Juggling Badly

One of my favorite Dr. Seuss quotes (and I have many) goes something like this:

"So be sure when you step
Step with care and great tact
And remember that Life's
A Great Balancing Act.
Just never forget to be dexterous and deft
And never mix up your right foot with your left.
And will you succeed?
Yes, you will indeed!
(98 and 3/4 percent guaranteed.)"

So after attending a workshop in Soho about negotiating book contracts, I didn't make it home until nearly 12ish. I hailed a cab after work to take my achy body to the Metro North station. It's the only way to travel from Riverdale to lower Manhattan expediently and stylishly. After the workshop, my adorable husband picked me up so we could make the mad dash together to Grand Central station to catch the Metro North train back up to our farflung neighborhood. Or maybe it's Soho that's farflung? Whatever.

It was a dreary Thursday, one of those that smells like rain and makes me feel like the Energizer bunny who could only afford 99 cents store batteries. I thought my boss was going to fire me when he called me into his office but instead, he surprised me, asking me if I'm interested in teaching a Writing Skills class next year to incoming freshman. I told him I'd think about it. The jury's still out on whether my expensive combination of medication, exercise and therapy has gotten me healthy enough to try my hand at teaching.

Running around for errands, the gym, work, and workshops must have drained me. The utterly disgusting Luna bars I had for lunch were certainly no help in raising my energy levels. And I learned never to buy Luna again. Yeech. When I finally crashed at 1:30am without the need of any literary stimulation, I didn't wake up until 12 hours later. I like to live dangerously by waking up just in time to throw a skirt over my pajames and grab challah at the Glatt Shop which closes early on Fridays.

At least Sunday will be better. In an effort not to do too much, I've only managed to book myself for the Second Annual Riverdale Women's Health & Halacha Day at the local posh shul after which I run home for a business meeting with someone who has ask Hubbie and me to present on Race & Judaism at an event before I head to therapy and a chat with my online class. And there's the bit about squeezing in two hours worth of exercise...four if I make up what I didn't today. My husband's forcing me to attend the "Marriage: The Good, the Bad and the Better" workshop at the Women's Health event. He might be upset that he's had a bad cough all week and has had to make his own soup. I'm starting to think that the "Deconstructing Superwoman: Finding Your Balance--Family, Career, and Spirituality" workshop might be a better fit right about now.

There might be more scheduled in my little planner but I'm too scared to look.

Aliza Hausman, The Writer?

Two years ago, I was too sick to move. The fibromyalgia diagnosis paralyzed me physically, mentally, emotionally. I've been hibernating since then.

For the first time since eternal winter set in, it finally seems as if sunny days are ahead. My mother-in-law and I were chatting today about pursuing dreams and how I never really had the time, the space, the opportunity to pursue mine. But now, suffering from chronic illness...I suddenly have time?

I'm taking a freelancing class and a personal essay writing class. I'm writing pitches for articles I'd like to write for my favorite magazines. And two of them replied back. I'm even learning to take criticism without crying...much. Hey, my husband's really tough.

Should I stop telling people that I'm a full-time fibromyalgia out-patient? A part-time university writing tutor? Should I start introducing myself as a writer before I've even before I've made enough to cover the rent with my writing income? Is that crazy or is that what people who stalk their dreams do?

Creating a Scene

I'm writing so much my brain hurts. And it doesn't seem like I've ever written enough. And then there are rewrites.

Some really cool chicks from my Personal Essay workshop on family have been helping me edit "Attack of the Mothers," the piece I wrote about my fears of motherhood and my own past with my epic mom.

Here is a compare and contrast, a Before (Ugly) and After (Sexy) rewrite of a scene from "Attack of the Mothers."

BEFORE:
Word Count: 78

I've been parenting since age three, when my sister B. was born. A born wild child, there was no way setting a good example was going to reform her. But hell, I tried. I threw my little body in-between B. and my mother's rage all throughout my childhood. I had to, my mother wasn't mean, she was cruel. She delighted in reminding me that at three years old, she had started to beat me with her bare hands.

AFTER:

Word Count: 190

I've been parenting since the age of three, when my sister B. was born. I had kept vigil by her crib knowing that I would be called to protect her. By her second birthday, B. had learned to cope with my mother by lying.

"Who broke it?! Who! Broke! It!" my mother screamed gathering together the pieces of the shattered porcelain trinket which had sat atop the glass coffee table.

Eyes wide, B. and I quietly steeled ourselves for a beating. B. had broken several of the porcelain pieces in the living just that week. Sometimes, on purpose. I pressed my hand into hers as my mother gave B. an accusatory look.

"I didn't do it," slipped petulantly from B.'s mouth. I gasped.

My mother's face twisted from a scowl to a menacing grin as she dove for B.. I threw my little body in-between B. and my mother's rage all throughout my childhood. I had to. My mother wasn't mean, she was murderous. As we feared for our lives, she delighted in reminding me that at three years old, she had started to beat me with her bare hands.

 

Aliza Hausman Goes Global

Thirty posts on my Chabad article! I'm glowing like a glow worm at work. It's probably distracting the other tutors. Guess I'm going to have to start writing more. Poor little blog. I will put something good up soon!

People from...Flushing, NY, Panama, Monsey, NY, Brooklyn, NY, Silver Spring, MD, Georgia, Chicago, IL, Los Angeles, CA, New York, NY, Kingston, Jamaica, Jerusalem, Israel, Brooklyn, NY, Brisbane, Australia, Jacksonville, FL, London, UK, Racine, WI...all read my article.

Comments to Chabad Readers

Wow, I've gotten 20 responses (so far!) on my Chabad article. It's very exciting.

This is what I wrote to them:

“Being different makes you fit in perfectly.” Thank you, Edith for reminding us that as people, as Jews, we’re all unique. I definitely feel, like many converts, that I have always had a Jewish soul, conversion just made the whole world aware of it. I am a Jew and a convert, both. I hope I never forget the journey that I took to become Jewish.

Good luck to all of those converting to Judaism. It’s a hard road but it is full of rewards. It can be hard for people to understand why someone would make such a decision. Often, it’s easier for people to think that you’re converting just for marriage. Maybe, it’s our jobs as converts to remind those people of the beauty we see in Judaism. I know that every day I am learning from my Jewish friends, they are learning from the person I am and the person I was as I become the person I will be.

