Passeaster

Last week I did something I am pretty sure I’ve never done before — I threw a seder on Tuesday (does one “throw” a seder?) and I put together Easter baskets for Sunday.  (Actually, Jake and Lily got Easter baskets and the rest of the folks visiting got some perfectly serviceable Easter bags, but who’s keeping track?)

As I mused over how and what to translate from this experience to a post, I cleverly coined the term “Passeaster.”

Not long afterward, it occurred to me that “Passeaster” bears an unfortunate resemblance to “Chistmaskah.”  The fact that I watched The O.C. even after it got kind of dumb and had episodes like the Christmaskah one did not make me cringe any less.

Still, for me, “Passeaster” is the only way to describe the amalgam of: continuing to forge my identity as I introduce my kids to theirs, expanding yet again my notion of family, feeling adult and grounded in a way that should be plenty scary but instead feels deceptively young and fun (yes, I know, I’m fooling no one but myself), and, of course, finding ever more joy in being a mom.

Allow me to explain.  Or try to.

First Came Passover

As I’ve mentioned before, I have found myself in the past year or so learning about the Jewish traditions I never learned about growing up — which, when I think about it, must have taken a lot of deliberate not-learning-about-Jewish-traditions given the fact that I was hardly the only Jewish kid at my high school even if I was the least Jewish one.

I am doing it, of course, for the kids.  Not in an I’m-joining-a-synagogue-to-give-my-kids-community way.  Rather, in a the-JCC-has-a-great-preschool-and-my-kids-happen-to-go-there way.  Plus, this being Asheville, the Jewish holidays are something of a cultural event for non-Jews, sort of like Kwanza celebrated many times each year.

And so, hiding behind all those enthusiastic non-Jews, I have ventured into the culture myself.  Last spring, it was the Purim Carnival. In December, I bought my first menorah, though it took a combination of my not-yet-three-year-old son and his preschool teacher to explain to me how to use it.  Last week it was a seder.

This was not, I hasten to point out, the first seder I have thrown.  In the mid-nineties, at the height of my law practicing, social singles, party throwing days I had a pot luck seder.  As I recall, it had a lot more to do with my naive idea that maybe if I cooked a lot of really good food for my friends I could escape the legal profession and become a caterer than with any notion of celebrating my roots.  For this reason, I was among the many guests who urged the two real Jews at the table to hurry through the haggadah they had proudly brought with them from their days at Berkeley so we could eat already.

This year, my desire to throw a seder had something to do with visions of Jake and his friends asking the four questions — one question, really, so I thought they could handle it.  That, and I wanted to take advantage of another joint dinner party with my friend Ellen, she of the culinary degree, shared Thanksgiving dinner, and awesome cooking skills.

I suggested the idea to her about a week before Passover, both of us game but neither of us particularly focused.  About all I knew was that Mike is reputed to make a mean brisket (as a non-meat-eater I cannot personally attest to this fact) and that I was going to schedule it for the second night of Passover, as school was closed that day and having friends over in the evening gave me the fortitude I needed to face a day without assistance with child care.

As so, on Monday — the first real day of Passover and the night on which people like me who are having only one seder are supposed to have it — I sat down with a haggadah I had found on the internet.  I chose it because it had a vaguely feminist tinge to it — requiring that Miriam be given a glass of water when Elijah receives his glass of wine (this does not seem particularly feminist in retrospect, since I think Miriam would appreciate the chance to get toasted along with the guys) and including an orange on the seder plate as a statement that all genders and sexual orientations are welcome at our table.

Given our audience — namely, me — I highlighted only the basics:  the history of Passover, the story of Exodus, and the symbolic gestures like eating parsley dipped in salt water.  Never mind those pesky prayers, I thought, until one of our guests gamely raced through them as the rest of us flipped pages.

In fact, this was the spirit of our seder — one person reading, two others saying, “Where are we?”, at least two adults springing from the table to break up a fight among the three three-year-olds in the living room, and Lily yelling for more haroset so she could suck the juice out of the apple bits and leave them scattered like a sticky blanket of fall leaves on the floor beneath her.

The kids did not ask the four questions — they were too busy watching a movie and fighting with each other — though they did find the hidden afikomen at some random point in the evening.  I’m not sure any of us knows a whole lot more about the story of Exodus than we did before the seder.  And I’m quite certain that we drank even more wine than the generous amount the holiday already calls for.

