Last Week: Credit Where Credit is Due
What if the voice in my head could remember the good stuff?
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Dear fam,
I began writing to you at half-past 11:00 pm on the night between Shabbat and Sunday. But my eyelids were like weighted curtains, and I honestly couldn’t think of one coherent thought to write.
I chose sleep.
This week was bonkers. I know, I know — every week I write that things have been off the wall around here. It is, after all, the Chaos Palace. But this week was more bonkers than usual.
A few things contributed to the extra dose of wackiness. First, my wife was traveling last week — she left Monday — to be with her family for an important milestone. Meanwhile, my mom flew in from Israel to help me with the kids.
This might not sound so radical to you, especially if you are a parent of neurotypical children. Or a parent who travels a lot, or who has a co-parent who travels. I get that. Lots of families are much more dynamic than our family, with multiple residences or other variables that create a shifting home life.
We are not those people. For us, this was huge.
Managing the day-to-day of this household is not a feat for the weak-hearted. And it’s not something just anyone can drop in and do. My wife and I are professionals at maneuvering the unpredictable pitfalls of life with a hyperactive kid with no impulse control and out-of-this-world feelings. As a result, we don’t get out much. Or, honestly, at all.
I was very nervous about this week. No, that’s not accurate. I was petrified. I just knew I’d mess something up. Forget a lunch, or a show-and-tell, or an extracurricular activity. Or something simpler! Once, I forgot to send a craft Big Kid had made for Thanksgiving, and he had such a huge meltdown the school sent him home in the middle of the day. So much could go wrong.
There were a lot of curveballs. One of Big Kid’s schools sent out the wrong date for a school closure, meaning he was basically home all week during the mornings. A leak in the kitchen meant our basement ceiling started melting. Toddler (née Baby) decided she wasn’t going to allow Big Kid near me all week, pushing him away and crying every time he tried to hug me.
Also, I never sleep well when my wife is away. Actually, I don’t really sleep all that well at all. My anxiety dreams, my insomnia, my struggle to peel myself out of bed in the mornings, all of these are part-an-parcel with the joy of ADHD-related sleep disorders (more on that coming this week! Stay tuned!) and they’re even more pronounced when she travels. I put together the following schema to show how this tends to play out:
~~> less sleep ~> less patience ~> more meltdowns ~> more anxiety ~> less sleep ~~>
So, yeah. Not great.
Last night, after the kids finally went to sleep, I crawled into my bed, rested my head on my mom’s shoulder, and cried a little. It wasn’t even that something particularly awful had happened. I mean, sure, Big Kid lost it in the closed booth of a ferris wheel, where the decibels were particularly pronounced. And, yes, Toddler insisted on lying facedown on the floor of the food court, screaming indignantly if I picked her up because ew. And at one point he darted off with a toy sword we definitely had not paid for, until my mom and I used a clever move to get him safely out of the store and back home. And it’s true that I ended up raising my voice in the evening when he wouldn’t go upstairs to take a shower
But, I mean, that’s just what weekends are like. Sometimes.
After I calmed down last night and stopped murmuring about how hard it all is, my mom got me up and brought me to the living room, where we poured some wine and talked. And she reminded me of a few very important things.
A lot went wrong, she said. But, more importantly, a lot went right.
I have such trouble remembering the good parts in my quiet moments (are there any?) when thoughts surface. The voice in my mind recalls how sharp my tone was when I lost my patience, not how soft it was when I held my Big Kid in my arms on the ferris wheel and whispered, “Mama’s here, you’re ok, I know it’s hard.” Why don’t I play those bits of my day on repeat? And can I break that habit?
There are so many good parts. One of my greatest fears — truly — is that Big Kid and Toddler will grow up and only remember the bad stuff. They’ll sit with their friends and complain about how I yelled or lost my temper or worked late. They’ll say we didn’t let them do this or that. Or who knows what else. I imagine myself like a ghost in the corner of this imagined room where they sit complaining. They can’t see or hear me as I whisper, “but we also baked rainbow cakes! and built rocketships! And invented a spoon catapult! I carried you on my shoulders through a Brooklyn night to the doctor when you had croup! Don’t you remember any of that?” But, in this frightful scenario, they don’t remember.
It occurs to me that I might also wonder whether I am going to only remember the bad things. That is, if I keep up this habit of focusing on my errors and missteps. And if, perhaps, if I made a point of lifting up the good and casting away the less good, that might go farther towards helping my kids do the same.
I mean. This week, the kids played with friends, and baked cookies, and snuggled, and danced, and played music, and so much more. I want to shake the voice in my head, asking, “don’t you remember any of that?”
A few weeks before my wife went away, I was speaking with my therapist about being nervous. She asked me if it would be possible for me to go away sometime. To which I scoffed and said a quick no. And then I realized what I’d said.
Do I really think this house would fall apart without me? No. I don’t. Not after this last week. I thought the household would for sure fall apart without my wife. I don’t trust myself nearly as much as I trust her with everything logistical. Or just everything that has to do with executive function. But we kept it together. Which means… maybe I can trust myself a little bit more. Maybe I can trust my kids’ resilience a little bit more. Maybe we all deserve a little (a lot) more credit.
This year is a leap year. In the Jewish calendar, that means we have a whole extra month — Adar 1 and Adar 2 — a custom instated to ensure Passover would always fall in the springtime. Our calendar is lunisolar, using elements of both lunar and solar years to come up with a complicated system that somehow works. It’s a whole thing, explained beautifully by Maimonides in his 12th century treatise called the Mishneh Torah.
During Adar, we are commanded to find joy. During both Adars, we’re commanded to find extra joy. And on the 14th of Adar 2, we celebrate Purim, a holiday wherein we’re supposed to rejoice to the point of losing our senses.
Respectfully, I don’t know about all that right now. That much joy seems a little far off in the current state of things. But I think we can find a little joy. In fact, during a leap year, the 14th of Adar 1 is celebrated as Purim Kattan — small Purim — and that was last week. In honor of Purim Kattan, I want to try to find pockets of joy in my day, to change my narrative from one of dammit-what-the-actual-heck-is-happening to one of hey, something very cool happened today.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
Meanwhile, here it is, late at night again and soon (so soon!) the kids will be here snuggling, smelling of sugar-cookies and dreams. I love those hugs.
I hope your week has pockets of joy in it. Will you tell me about the moments you find?
Love,
Mikhal
Some music links
Usually, I share essays. But all the writing I’ve gathered is specifically about the war back home, and I plan to share that a bit later this week in a dedicated email. In lieu of that, here are some musics I’m loving.
Beyoncé’s new single is everything. This is not an original take, but I would be remiss not to share it because holy Lord this is wow.
Paris Paloma “It’s Called: Freefall”, is what you listen to when you want to put your arms out and pretend you’re flying when actually you should be washing the dishes.
Kylie Dailey “Not Blue” is a hug. That is all.
Gretta Ray “Vienna” is what you listen to when it’s raining outside and you’re feeling moody but also a little cozy.
Welcome to the Chaos Palace is about coloring outside society's boring ol' lines.
More specifically, it's about ADHD, parenting, queerness, and Judaism. Subscribe to get new ideas (big and small) about how to expand the boundaries of societal rules. Let’s get messy (and chaotic) together!