Settling into Our Traditions

This is the second holiday season since I converted, and the third since we stopped celebrating Christmas in our own household. The first Christmas, before my conversion and when I had just begun my Intro to Judaism classes, was made underwhelming just by circumstance; we had just moved into our house in early December and life was too chaotic to get a Christmas tree and to find our boxes of decorations. We realized it wasn’t so bad and we didn’t miss it so much because we had enough of it in the rest of the world, and that helped us the next year when we skipped celebrating much more intentionally.

Last year was the first year we deliberately did not get a Christmas tree or Christmas gifts for each other, and I had to grapple with the question of how we create our own traditions and what traditions we can share with family, which traditions we want to try to keep consistent from year to year and which will be flexible depending on whose family we can be with. I feel a little more grounded in that this year, but also still open to changes. Basically we are creating our own Hanukkah traditions and letting Christmas be more open since it’s not our holiday, but our families’ which we participate in secondarily. Some years we may go to my in-laws’ for the traditional Christmas morning bagels and gift exchange; other times, like this year, we won’t go over til mid-afternoon when the other siblings are going over there, and we will have dinner together. Some years we will travel south to visit my parents since our child will be out of school for winter break. I’m not worried anymore about “confusing” our child with whatever happens that day in whichever family member’s home; I feel confident in and comfortable with what we have begun setting up, and grateful for all the love and culture-sharing among family that our child will get to be surrounded by.

Nicole’s brother and his wife, who will raise their children Catholic, will continue coming over to our house for the Passover seder every year. That will be in their kids’ memories, and yet their kids won’t be confused about whether they are Jewish or Catholic. They will know they are coming over to celebrate our holiday with us since we are family. Likewise, our child will not wake up to a Christmas tree and piles of presents on Christmas or have anything else happening at home or within our family that makes them think they are Christian, but they will have memories of how they spend Christmas with their extended family. They will certainly look forward to having dinner with relatives and exchanging some gifts with them. And they might even find the sparkly attraction of Christmas more appealing than Hanukkah. I would be naive if I didn't expect that. Despite its crucially important message about preserving our faith and culture against all pressure and threats, Hanukkah is a minor holiday in the Jewish calendar, and I don't want for us to blow it further out of proportion than it already is in a misguided effort to compete with Christmas. We have our own major holidays, and our child's sense of how being Jewish is honored and celebrated and observed comes from an entire year of rituals, not just this one holiday that may be culturally overshadowed by Christmas (and not without reason - the birth of a savior is understandably a bigger deal; there is not even anything temple-based in the observance of Hanukkah). 

But at Christmas, we will have just recently finished our holiday of light, telling the story of Hanukkah and remembering the importance of maintaining culture and resisting total assimilation. We will have our newly created tradition of having a Hanukkah dinner on the weekend - how nice that there is always a weekend since it’s an 8-day holiday! We will give our child a gift every night, some much smaller than others, and we will also spend that time as a family around the menorah each night, talking and reading and playing games as the candles burn low. We will make latkes on the weekend. We will donate the tzedakah (charity) we’ve been saving all year. We will go to that week’s Shabbat service and watch the big menorah be lit and sing Hanukkah songs with our community. We will attend the synagogue’s family Hanukkah party. And within days or weeks of that festivity coming to an end, we will continue enjoying the larger culture around us - the prettiness of our neighbors’ Christmas lights, the music and decorations in stores and friends’ homes, the Christmas cards that come pouring in from loved ones. We will enjoy it as many non-Jewish people enjoy driving and walking through Williamsburg Brooklyn in the fall to see the sukkahs set up outside Orthodox homes, or as Westerners enjoy going through Chinatown during the hugely celebrated and brightly decorative Chinese New Year.

We are a pluralistic society, and I love that. As much as I love Israel and look forward to traveling there someday, and as much as I think it must also be nice to have most people around you joining in your celebrations, I wouldn’t want to be separated from other cultures. I have always loved learning about and participating in other cultures, while not appropriating them as my own.

Winter is a dark, dreary time, and it’s beautiful that several cultures have festivals of light and giving and family and celebration for us to look forward to and to keep us going until the days begin lengthening again. 