Judaism is a people, a religion, a way of life and so much more. People forget that it’s much, much more than an ethnicity and a race. I hope that as “the face of the Jewish community” changes, certain outlooks will too. No one looks Jewish, as “Anonymous” points out, it’s in our souls. I challenge you, if you’re up to it, to change those misconceptions.

The Jewish Feminist

In a Newsweek essay on race and the Hillary Clinton presidency, In The Legacy of My Grandmother, Allison Samuels writes that her family has been fighting against racism and not gender roles. "In her [grandmother's] world, being a woman in control wasn't something she had the luxury of deciding to fight for. She was. In her lifetime--- as well as my mother's, and to some extent, mine---race, not gender, has been the defining narrative in my world." Because of this fight, it is more important to her grandmother to see a black president. "I can't afford the luxury of fighting two battles when one is so clearly a matter of life and death.



Samuel's essay made me think about my feelings towards feminist Judaism, or rather my lack of feelings. At a recent function, I found myself surrounded by strong Jewish women passionately discussing issues of gender in Orthodox Judaism. At the time, I told myself that as a convert, someone new to the religion, my lack of passion towards the subject could be attributed to ignorance.



The idea or desire to become a rabbi just doesn't fit into the Jew I am right now. I don't want to read from the Torah. I could use my own personal mechitzah. I think it would lead to higher quality davening. I'm far more concerned with the fact that my fibromyalgia demands a book holder where there is not; I'm much, much less concerned with whether or not I get to speak from the bimah. For some Jewish women, these are clear issues of women being limited by constraining gender roles in the religion; for me, these issues don't even make the top of my list of concerns.



Because of Samuels, I realized that I, too, grew up in a world without men. I never had to prove that I was equal to a man because there were no men around to use as a yardstick. I never had to fight for women's rights, neither did my mother or her friends. My mother and her friends were single mothers who were full-time mothers and fathers. And though, only some were breadwinners, there was never a question of who had all the power.



I also grew up in a world where I was told that people "out there" thought I wouldn't finish college because of my race, because of my class. I was told that when a person of color makes a mistake, all other people of color pay for it but that when a white person makes the same mistake, only that white person pays for it. Don't make mistakes, I was counseled. Don't embarrass your race, your people.



As a child, I was worried about making up for whatever education I lacked because I was a poor Hispanic attending overcrowded innercity schools that didn't, couldn't, match the education offered on a private school budget. When I, finally, understood why we lived on welfare, I realized that it was because we lived below the poverty line. That welfare put us just over the line so that food stampes ensured that we didn't starve and Medicaid ensured that we didn't die from illness. On television, I saw a world that was miles away from the poverty line I skirted and I knew that I was a "have not" and that statistically, there was a chance I might always be.



A little girl who had the luxury of choosing karate when her sisters took ballet doesn't begrudge women who are fighting for equal rights for women. But that little girl, even when she's all grown up, is too busy struggling against issues of race and class to jump on the bandwagon.

An Update to Aliza's Portfolio

Aside from today being Hubbie's 26th birthday (they do grow up so fast), I was published in The Jewish Woman online magazine at Chabad.org. The link, if I haven't already bombarded you with it via email or Facebook, can be found on the left under "Aliza's Published Works."

Does this mean I'm officially a Jewish woman?

Drafts, Pitches and Homework

Swamped and crippled by endless drafts, pitches for magazines and newspapers, homework and as-yet unwritten commissioned pieces, I find myself sleepless in New York.

And speaking of endless drafts, I'd like to draw your attention to a new rewrite of Attack of the Mothers. A head's up: it's tragic, it's shocking and it's violent. It won't leave any doubt in your mind as to whether or not I should celebrate Mother's Day. This is a very honest look at my fears of motherhood after surviving a violent mother:

Attack of the Mothers

The MFA Dream

As some of you know, I've been having a long drawn out fantasy about getting an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Sarah Lawrence College. Their writing program has famously churned out some epic writers.


The school requires two recommendations as part of its application process. Which is of course why I sent four, no? The odds seem better that way, especially when you have to send a professor a photo of you so that they can remember who you were way back when. Kidding. Apparently, I was pretty memorable to my graduate and undergraduate professors.


My favorite recommendation (and the only one I've read) is a recommendation from my eighth grade (you read that right) English teacher:


Mr. Miner's Recommendation


I wrote to Mr. Miner all through high school, college, graduate school...honestly, through most of my life. When I ran away from home, I wrote him about all the horrors at home. When I kidnapped my sister, I wrote him about the anxiety of taking on more than I could handle. It was Mr. Miner who sent me checks with long letters of encouragement to ensure I made it through everything with some financial and emotional stability. He has been one of the great father figures in my life.


I became infamous in Mr. Miner's class for writing poetry. In junior high, I had a poetry book full of joke poems and often poems dedicated to friends and eventually to some of my teachers who requested I write about them. In his apartment, he framed the poem I dedicated to him for being my favorite English teacher.


In his class, I also famously learned to write in Viking letters so I could pass notes in code. I memorized the alphabet out of my National Geographic magazine. Though I was shy, I was quite the talker with friends. I didn't realize that unlike me some of my friends really couldn't do two things at once. I spent class listening, drawing, writing poetry, passing notes and answering as many of Mr. Miner's questions as I could.

Check me out at my most awkward phase at 13 at my Jurassic Park-themed birthday party, which was shared by my sisters whose birthdays fall in the same week. To this day, we still have theme parties. Last year's was Harry Potter. At this party, my mother managed to top the cake with monstrous dinosaurs of all shapes and sizes. And of course, much to my dismay, she did not forget to include Barney and a Treasure Troll.

The Good Little Teacher

The assignment for my Personal Essay Writing class was to "write about a moment that taught you something unexpected about yourself."

Those of you that read and enjoyed my previous blog Living in the Spotlight about the "wetsuit" incident at Bally's, you may enjoy the rewrite for my class: The Good Little Teacher That Could.

Happy reading.

Losing my religion

A funny story happened on the way to the library, just not to me.

My sister was loitering near the donated books at the Baruch College library. In the library's trash pile, next to the donated discount books, she spied a brand-new shrink-wrapped book and went for it. Books are very important to my family, free books even more so.

Salvaging the book from the trash, she finally got a good look at it: An Introduction to Scientology Ethics by L. Ron Hubbard.

