family and soul-friends, this was a very hard trip. Towards the end, Big Kid had completely gone off the rails — behaving erratically, fighting over everything, crying hysterically several times a day. My wife and I held space (mostly) and sometimes lost our tempers, too. Mostly, we felt beaten down by it all. Helpless. Ill-equipped.
Then there’s the other families. I try not to compare myself to others, but it’s hard not to notice the stark contrast evident at family gatherings. Most of the cousins can do things like eat a meal at the table — mine cannot. Most children are able to handle the disappointment of a toy not working the way they expected — mine sobs for upwards of 20 minutes. Most people can eat in restaurants — we can’t.
Plus, people experiencing our chaos for the first time can be visibly taken aback. I get the sense that, to the untrained eye, Big Kid seems like a brat. My wife and I know that this is far from the truth — she’s a deeply sensitive, kind-hearted kid who just has a really hard time metabolizing emotions and working through transitions. Alas, not every occasion is the right occasion for a presentation on how the ADHD brain works. So, I have to accept that Big Kid will be perceived as a “bad kid” some of the time, I guess. Which is pretty painful.
Last week, when chatting with a dear friend about our kids’ upcoming first days of kindergarten, I expressed apprehension about the school year. “Oh, they’ll be ok,” she said, “It always works out.” I was floored. How wonderful to know that your kid will figure it out! What a privilege! I smiled and replied, “You’re just saying that because your kid has never been kicked out of school.”
Our experience of school, and of all social interactions, is unsteady. Insecure. Hoping for the best but always, always prepared for the worst.
I don’t know what conclusions I should draw from this. We can’t take family trips? We need to accept that our family is different? Our trips should be shorter, or differently structured? I need a damn break? All I can hope is for some of these answers to come to light as the dust settles.
Part II: Home is where?
Lord, but it felt good to get home to New Jersey. Have you ever felt your back un-knot itself as you lie down in your own bed? Mmph, that’s a good feeling. It’s that familiarity, the muscle-memory of one’s own home — hands find light-switches, feet know where the rough spots on the floor are, eyes know what the morning light feels like. You can let your guard down. Relax.
It took us 22 hours to get from my father-in-law’s home to ours. Spiritually, though, it took much longer. In so many other ways, this place is foreign in a way Israel (and especially Jerusalem) will never be to me. Landing in Israel is like putting on that t-shirt that’s been laundry-softened and worn, hanging on your body in all the right ways.
The language. The food. The people — friends who have known me for decades, family who has known me all my life. The smell of the air. The blinding light of an August morning. The mannerisms. Just, well, all of it.
Almost all of it. Because there are parts of me that are foreign to Israel in ways I can’t yet describe. Spaces inside myself I can’t fully inhabit when I’m there. Most notably, my queerness, but not only. My liberal, egalitarian, queer understanding of Judaism, which has become an increasingly important part of how I think about the world. My leftist ideals.
To be clear, I’m not saying there are no queers in Israel or that I can’t speak Hebrew in New Jersey. I’m saying I don’t feel totally safe being as gender-fluid as I’d like to be in the motherland, and that I don’t feel totally safe speaking Hebrew or wearing Jewish symbols in public in the U.S. right now. In both places, I feel that I need to explain aspects of what and who I am, instead of just existing, no questions.
New Jersey is home, and it’s not. Jerusalem is home, and it’s not2. I belong to — am made of — both places and neither place. What does it mean not to belong anywhere?
Part III: People change. Me included.
I’m not good at staying in touch. One part of this is the aforementioned ADHD, one huge part of which is a major struggle to remember that the past and future exist. Dr. Russel Barkley, the godfather of ADHD research, has said that ADHD is a form of time-blindness (here’s a great talk he did about it) and, for me, this makes it very hard to notice that it’s been three weeks or three months since I last spoke to someone.
To mitigate this, I’ve tried to develop rituals around staying in touch. I practice something I call “Batch Messaging,” which basically means I sit and reply to all the people who have messaged me once every few days or week. I have regular times for calling people. That kind of stuff helps, but it doesn’t mean I’m able to really be a part of people’s lives.