What's Next? (Is "planning for the unknown" an oxymoron?)

Realizing that I’m not even halfway through pregnancy is strange, because I feel like I’ve been pregnant for AGES, but nearing the halfway mark next week is still a reality check that THERE IS SO MUCH WE NEED TO DO. We still have an English-immersion student living in what will be the nursery (she’s been with us since September) and we haven’t even measured the room for furniture. We do have a plan for where she will go when we need to start setting up the nursery, but it feels strange that our designated room isn’t even really accessible yet for planning or fantasizing.

We are frantically saving up the $2500 needed for second-parent adoption (still necessary for travel to states and countries where our marriage is not recognized), $1200 for our doula who we will be interviewing next weekend, $1600 for wills etc. with our attorney, and approximately $3200 for two months’ worth (4 vials) of donor sperm if we want to guarantee having the same donor available for a possible second child. (What if we end up needing more than that? But we can’t afford it! This is all I can allow myself to budget for in the mad race to save.)

We also have yet to figure out our day care plan. Every time someone asks, “So what will you do for child care? You know you need to be planning that YESTERDAY because day care centers have waiting lists, right?” I panic and have an internal meltdown. The problem is we don’t really even know what we need yet. Will we be able to afford for me to go to work part-time somewhere? And will I even find something local that accommodates me in that way? If so, will the child care provider be able to do just a few hours a day, or will that take away from a possible full-time client they would prefer to have? What would those hours look like? I don’t know if I’m asking a provider to just have our child three full days a week, or four or five mid-afternoons (if I work from 3-7 somewhere), or something else. If I get an afternoon gig in Long Island that I have to drive to, how will my wife pick up the baby from daycare when she gets home at 5:30 with no car? We can’t afford a second car on part-time income! If I need to go back full-time, will I find something close to home, cutting down on my current three hour total commute? Will I be able to work 8-4 somewhere? Will I NOT find something before my maternity leave is up and end up having to go back to work in the Bronx for a few months before taking a whole different work schedule when I do find something? Will the child care provider be able to be flexible and agreeable to all eight thousand possible scenarios we are facing???

I love my job but am also ready and okay with moving on at this point. I’m glad I stayed here when I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else a few years ago (the critical point to leave if I was going to leave and accrue new benefits elsewhere before having a child). It’s comfortable, I have a flexible and supportive environment that has allowed me to go through the crazy and unpredictable schedule of fertility treatments, and I get unusually great benefits for a social service agency. I have five weeks’ vacation, five sick weeks a year plus up to five additional weeks I can save in a sick bank, three personal days, and all the major Jewish holidays off. I have a pension plan and a life insurance policy paid by my employer. I can take five months off with my baby and have my position guaranteed when I return. I have my own office (very rare in this field) and a comfortable environment. I have so many friends here.

But I also have to travel an hour and a half each way every day. I have to pay $242 per month on my railroad pass, in addition to subway fare. I have to be on call every few months, getting phone calls throughout the night for five days. I have to work until 7:00 one night a week every other month. I’m not guaranteed to leave at 5:00 any other day because crises pop up unpredictably in foster care. My heart hurts worse and worse with the emotional burden of this work as I bring my own child into the world. I am realizing that being a supervisor is something I love in many capacities (when I feel empowered to make real changes and impact on my staff and with the cases) but hate in others (I’m weak with staff confrontation, get really anxious and procrastinate on disciplinary action, fall behind other supervisors on ensuring workers’ mandates are being met even though I am ahead of most others in ensuring my own are met).

I want to get back into direct practice, and I want to learn something other than foster care. I’m passionate about it, but I’m passionate about it because this is the job I happened to land right out of school and I went into it with everything I have. I have the ability to be passionate about other areas of social work also, and a big part of the appeal of an MSW to me was how versatile it is, how very many different things you can do with it: gerontology, mental health, schools, hospitals, prisons and juvenile justice, immigration, domestic violence, homelessness, HIV/AIDS, LGBT, children and families, individual and group therapy, policy work, research, advocacy. I have always been attracted to the doors open to me as a social worker, but I felt safe and comfortable and passionate in my first job and have stayed here. I don’t regret that because I have been able to serve my clients better and better with each year of experience I get. I don’t want to spend my life dabbling, I WANT to have a focused passion and area of expertise. But it’s okay for that to change once in a while, and now might be a good opportunity. I also know that I work for the cream of the crop in child welfare, and moving to a more local agency still doing foster care is likely to leave me feeling dissatisfied, frustrated, and overwhelmed in comparison to what I left.