"So, that's why it was in the trash," she surmised aloud.

And then thanking the Christians and their Easter holiday for the leisure time to look through books even the library would trash, my sister, the former Wiccan, shook her head and returned the book to the trash bin.


Later it would occur to us: one man's trash is another man's religion.

Baby Face

"How do you feel about the fact that your baby looks nothing like you?"

I asked a new acquaintance after being shocked by the dissimilarity between her face and the face of her interracial baby.

While Mom is half-white, half-something else, baby is at least three quarters white and only 25% something else. Given these kinds of statistics, it's no surprise that baby has big blue eyes and the sort of pale, translucent Caucasian skin reserved only for redheads. It's still a shock to see. That he's white but his mother isn't.

"Well, I felt sort of ambivalent about it. I mean, look at me? This is my baby?"

It is she assures me, her baby. She remembers the labor pains.

Mom's response made me think about poor Jessica Alba and all the flack she has gotten for being half-Mexican and half-white. When Jessica dyes her hair blond to take on a role as a white Fantastic Four superhero, Latinos everywhere want her pretty head on a stick. What? She thinks she's too good to be a Latina? No, Jessica responds. As someone half-white, with a blond mom no less, Jessica just has more options.

One could argue that a blond Jessica who wants to look like her blond mother is a normal Jessica. Growing up, we look towards our same-sex parent, for gender guidance and identification. After all, it's mommy who teaches her little girl how to be a woman.

When I looked at my mother as a child, I saw a beautiful, dark face and I prayed for a tan. I didn't want an exotic face that passed for white by Dominican standards. And I certainly didn't want the encounters that would follow later in life where biracial people everywhere would identify with me because of a shared experience they thought we had. To them, I was biracial, too---half-black, half-white, half-Hispanic.

I've always been touchy about announcing my ethnicity (Hispanic not being a race) to the world. As the child of a white father and a "brown" mother, my racial identification has always been conflicted. Whereas white faces and brown faces both represented home to me, my "white" face has been met with hostility from browner faces and curiosity from whiter faces.

Sometimes I hide my Dominican identity in my pocket next to my earplugs at Jewish tables. Though this usually leads to steady and increasingly less subtle inquiries, people yearning to know exactly how foreign I am, I have learned to deter the questions with a yawn, a shrug or a tight-lipped smile. They wonder: Is she Sephardic? Is she half-white? Or better, are her dark features a hint of half-something more exotic than our pasty white skin? My defense mechanisms rise just as the curiosity of my hosts does.

Different hairstyles and shades of skin have seen me through various cultural identities. I've let people assume that I'm everything from half-white, half-black, half-Hispanic to Greek, Israeli, Central American, Italian and other variations and combinations. I've nodded through unintelligible barrages from people speaking to me in foreign languages and feigned an inability to speak or understand Spanish when I didn't feel like being bilingual for the day.

What I've never wanted is to be branded an outsider or an outcast: a Dominican that wasn't Dominican enough or a white girl that wasn't really white. I wanted to be accepted as an insider and that never seemed possible as long as people were trying to categorize my frizzy hair, my boring thin nose and pale (to Dominicans), dark (to Whites) skin. When I look at Halle Berry or Barack Obama, I think, of how easy it must be to pass for just one race, black, even though they're both equally just as white. Their favorite author probably never complimented them on the mysterious dark whiteness of their skin.

And then there are my imaginary children to think about. My husband is praying for big curly corkscrews, darker skin tones culled from the intermingling of blacks, whites and natives in my ancestry and my great-grandmother's beryl blue eyes. If he gets a white baby with brown eyes and my father's straight hair, will he just put the baby right back? I ask him this with a horrified expression. In response, he laughs.

My husband as a baby.

"No, I wouldn't put the baby back! But it'd just be so nice, so cute if they...." If they looked like me? But what if I want our babies to look like him? Doesn't everyone want their children to look like the people they love most?

People tell me that all that matters is that my children are Jewish. It doesn't matter if they speak Spanish. It doesn't matter that they're Dominican, too. These people try to console me by overlooking parts of me that I don't overlook. I can't.

In an Ashkenazi world of Judaism, where people gawk at difference, I don't think it's just an innocent wish to have babies who look like my husband. I think it's a hope that my children won't have to answer constant questions because of faces they can't change. I think it's a hope that my children will blend in, in a way that I never have in the Dominican and Jewish communities. It seems easier to hope they have their father's faces than to expect the world to include my face when they think of what Jews, Americans and Hispanics are supposed to look like.

It's a hope that comes from a history of racism. It's a hope mixed with fear. When I look at the face of my newborn half-Asian, half-Dominican cousin, I contemplate the half-white, half-Dominican my sister and I will have. I wonder how the world will look at all our babies and what the world will look like to them.

Because of the decisions I've made, will my children, whatever their faces, ever speak the language of their mother's ancestors or want to eat plantains, instead of Cheerios, for breakfast. Like Jessica Alba, will my children someday look back and "wish to G-d that...dad spoke Spanish to..." them because of a desire to fit in all the different worlds that their little souls represent? All the worlds that their very existence challenge and change?

Withdrawl Weekend=Boring Blog

Friday morning, I went into withdrawal.

I take nine medications daily. Funny enough, if you can find humor in having a pill case at 27 which of course I do, none of the medications are for fibromyalgia. After years of trying combinations of different medications (from mood stabilizers, anti-seizure meds, anti-inflammatories), including all the ones currently advertised in sleek pharmaceutical ads online. Now, all I do for my fibromyalgia is a combination of psychotherapy, exercise and mind meds. I've come to realize that not too much can effect the pain so the way that I deal with it and react to it is really paramount.

This weekend I ran out of two of the medications that I rely on for homeostasis. Chalk up to not being able to add (so many pills, so little time) and mix it with being too strapped to see the psychiatrist early enough to get my medicinal cocktail ready for the weekend. Controlling fibromyalgia is all about maintaining equilibrium so Thursday, I spent most of my time praying that the weekend wouldn't go awry thanks to some miracle of G-d.

And so of course, I totally forgot that I had to be up and about for Shabbos meals and the annual gala dinner for my husband's school.

Friday morning , I woke up bright and early around 12:30pm. No energy. I crawled out of bed, stumbling over my feet as I reached for the buzzing alarm clock.