Which perhaps made it even more lovely, as the evening drew to a close and we ate flourless birthday cake, to realize that in finding friends who would allow their children to stay up late and eat a dinner no more substantial than a piece or two of matzoh and lots of macaroons because who wants to get them to eat when we have our own social life to attend to, I had found even more.  I had found people who I would like to believe would be my friends even if we didn’t conveniently share the need to socialize along with our three-year-olds.

In other words, I gather great reassurance from the fact that this seder I kind of threw for my kids wasn’t so very different from my last seder when I wasn’t even so sure I ever wanted to have them.

After Moses Comes the Easter Bunny

Given the fact that school was closed the day after our seder as well — thus leaving me precious little of the work week to, well, work — I believe I can be forgiven for having to run out to purchase Easter baskets on Saturday evening.

Yes, I had managed to pick up some felt bags with bunnies on them at Target a few weeks ago, but Mike insisted that his kids have actual baskets for Easter.  As this was the only part of the holiday my former altar boy husband insisted upon, I was happy to humor him.

Plus, I had visions of Easter morning even more arresting than my thwarted imaginings of a seder in which my children would, in some small yet meaningful way, participate.  As I artfully arranged packets of organic gummy bears, clever but overpriced plastic toys from World Market, and one of the “touch and feel” books that give Lily such delight these days in the hemp baskets I found, I pictured my kids bounding down the stairs on the warm Easter morning that fell in the midst of this lovely stretch of April summer we’re having.  Never mind that Lily isn’t quite up to bounding down stairs yet — or anywhere for that matter.  And, okay, I expected Mike and Jake to sleep late, as we’d been up late the night before with a passle of teenagers.  A girl can dream, can’t she?

Mike and Jake were sleeping late, you see, because it’s not only Passover and Easter, but it’s also spring break — most notably for Jake and Lily’s cousins who live four-and-a-half hours away in West Virginia.  So this year Easter for us meant having Aunt Minnie hop in her friend’s minivan with her teenage son and daughter, the teenage son of the minivan driver, the minivan driver, and another teenage friend of theirs just to round out the numbers and make Jake really, really excited to “play with the boys.”

You’d think that with teenagers in the house I could recapture the non-frumpiness of my childless first seder days.  There was, after all, talk of going out to listen to music on Saturday night.  But we ended up at a family friendly pizza joint, and I suspect it wasn’t all the doing of Jake and Lily.  The boys spent some time wandering downtown Asheville, but the only place I almost went shopping was Target with their moms.  And, mostly, they played with my kids, which surely doesn’t qualify as cool, since I do it all the time.

In other words, the wine buzz had cleared from the seder and I could see once again that I am no longer a young party-thrower but rather the mother of two small children who thrills to the excuse to have a drink while someone else entertains them.

Easter, however, seemed the perfect opportunity to take advantage of this sad definition of my social life.  Aunt Minnie had come equipped with a bag full of plastic Easter eggs, and the boys were ready to hide them in the yard for the big hunt.  Mike had sent her out Saturday night to purchase a mighty nine-pound leg of lamb he intended to grill outside — traditional Easter style he’d like me to believe.  We managed to have three bottles of Prosecco in the refrigerator for four adults. And I had the aforementioned Easter baskets at the ready.

But, as I suspected, Lily and I were up well before Mike and Jake on Easter morning.  Plus, I realized as I gazed upon the enticing baskets on the dining room table, it was unlikely Jake would bother to eat the granola we pretend is real food every morning when there were gummy bears — organic or not — to be consumed.  So I hid the baskets, and the bags for everyone else, figuring some other opportune moment in which to spring them would arise during the day.

Besides, what better way to encourage Jake to get dressed after he finally got out of bed and ate his granola than to promise him a “surprise”?

“What is it?” he asked me, so excited he momentarily forgot the frustration he is so quick to exhibit every time I coax him to put on his shoes by himself.

“You’ll find out when the boys get here,” I promised.

I am not, alas, well familiar with teenage boys.  By the time they had roused themselves and made their way to our house Lily was down for her nap.  And though she would hardly know the difference, it didn’t seem right to do Easter baskets without her.