I’m glad I stayed here. I’m glad I got all this experience under my belt in an organization where I felt safe and cared for. My resume is very well-padded with the various positions I’ve held here. I’ve also accrued maximum vacation and sick time from all my years here, so I knew I either needed to leave years ago (when I was NOT ready) or stay until I had a baby. But now I’m in a position of planning for the birth of my child while also having to plan a major career change, and that is more than a little overwhelming. When I first got pregnant, I told myself I could just come back to this job after my maternity leave and then start looking, so that I wouldn’t have the pressure of that while on leave and the anxiety of it while pregnant. But the looming reality is that I do not want to spend even one day leaving the house at 7:00 and getting home at 6:30 earliest. I do not want to spend even one week on-call, handling crises at two in the morning with a cranky baby at my breast. I do not want to return after five months away and feel disconnected and checked out because I’m so antsy to move on. I do not want to catch up on my cases just to leave them a couple months later. I want to go into a fresh start.

And this means I have no choice but to be thinking about it now. I’m trying very hard not to obsess over it, because I can’t interview now so it’s not something I can control at the moment. I have to trust that things will fall into place, and do my part in making that happen when the time comes. But the child care dilemma makes this difficult to do.

My strong preference is to go with someone who watches two or three children from their home, like my mother and my wife’s mother did when we were young. I have two possibilities, recommendations from our neighbor and from my mother-in-law’s secretary, so I need to start with calling them and running over all the possible day care needs we will have, and see how flexible they can be. I have to start there, because maybe one will say, “Part-time, in any arrangement, will be fine and I will charge accordingly. I’m also open to doing full-time if that’s what you need. Just let me know when you know!” Wow, just imagining hearing that takes a weight off my shoulder. I can only hope!

On the Move!

Baby Bug is making such advancements! I’m 19 weeks, and already a lot has progressed since I last wrote at 16 weeks.

My breast sensitivity FINALLY abated for a few weeks, and now has come back in a different form. They feel muscularly sore and achy, in a way that I can feel with very minimal movement.

I was already having difficulty bending over my abdomen a few weeks ago to put on shoes, pick something up off the floor, etc. That’s improved only because I’ve figured out how to bend in a different way that accommodates my growing belly; I squat slowly with my knees going outward, like a plie. (Tying shoes is still difficult, but I sit down and bring my foot up on the opposite thigh to make it easier, instead of bending down to the floor.)

It’s a rare treat to get a good night’s sleep. Not only am I up every hour or two to pee, but my body is apparently aware that I’m not supposed to be sleeping on my back anymore. I can only fall asleep on my back, but I’ve been turning to my side in my sleep and then waking up out of discomfort at some point afterward. My friend gave me her pregnancy body pillow because she didn’t want to have to store it, and after five nights of trying, I haven’t figured out a way of using it that actually keeps me comfortable enough to fall asleep. I can still get away with being on my back for probably another couple weeks, according to what I’ve read, but I don’t know how I’ll adjust after that. It’s already problematic.

At my 16 week check-up, the doctor said to have plenty of calcium because critical bone development would be happening for the next few weeks. The baby will get enough calcium no matter what, but will take it from my own supply which will hurt my own bones if I don’t get what I need. Also, fat is necessary for helping your body absorb the calcium, so I kept whole milk and full-fat yogurt and cheese around. I craved it like crazy, buying chocolate milk at restaurants and carrying string cheese with me wherever I went. Then that craving faded about a week ago and now I have to remind myself to continue having dairy, though I feel like my body is telling me the critical period has passed. It’s so amazing to me how my body knows what it needs and gives me the cues to get it! I craved steak in the first few weeks of pregnancy when I needed lots of iron and protein, then hated meat and craved simple carbs for the second part of my first trimester when I needed energy, and now I craved dairy for a few weeks while baby’s bones were calcifying. The human body is just incredibly designed.