By 1:30pm, I could talk without sounding as if I was still asleep. By candle-lighting time, though I was at least able to dress myself, the world was spinning around me like a bad amusement park ride. Every step forward became precarious as the world careened left and then right.

Thank G-d for Shabbos hosts and guests who can make conversation about, well, homosexuality for hours. I didn't need to add my two cents, though I like to think that I am an expert when it comes to gay men since I dated one as a teen. Most girls at my art high school did.

Saturday morning, my alarm clock read 1:30pm when I squinted and groaned awake. I congratulated myself for being able to serve myself and bumbled through conversation with my husband as I tried to make sense of The Jewish Week blur next to my plate. My husband and I love to burrow ourselves into our little library at home when we don't have Shabbos guests. Sometimes, I even put on something decent.

By Sunday morning of dealing with his ghost of a wife, my husband almost had a nervous breakdown when I told him that our local CVS wouldn't have my prescription in until Thursday. I decided, quite rightly, that I would spend every day until Thursday in bed.

I dreamed about going through my romantic comedy collection and forgoing all the essay writing I had planned. I would scribble in my journal instead. Once the husband was gone for the day, I figured I would sneak my vegan lemon cookies (hey, wait until you get high cholesterol to judge) into bed with my portable DVD player, two or three writing books and Latina and Entertainment Weekly. I do like enjoy a leisurely multi-task.

I was rudely disturbed from my reverie by my husband who first tried to drag me out of bed. Then stole my comforter. My sheets were later ripped from my cold, quivering body. Then he tossed outfits in garish combinations at my head. Withdrawal and fibromyalgia, apparently, are not good enough reasons to hide in bed away from impending social doom at gala events for the man's school.

I tried sniffling. Then wailing. Unfortunately, for my husband, all the tantrums I never threw as a child (what with fearing death by mother and all), I throw now. Sometimes, I am mercilessly tickled out of a tantrum mid-rant. This time, though, he was bad cop. And bad cop wasn't going alone to any fancy schmancy dinner.

My sister, the cruel turncoat, piped in: "Well, didn't he marry you so that he wouldn't have to go to these kinds of things by himself." Ha, I thought it was for my body, er, my mind.

Squeezing into a dress that fit me ten pounds ago and wobbling into knee-high black boots that pooled around my ankles, we hitched a ride to the gala and made it just in time to snatch some goodies at cocktails. As I noshed mostly fruit, I contemplated the irony of my too-big black boots and my too-small H&M dress. At least I had managed to wrestle the frenetic frizz of my Afro into one merciful little beret that threatened to pop off every time I scratched.

A bunch of us were seated together in what we would lovingly come to call "the closet," the table furthest away from any socialization with donors. We were either too embarrassing to seat with donors or we had scrimped and never sent a donation towards the gala meal. Considering that my good friend rabbi, in my dizzy state, had to coach me introducing myself to his parents, I have a sneaking suspicion that it was both. I purposely forgot to donate moula towards the meal and gave it instead to some homeless puppies on Long Island. Shrug.

I survived the gala without falling asleep in my plate. My head only bobbed downwards towards my plate once or twice. In the middle of a speech, my arm suddenly woke up and felt like it had been broken in several places. Now, that's an alarm clock. Luckily, I was also seated with the kind comic geniuses who, inadvertently, cause giggles during the speaker's serious stage schmooze. Neither the giggles or the yoga stretches to ease the pain forced my dress to rip over the expanse of my winter weight. It's the little things that you find yourself thanking G-d for throughout the day.

I walked into my apartment a little less wobbly than when I had left. Drunk on the buzz from witty banter and compliments for my blog, I was ready to crawl into bed for the week and complete mission impossible, hunting down my medication at every local pharmacy the next morning.

Ah and then Monday arrived with all the glorious madness that it brings.

A 10am wake up time seemed to hint at the possibility of productivity. And then $250 later, I got my drug fix thanks to Discover. I also had a strong urge to watch Sicko after having my prescription denied by my health coverage. Sulking all the way home from the pharmacy, I gulped when I noticed a Sarah Lawrence envelope in my mailbox.

The cherry on top of an otherwise sad morning?

A thin letter from Sarah Lawrence. Once opened, it promised me a spot on the short list of wait listed applications. People, pray harder.

Living in the Spotlight

You know that strange feeling you get when you're anxious and you feel like everyone is staring at you? When I get that feeling, everyone IS staring at me.


I made an appearance today at the Bally's pool for the first time. Not only were people staring at me, jaws dropped, whispers ensued and finally the lifeguard had to come over and talk to me. More details on that later.


The back story is that I am in-between gyms. I decided that my charitable donation to the Y needed to end. It's 30 blocks up by bus and it's been hard to get there during the winter and only less hard during the other months. So I've been trying out Bally's, aka the Ghetto gym, and the Whitehall Club, aka the posh gym, and maybe even the Tennis Club of Riverdale, aka ridiculously priced über posh gym.


The Bally's skirts Riverdale. And I'm one of the only white people there and I'm not white. I get lost in a sea of Dominicans, some of them inexcusably ghetto...at least to me, I still have nightmares about the ghetto Dominicans who made my life miserable in junior high. At Bally's, no one guesses that I might be Dominican (albeit, less ghetto), too.


At Bally's, not only am I the white girl, I'm the girl in the skirt and the "Jewish" girl when I clarify as men try to shake my hand or ogle my long-sleeved shirts.


Today I was also "wet suit girl." It wasn't my incredible sexiness that was attracting everyone's eye, it was my Aqua Modesta swimsuit. It's a frum three-piece swimsuit that looks like an Adidas track suit but comes with a skirt.


The lifeguard came over because he said people wanted to know more about my swimsuit. He was very apologetic as he stammered this. I sighed. At least he hadn't asked me to get out of the pool.


Finally, I started my laps and stopped to take a breath.


"Can I ask you a dumb question?" The bald guy bobbing next to me asks sheepishly.


Sure, I'm starting to think answering dumb questions is my job.


After he compliments my "wet suit," he offers that I should market it to other religious women.


I have a funny feeling that no matter how hard I try, no matter how much I've always wanted to feel like I "fit in" because my violent childhood made me feel so "left out," I'm always going to be the anomaly in the room. No matter how much I fight it, my graceless tightrope walk between cultures is going to teach others something. And maybe I'll learn something along the way.