Problem is, sometimes those times don’t line up — especially when your best friends live seven hours in the future. Or your grandmother can’t use her phone anymore. Or any number of other logistical troubles.
There’s something about leaving a place that freezes folks in time, at least for me. I know I am constantly changing, but I expect everyone else to stay the same. This notion is ridiculous; time marches on for us all. When I came home this time, there were new babies, and the babies I’d met were big kids! People had retired or changed jobs. People had gotten sick or died.
Plus, of course, there’s the war. Israel in the summer of 2024 is not the Israel I last saw in the summer of 2022. There’s a sense air of… exhaustion? Despair? Defiance? Fear? Rage? Sadness? Grief? Something like all of those (and more) mixed together and permeating everything, all the time. It gets under your skin.
Above all, it feels like something very fundamental — some kind of understanding or belief about the world — has been broken, perhaps beyond repair. That’ll change a person.
Everyone I met was both different and the same, and I suppose I was, too. I came home (from home) with an idea about trying to stay closer to who I am there and to the people who help me dust off those parts and bring them to the fore. I want to be a part of the everyday. I want my kids to know their cousins, to speak Hebrew, to know what it feels like to swim in the Mediterranean Sea.
Not totally sure how to make that happen, what with all the complicating factors described in Part I. One cannot exist in two places at once, or so I’m told.
As for the grief-rage cloud that has subsumed my homeland, it more or less swallowed me while I was there. There’s something very clarifying about putting diapers in a bag to take into a bomb shelter in the middle of the night — just in case a nuclear power decides to obliterate you and your children. Similarly, there’s something clarifying about watching a fighter jet cut through the clouds above you, when you’ve just read a report about how AI is deciding where the bombs should fall.
I want all the people to live in peace. This feeling — this knowing — that no one should have to live in a cloud of destruction and fear is only fortified now. That doesn’t mean I know how the heck to get there! It means I know we must get there. For our kids.
That’s all for this dispatch from the Chaos Palace. There’s so much more to share! An ADHD diagnosis for Big Kid, Toddler speaking in sentences, thoughts about this fascinating time on the Jewish calendar, and so much more. But that’ll have to wait.
Until next time, wishing you peace,
Mikhal
What I’m reading…
On Substack, I’ve been quietly enjoying these pieces:
- is a wonderful reminder of price of abandoning empathy towards our fellow humans.
The Games or the Wars? is a rumination on the Olympics, the ongoing war, and Tisha B’Av (a day of mourning and grief on the Jewish calendar) by my wonderfully brilliant cousin,
- lenz is an important piece of reporting from the middle of this country about the stakes of banning reproductive healthcare.
Off Substack I’ve been loving:
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? a fantastic memoir by the whip-smart Jeanette Winterson
Frankissstein: A Love Story, also by Jeanette Winterson, wherein she juxtaposes a fictionalized telling of Mary Shelley’s life with a strange, AI-informed love story in the modern day.
- is a stunner of a novel that I’m reviewing for the Jewish Book Council, so I won’t give away too much. Suffice to say it is a dazzling exploration of queerness, what it means to be American, and how to find oneself. Plus a lot more. I finished it, turned it over, and started again.
Quite literally — while I was there, my parents left the house where I grew up.
I just took a trip "home" as well--a place I haven't lived in over twenty years now--and found myself reflecting on many of these same themes, so this really resonated with me. Also, I totally relate about traveling with neurodivergent kids and struggling with the reactions other people have to their behavior, and the constant sense of judgment and shame because people with neurotypical kids don't understand and think I'm just a bad parent with bad kids. Sometimes it gets in my head and I start to wonder if they're right. But also the struggle of feeling, as one of my therapy clients described it, like a sensitive houseplant who wilts if you don't get precisely the right amount of sunlight and water. I have often encountered judgment about that as well from people who think I'm being self-centered and high maintenance because I'm rigid in my routines. They don't understand what a high price I will pay for it if I try to be flexible and accommodating.