“Do I get my surprise now?” Jake asked once the even greater excitement of playing with the finally arrived boys had waned slightly.

“When Lily wakes up,” I promised.

Only by the time Lily woke up the boys had gone downtown, so once again I broke my promise to my young son who, if I keep this up, will never believe anything I tell him again.  To the teenagers’ credit, they had first scattered plastic Easter eggs throughout the yard.  But that meant they deserved to be around when Jake went on his hunt.

So, with nothing much else to do on this Easter day, we went on an oh so traditional Easter visit to the park we visit pretty much every weekend.

This meant that as dinner time approached, Jake still asking for his surprise, no one had received so much as an Easter bag, and the yard was full of plastic Easter eggs that were in grave danger of being forgotten until the dogs brought them in the house, muddy and chewed, to be scattered among Lily’s toys on the living room floor.  There was, however, lamb coming off the grill and beautiful roasted potatoes and crisp green asparagus.  Not to mention a bunch of hungry kids.

As it turned out, the hidden eggs came in handy when Jake finished the half a potato he called dinner well before the rest of us had loaded our plates.  Squinting to see him flit across the yard from my vantage point on the deck above did not exactly jibe with my idea of Jake’s Easter.  But at least I can be grateful that the weather was nice enough for us to eat outside so as to halfway keep him company.

The Easter baskets came out, finally, toward the end of the dinner, just before Lily completely melted down waiting impatiently for her bottle and a quiet room in which to go to sleep.  And they were, I’m happy to say, a source of pleasure for all — from the singing plastic tops the big boys got to the “dino-soar” (get it?) toy that thrilled Jake to the organic gummy bears Lily dug and the chocolate bar with ginger that the adults disappeared while I was upstairs putting Lily to bed.

Did I learn anything about Easter on Easter?  Even less than I learned about Exodus at the seder.  And yet, at the same time, I learned the same lesson all over again.  Those people you enjoy so much while you enjoy your kids, I realized, are in fact a kind of family, whether they are technically your family or not.

What Do I Mean By “Family” and Have I Stripped the Word of Any Real Meaning?

I’ll keep it short because if you’re still with me you deserve to not be with me for much longer, since I imagine you have plenty of other more interesting things you could be doing right now.

I have, in the past, had a rather tentative and circumscribed notion of family.  I don’t come from a big one.  We lived in Los Angeles, far from any other family members.  Grandparents were the people who came to visit a few times a year bearing gifts and varying amounts of patience.

And yet, always, I had friends.  Close friends.  The ones you confide in and, eventually, start to introduce as “like a sister to me.”  And then the people I lived with, ate meals with, made mistakes with in college.

But it wasn’t until I had kids that I really grasped the notion that “family” isn’t merely something that is there when you are born, set and inviolate and, even if you are unlucky enough to want it otherwise, with you for life.

My children were the first members of my family that I saw join it.  From nothing, from nowhere, I often marvel, came these beings that I love like nothing and no one I’ve ever loved before.

Okay, so, yes, our children belong in a special category.  But then there are categories for partners, pets, in-laws, best friends.  And whether we consider them “family” or not, whether we have to qualify what “level” of family they have achieved, we rarely stop to think about it.

Which is, I’m pretty sure, where I’m headed.  Yoga teaches us to recognize and honor the connections between all of us, the common energy that runs through everyone’s heart.  If that is the case, when I connect particularly pleasurably with that heart energy — when, say, I see a teenager we’ve met only a few times playing sweetly with my son — why not see that person as, in a way, my family?  Why not be easy with the hugs and open with the love and accepting and willing to be accepted even if I don’t know all that much about him?

In other words, I have found more than friends in my new life in a new town with the newness of motherhood still clinging to me even as it has become so very familiar.  I have found a sprawling, supportive, willing-to-believe-I’m-cooler-than-I-really-am family.

Surya Namaskar (Sun Salutes) — Feeling the Connection

I offer the traditional surya namaskar here because it is the most clear path to the literal embodiment of connection.  You move through a series of poses as one — ending where you started, full circle.  As the end of one cycle connects to the beginning of the next, your mind starts to relax, your body takes over.  And, eventually, as you become more comfortable, you start to find that sun salutes — like every yoga pose and everything for which we strive in life — come from the heart.

Surya Namaskar (Traditional) Instructions