I'm not sure why G-d thought I'd be a good teacher but I guess, it's a job I can't turn down. So fine, I'll teach the masses to play nice in the intercultural game of life.


"Well," I respond with a smile. "I'd never thought of that. That's a good idea."

In the Dominican Republic with my husband and my "wetsuit" in 2007.

The Subject-Verb Disagreement

They can't write.

This symptom manifests itself in different variations at the university tutoring center where I spend my afternoons. I tutor mostly freshmen and the rare upperclassmen in writing. As the high school teacher made famous for packing on the writing assignments, students and teachers alike complimented my relentless drive to ensure that my students could write.

It sounds easy enough. How hard is it to write a cause and effect essay? Or to write an essay comparing literature? Or to answer an essay question of mild complexity? The assignments aren't that difficult but the students I tutor aren't just struggling, they're drowning.

I have to fill out a sheet for every student I tutor that lists what we worked on together. Today, after four one-hour sessions with four different students (three of which were working on the same assignment), I realized that the writing was getting worst. And sadly, each student was left wanting more after our one-hour session was cut short by the next student.

They can't write essays. They can't write paragraphs. They have trouble with topic sentences and struggle over summary sentences. They do away with conclusions. They don't know how to use MLA or APA citations. They've never heard of a in-text citation or a preposition. The classic five-paragraph essay model has them stumped. College writing has made them feeling utterly inept and lost.

I spend a great deal of time writing (with my little arthritic fingers) out explanations. This is the recipe for a paragraph. This is the recipe for a conclusion. This is what an introduction should look like. Citing evidence shouldn't turn into a rant. And if they spend the five minutes to plan an essay, I promise them that I won't have to spend one minute using my red pen to cross out most of what they managed to cobble together.

My first paper in college came back to me with a big fat, red C+ at the top. I was horrified. How had I gone from straight-As in English to being an "average" writer. I hadn't gone anywhere. I was still the same straight-A student from high school but I wasn't prepared for college. In my high school, grade inflation was what happened when a student like me got an instant-A for an assignment because the teacher had to worry about the the students that couldn't write at all, not the students who just couldn't write well.

When I taught eleventh grade, my husband looked at some of the writing. This is fifth grade work, he said ,of a good deal of the essays. I didn't disagree. In eleventh grade, I was teaching my students writing tools they should have learned in elementary school. I thought that my students were an anamoly, though. After years of poor writing education, the system had failed them, me and maybe a few others. I mean, it couldn't be failing everyone, could it?

No Child Left Behind, the thorn in every teacher and administrator's side, is supposed to be catching students before they fall. It's supposed to ensure that everyone's on the same page. And everyone is, but at the top of the page, there's a big red F.

Students from different backgrounds--public school, private school, parochial school, rich and poor alike--are suffering. They're getting their high school education in college after getting their junior high school education in the halls of their high schools. And when they can't keep up, they're dropping out or being kicked out of colleges that don't have the time to make up for students that have been left behind.

A Rainy, Racist "MEXICAN HOUSEKEEPER" Kind of Shabbos

We went to the Five Towns for Shabbos. Everything that could go wrong did.

Traveling and fibromyalgia don’t really mix. Sitting for too long (so my muscles and bones atrophy and start to hurt unbearably), over-stimulation (from subway noise and train noise) and carrying heavy things (like our bags) all spell disaster. To get to the Five Towns, we had to get a public bus, then the subway and then a LIRR train before finally, Hubbie’s brother picked us up. I was in pain long before we ever left for the trip.

And then it started to pour. People with arthritis and injuries generally complain about the rain. I sympathize greatly. Rain can send my body into "shutdown mode." I literally feel like I’m powering down. First, the pain starts to shoot all over my body, and then my brain starts to fog up and slow down. All my physical movements slow down, too. My hip joint starts to crack and lock and slowly it becomes difficult to walk. Usually, one side of my body completely shuts down and then with all the nerves in my body overreacting, the other side joins up, too.

And then we arrived to the house where we would be saying and discovered that they had...the horror of all horrors...WALL-TO-WALL CARPETING! Within 5 minutes, my chest hurts and my eyes start to burn. With 20 minutes to spare before Shabbos, we run out to Best Buy and buy an air purifier which we hope will get me through the night. It helps. But I still wake up feeling like a fat man sat on my chest because my asthma’s been working overtime. And I’m also totally high from nearly overdosing on Benadryl to get me through the night.

But there’s more. Friday night, I escape davening to stretch in hopes that it will help my pain. It doesn’t but it releases the nerves in my hands so I feel like I have some control over them. I know I’m going to be a terrible guest but at least my husband won’t have to cut up my food for me.

At dinner, I am, as predicted, an awful guest. The nerves in my face are making it hard for me to open my mouth. I murmur everything. I’m moving slowly from head to toe because every movement causes me to wince. Aside from Hubbie, Brother-in-law and me, the married couple with baby has invited over two guys in their 20s, a college student and a comedian. Though the wife asks me to sit next to her, I renege because I would have to squeeze into the seat between her and my husband and have a hard time getting up to stretch. I know I’m coming off as rude, standoffish and shy but I can’t help it.

I’m ready to throw a tantrum after the wife frequently asks me where I’m from five times too many. Finally, we get to the gist of it, when I remind her again and again that I grew up in Washington Heights and she asks, “Originally?” I bite my tongue but I’m pissed.

Why is it that though I was born in America and speak English with no hint of an accent, people have to ask me where I’m from all the time? And in case you think, I'm overreacting, you should know that I am asked this every other time I meet new (ahem, white) people. Why don’t they just say, well, since you’re not white, what the hell are you? Or why don’t they ask, what is your racial and ethnic background? Well, probably because they're not the from the US Census bureau and oh, right, because that wouldn’t be polite. Neither is asking me where I’m from, repeatedly, especially when you know the answer you wanted wasn’t “New York.”

I’m sorry that my tan is confusing YOU. How often does anyone ask black people where they’re from. That’s racist, no? What the hell do you expect them to say?

I've trained my lily-white husband to approach people he thinks might be Hispanic at synagogue with, "Hey, my wife's Hispanic, by any chance are you?" Direct and to the point.

Imagine you’re white and I ask you where you’re from. My husband says “LA.” Okay, no, where are you from originally? “Well, I grew up in Long Beach.” No, where are your parents from! A clueless, exasperated look has just crossed your face and then you repeat yourself again. No, dammit, where are your people from? “What people?” Your white people! What shtetel did they crawl out of?

No one asks white people where they’re from. Come on, they're white, they're American. Unless they have an accent no one assumes differently. Most white people can’t remember how they got to America but that doesn't matter because white people don't get asked what countries their ancestors came from over dinner. Guess what, those brown, yellow and black people are American, too, and would forget where they were from if people stopped ASKING. And yes, I'm still pissed.

Finally, the pain starts to let up and the comedian has decided to do some of his show for us. By the end of his bit, I’m glaring at him. One racist joke about “a Mexican housekeeper” too many? He says that when his mother told him to date someone traditional, he ends up dating a girl who can cook, clean, blah, blah, blah and who, of course, is a Mexican housekeeper.

I shoot “the comedian” frosty glances the way that the pain is shooting up and down my right side. My pain like my anger is seething. It is taking all willpower to contain myself and not call him a RACIST! My husband and my brother-in-law, who both winced and looked at me the minute the words "Mexican housekeeper" were uttered, are darting glances my way as if waiting for a volcanic eruption.

Things only get worse when our hosts start joking about Chinese names while discussing their costumes for upcoming Purim. When they’ll be dressing as a Chinese family! WHAT?!

Maybe I should wear a sign? I’m Hispanic. My friends are Chinese. Bite me, you racists.

I was already in a terrible mood but these jokes just reminded me how terribly isolated I, often, feel in Jewish (ie, white) company. When I'm at the table, offhand comments about race and class become daggers. These comments happen most frequently when I haven’t announced that I’m Dominican. Yes, that means they happen even when I have said I'm Dominican but at least, then, people look rightly sheepish. But when they don't know I'm Dominican, it means they've decided that I’m "one of them." When really, I’m one of those people that they make jokes about when “one of those people” isn’t in the room.

Suicidal Ideation

This is part of a larger, as yet unwritten, piece on depression.

I told my psychiatrist, a zany baal teshuva, that I was in his office because I thought about killing myself. And my friends and family were pretty pissed with me. No, I didn't have a plan. I didn't have one for death OR for life, for that matter. That was part of the problem.

"You can't kill yourself," he said, peering up at me over his glasses, with shocking self-assurance.
"Why not?!"

"Well, for one, it's not Jewish," he said shaking his head and scribbling on his pad.

That was low. He had gone and pulled the Jewish card on me. And yet, all of a sudden, the fog cleared.

In Catholicism, suicides get a one-way ticket to hell. Even though, Judaism's not sold as the kind of destination religion that offers exclusive packages to heaven or hell dependent on belief, I could see that he was right. It wasn't Jewish to kill yourself.

If I killed myself, I would be a murderer, my soul damned to limbo. I would be usurping G-d's awesome power. And in doing so, I would cease to be Jewish as I knew it, having nullified my ability to see G-d's work, to struggle to be able to find meaning in the good and believe that the bad was beyond my human comprehension. Blessed are you, Hashem, King of the Universe, the true Judge.

We made an appointment for the following week. And I started to take my happy pills. There was no way that after working so hard to convert, that I was going to go "crazy" and start breaking one of the Ten Commandments. I walked away and for the first time in a long while, I thanked G-d. For all the "angels" in my life, I cried. For my husband, my sisters, my friends, my eccentric Jewish psychiatrist...little human post-it notes from G-d to remind me the Big Ear is always listening.

Mothers/Submission for "Personal Essay Clinic: Writing about About Family" Class

Everyone I know is pregnant or trying to get pregnant. Well, everyone except me. The other day I felt like a hostage as I sat around with moms discussing daycare options over lunch. During my regular Target shopping spree, I became harried going through racks of baby clothes as I searched for a gift for a friend’s baby. What in the world does 6M mean? And does NB really fit any baby? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not unhappy for all my glowing, new and improved friends. And no, I’m not terribly jealous either. I just can’t help feeling like an outsider in my peer group as I master the art of having casual conversation while my girlfriends feed their newborns.


I’ve never really wanted to be a mother. Though I have baby names for all of the imaginary children my husband and I have together, I am terrified of sweet-smelling creatures who crawl on all fours. I cringe at the idea of sharing my room, my breasts, my life with a wailing infant. At 27, you’d think that I have had enough therapy to process why the eldest of eleven is concerned about becoming responsible for yet another human being.


I stopped loving my mother when I was eight. If this seems drastic then you should know my mother probably stopped loving me soon after I was born. I was the primary reason my father married my mother and I was, my mother had hoped, the reason he would stay. But when he finally left after countless infidelities, my mother never failed to remind me that she was “stuck” with me, that I had “ruined” her life and that she could never forgive that my father had loved me more than her. I have a sneaking suspicion that the way my friends hold their sons and daughters now, with tired looks of exquisite serenity, looks nothing like how my mother held me.


I’ve been a parenting since age three, when my first sister was born. B. was a born wild child and there was no way setting a good example was going to reform her. But hell, I tried. By seven, I was changing diapers while entertaining my sister, A., soon after she was born. At fifteen, I came home from school to give my baby sister, K., her bath and then woke up in the middle of the night to rock her to sleep whenever my mother locked Kary out of the bedroom they shared.


But I didn’t become a parent legally until A. ran away from home at fourteen. She was following the example I set for everyone after leaving at seventeen. When family court threatened to send A. back home and A. threatened to kill herself, I stepped in to fight a three-year custody battle against my mother. I was 21. Overnight, I developed the fear all parents have when their child isn’t right in front of them to protect. I worried daily about caring for two on a budget for one. I shook my fist in anger as I charged an overpriced graphing calculator her teacher requested at the last minute to my trust fund, my Discover card.


My sister B. turned an intervention for her on its head when she got everyone to agree that I had to stop meddling in her life. My therapist told me I needed to realize that my sisters are finally adults and I start caring for me. But though I don’t carry a photo of A. in my wallet, I never resist telling anyone who will listen that her college GPA is a 4.0 despite holding down two jobs. If my sisters are any example of my skills of as a parent, then I “did good.” I should be a shoo-in for Mother of the Year, right?


But I don’t know what a mother is. I learned to mother my sisters by reversing everything I ever saw my mother do. Don’t hit your kids in the head with rollerblades. Don’t force them to lie or cheat or steal. Don’t beat them with telephone wires after Thanksgiving dinner. Don’t laugh at them when they tell you they miss you. Don’t tell them you’ll kill their younger siblings if they disobey. Whatever you do, just don’t hate them.


I worry that even with all my experience as a child, then teenage and later, barely adult parent, I will not be able to do the awesome job of mother any justice. I’m terrified of the violent temper I inherited from my mother. And when I lose it, I imagine doing it in front of my imaginary kids. Whenever I roll my eyes as my friends nuzzle and coddle their children, I know that it’s because my mother never did that for me. And then I realize that being a mother is about more than just knowing what not to do.


My mother-in-law, E., used to call me every day until I made her stop. All the attention was completely freaking me out. I didn’t understand why she wanted to talk to me so much. Why did she insist I stop to say hello every single time I walk into her house after running an errand? I mean, didn’t I say hello to her in the morning? Doesn’t that mean I’m covered for the entire day? And what’s with all the hugging? In the year I’ve been married to her son, E. has done more for me and my self-esteem than my mother did in seventeen years. But E. swears her approach to parenting is not to parent at all. I know she lies.


E. picks off what her daughter N. won’t eat before handing the precocious five-year-old her lunch. When N. complains anyway, E. responds firmly without having to resort to beating N. to a bloody pulp. E. is consistent but not smothering in the way she shows affection to her three adult children. When she goes to Target, she buys clothing for all her brood and then mails the gifts halfway across the country to New York. She worries about spoiling them. And then she sighs happily as she tells me that I’m her favorite daughter when I call to ask her about her sunnier days in California.


When I look to my mother, I know not what to do but when I look at E. and all the new mothers around me, I’m not sure what to do at all. What if I can’t breastfeed because of antidepressants coursing through my veins? And if I pat my imaginary son in the tushie for being disrespectful, is it because of my history of child abuse? And if I don’t learn to hug and coo properly, will my imaginary daughter think mommy doesn’t love her? Really, instead of a college fund, should I be creating a health fund to help my children defer the costs of future therapy bills?


I came to my husband in tears after reading Leslie Bennetts’s The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much? and Pamela Stone’s Opting Out: Why Women Really Quit Their Careers and Head Home. “I don’t know if I want to be a stay-at-home mom! I don’t know what to do!” I gasped through tears. Calmly, my husband reminded me that our imaginary children didn’t really need a stay-at-home mom and that our future children hadn’t even been conceived. In response, I sniffled.


Someone else told me not to talk about my mother’s abuse so much because it made people start thinking about whether or not I planned to take the cycle of abuse into the next generation. But if I didn’t talk about it, I would still think it. Someone told me that by simply worrying about turning into my mother, it means that I won’t ever become the kind of mother that my mother was. But what does that mean? There doesn’t seem to be a person or a book to answer the question that really worries me when I see protruding bellies, breast pumps and onesies. How do I know what kind of mother I will be?

On the list

Rabbi Lookstein, who happens to have been the head of the beit din that converted me, is not too happy with the RCA's new stance on conversion. I guess I should be happy, that according to an article in Jewish Week, Rabbi Lookstein is "on the list." I think that means my conversion is "100% kosher for Israel" after all. This only makes it, what, 50% possible for Israel to screw with me and my future offspring? It's actually supposed to make it 100% impossible for Israel to bug me but who's kidding who?

The new standards will streamline conversions. Because, you know, it's rather simple to streamline people. If you think about the kind of people that convert, you will see a broad spectrum of individuality and strength. I'm afraid that new stringencies will not only turn away people who would otherwise be good G-d-fearing Jews, I think that we're going to see a change in the kinds of people that are converted. Bring on the boring Jews! Interesting converts need not apply.


Rabbi Avi Weiss spoke from the bimah at shul last Shabbat about how in the rush to centralize power, the Israeli rabbinate has taken power away from congregational rabbis. It's these congregational rabbis that are in the trenches, they, like Rabbi Elie Weinstock at KJ on the Upper East Side, are the ones answering kashrut questions at midnight on a school night. But no worries, the congregational rabbi can still act as teacher, as sponsor, but he's just not good enough to actually create his own beit din.


Future converts won't be able to experience the awe I experienced when surrounded by Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, Rabbi Elie Weinstock, and Rabbi Sam Shor, I dipped at the Upper West Side mikvah and entered the Jewish people. I was awed, not only by the life-changing experience I was undergoing, but by knew the men that were standing with me. I felt honored to stand with them, blessed to have them become an integral part of my personal history.


The new converts will share their special day at the mikvah with a beit din of strangers. Strangers who have not been answering their questions at midnight. Strangers who cannot care for them deeply in that way that a teacher's begins to do so when he learns and struggles along with his student. It is a beit din of strangers that will make the objective decisive decision whether or not someone is ready to convert. Objective makes me think we're starting to look at people as objects. Or are they pawns in a larger political intrigue?


I said it at shul and I'll say it again. I think that the this whole conflict is disgusting. When I uttered these words in front of a packed congregation at the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale, shaking and in tears, I was just as angry as I was sad. I thought of all the friends I have seen suffer through their conversions because of human callousness. I thought of how careless people made ME suffer for my conversion. The new standards are hurtful and go against halakha. They add stringencies where stringency is not necessary. And for what? For politics between America and Israel, the lives of converts everywhere are being challenged?


People aren't reading their Torah properly if they think that this is how we love a stranger. Like Rabbi Lookstein, I agree that these new constraints will do more harm, to future and current converts, than good. Right now there are converts everywhere who are starting to question their Jewishness and wondering whether their children will be allowed to marry in Israel generations down the line. Like Rabbi Avi Weiss, I think the appropriate avenue would have been to offer more rabbinic education to rabbis who needed to brush up on conversion.


I summered in Israel before my conversion. I told the people at my shul that I was ready to convert once I had learned how much Jews hate Jews in Israel. I had never seen anything like it. I no longer had the Jewish people on a pedestal but still, I wanted to be a part of them. In Israel, the head of a haredi school for converts told me that I would ruin the Jewish people. She didn't know me. She didn't know what was in my heart. All she saw was that I was flagrantly disobeying her school's obsession with modesty by allowing my collarbone to see the light of day. When I told her that an illness causes the nerves on my collarbone to be incredibly sensitive, she told me it was better that I stay indoors and out of sight than to help men stray towards sin because of my immodesty. I learned more about the thickness of stockings that summer than I did about halakha.


I spent those months in Israel crying. Every night, I was on the phone with friends in America asking them to remind me that the people at this haredi school for converts were not representative of all Jews. I needed a reminder that it was more important, or just as important, for me to learn modern Hebrew, Jewish history, Jewish philosophy and how to follow services as I went to class after class about modesty that were not so subtly aimed to reform me. My fellow students did not bother to hide their distaste for Modern Orthodoxy or Avi Weiss's Open Orthodox yeshiva. The last day of my schooling there, the head of school likened the rabbis that I cherished and respected to "dogs."


I wonder if any of the RCA rabbis have had a chance to really look at what conversion is like in Israel. I wonder if they have met the women that I met that summer, women who have been studying for years, sometimes in limbo for as long as three to five years. I met women who have had their devotion challenged though they left everything in their countries to come to Israel to convert. I met women who had to go to the mikvah several times in different haredi communities and still were not accepted.


Why don't we insist the Israeli Rabbinate adopt our standards for conversion, and not the other way around? What do converts actually have to say? Has anyone actually TALKED to converts in Israel or America about what they think of the conversion process? Why is policy being created without actually speaking to the people who the policy is going to affect? Let's demand change in an Israel that makes even marriage difficult for born Jews.


Oh, people worry that conversion isn't difficult enough. During my conversion, I worked full-time as a high school teacher, attending Master's classes at night and learned as much as I could about Judaism from books, classes and the Jews around me. No one told me that part of the curriculum was going to be learning to deal with the anti-Semitism from former friends who created a "pork eater's table" at work and didn't invite me. No one said my relatives might not come to my wedding. No one said outright that people would cut me out of their lives.


Jews worry about what this or that convert will do to the Jewish people, sometimes without thinking of the sacrifices the convert has made to take that final step. Sometimes, balancing so many new cultural cues feels like a constant reminder that you're walking the tightrope between two cultures and never quite sure that you're really accepted in either.


If anyone wants to take my conversion away, they'll have to rip it from my hands while I kick and scream, I told the congregants at HIR. As I said this, I thought of the converts all around America who are worried about how the decisions the RCA makes today will affect their grandchildren. I know I want my decision to convert to affect my grandchildren, I don't want the Israeli rabbinate to affect them more. And s I think about the people know that they're as Jewish as Jewish as Jewish gets but who, like me, have flirted with the idea that they may always be permanent outsiders in a people they call home. I wonder if the minute some old bearded guys made me doubt my Jewishness that was the second that they lost some of their humanity.

*

A Conversion Critique From Within

Part of the RCA committee on new standards, Haskel Lookstein now says he’s ‘afraid’ of the deal with Chief Rabbinate.

Portrait of an artist

Hubbie's cousin is a Radio City Rockette. And last night, she almost became my creative guru. If it were up to her, I'd be giving art lessons, painting and writing up a storm...oh, and taking some risks.

I am not a risk taker. I have never had enough stability in my life to be willing to forgo some of it. The risks I've taken in life were mostly self-destructive. I think that deep down inside, I saw taking risks as self-destructive so I made sure the ones that I did take ended in failure.

I have a secret. I've been blessed with many gifts but I've always found them daunting. I can create exquisite artwork and I could do much more if I'd pursued it in high erducation. But I didn't. And yet a few hours at the drawingboard transportts me to the years when a sketchpad and a notebook were never too far from my hands.

When I wasn't sketching, I was writing. I wrote stories, plays, poetry and read anything and everything as if I was a starving woman and books were food. I daydreamed new characters and intricate back stories. I wrote the article that landed me the book contract in 20 minutes. I didn't even break a sweat.

What I learned from the Rockette was something I think I already knew. I never really pushed meyself with either of my gifts. I didn't think I was good enough and even when I did, I just didn't want to take the risk. Didn't want to risk being a starving artist. Instead, I prayed that I could be extremely good at one thing, something stale but lucrative. I wished that I could hide my secrets, these hidden talents, and for a long time I did. Always practical over creative.

And then I met my husband. He plundered my art portfolio and canvased the walls of my apartment in artwork. There are portraits here and figure drawings there and childish scribblings from long ago. When I couldn't work, he urged me to write and on that suggestion, I landed a work-from-home internship at a family magazine.

I envy the Rockette. I envy people who have drive and ambition. I envy people who live their dream no matter the costs. She is a dancer. But I am only a very strictly freelance artist and writer, undercover, still worshipping the staid careers of friends who wish they could paint a portrait or write easily.

I sometimes think that if I'd been born a Hausman, not married one, things would have been different. My mother and father-in-law would have made sure I took all the right classes, had all the right supplies. Instead of sacrificing one talent for another, they would have pushed me to double major in writing and art. I would have been a creative tour de force, not racked with doubt and fear of failure and always, fear of success.

As a teacher, I was the consummate cheerleader to my students. I was the cheerleader I never had at home. Because though my mother bought me art supplies, let me enroll in art school, she ensured that I only had enough self-esteem to srvive, not thrive. And all the while, I watched as she decided to break my sister's passion, by denying her the choices I was given freely. My sister can dance, sing, draw but my mother sent her to a public school instead of an art school as a lesson: You will obey me or suffer. And so we all suffered.

There are fleeting moments when I believe that I could take risk, put all my eggs in one basket, learn to sell myself as a true artist. Still, in the back of my mind, there's that welfare child who doesn't want to go hungry, terrified of instability and sicked by the prospect of a rocky road ahead.

My friends did not approve of my decision to study to become a fitness instructor last fall, though some friends were more open about it than others. Though, I was pursuing something I was interested in, it was no secret that I was ignoring my natural gifts on purpose. Becoming a yoga teacher still seemed more of a steady gig than a writer or an illustrator.

What would Michaelangelo had been without the Medici family sponsoring some of his greatest work. Would he have pushed himself anyway? Would he have found the support he needed from within? I don't know. I think it's easier for me to look for external support than it is to look within. Now I wonder if as a teacher, I didn't push my students enough to find it within themselves to...just do it.