The best change is that I can feel baby move! I’ve been soooo eager for that day, for that regular awareness that there is really a life growing inside me, and it finally happened last Shabbat after a lunch at the Outback (one of our guilty pleasures that we only indulge in maybe once a year) while we were sitting and chatting. My doctor had said movement is typically felt between 18 and 25 weeks, and I was 17 weeks and 6 days at the time. I had been hoping it wouldn’t take me til almost 25 weeks to feel something! Several people have told me they didn’t feel their baby for a while longer just because the mistook the early flutters for gas or hunger pangs, but to me it felt very distinct, like nothing I’ve ever felt before. I knew immediately what it was. It felt like a goldfish was trapped in my abdomen and had just run up on the wall of its enclosure. I felt it on the lower right side of my abdomen. I didn’t feel anything the next day, but then felt it again on Monday, and then two or three times on Tuesday. On Wednesday or Thursday, it finally shifted to the lower center of my abdomen and became much more frequent.

Up until Friday, I was texting my wife every time I felt it move so she could be included. I would just text “Bug” each time, and she would know. Friday, it was too frequent for me to keep up with doing that anymore. Our baby also developed hearing about a week ago, and at the last Shabbat service, the baby was moving like crazy throughout all the music. At one point, it was so strong and unexpected that I jumped in my seat and my wife was concerned that something was wrong. Then it stilled as soon as we got outside. On Sunday, we played a Debbie Friedman CD loudly in our living room while we were organizing the contents of our desk, and again the baby was moving so much. I know all babies love music, but I also know that we chose a donor who plays jazz piano, and this was a reminder that I want to watch out for and nurture any musical talent or interest that may be there. There are wonderful artists and musicians in my wife’s family, including her own mother, brother, sister, and grandfather, and it’s just not something either of us have so it could go unnoticed by us. I also know that’s something that should be tapped into early or it could be lost. (If there is no interest or talent, it is okay for it to fade out. I am still glad I had five years of piano lessons even though ultimately it wasn’t something I felt inclined to and I lost interest. Same for ballet, bowling, and other activities I dabbled in as a kid. There is so much value in exploration and learning of any sort!)

Though I’ve only gained six or seven pounds (which is good – since I’m overweight already, I should be on the lower end of the healthy amount to gain), I very much look pregnant, and I’m loving that. I love seeing how my belly looks in maternity shirts, and I LOVE how my breasts look in their new C cup bras. I bought three regular and one sleep bra at Destination Maternity, using a sale and a coupon to get them very reasonably. I got nursing bras without underwire so that I can keep using them until I go back to my old bras (sad day that will be). I fill them out pretty well, yet there is still some room for them to grow more since I know that is to be expected. LOVING THEM.

I am so excited for the 20-week sonogram next week. After getting sonograms at 4 weeks (after a bleeding incident, but sac was a tiny dot that couldn’t be confirmed), 5 weeks (to confirm it was not ectopic), 7 weeks (heartbeat at the clinic), 8 weeks (heartbeat at the OB), and 12 weeks, going 8 weeks without one was torture!! I’ve been counting down to December 30^th with ridiculous levels of excitement. The torment has eased, though, since I started feeling Bug move. Feeling the baby gives me so much of the connection and reassurance that I look to sonograms for.

My Changing Body

I've been feeling little sharp pings and pains on the lower sides of my abdomen for almost a week now. I'm familiar with "round ligament pain," which happens as your pelvis starts to loosen up and shift to make room for baby, and I was expecting it as I entered my second trimester two weeks ago. So at least it wasn't concerning or scary.

I started showing at 12.5 weeks, which is very typical since that's when your uterus first starts to rise above your pelvis. But I swear in the past day or two, at 16 weeks, I popped completely. Two different people at work remarked on it today, and then so did my wife when I came home from work. I looked down and held my shirt against me to frame it better and was shocked to see how big it was. (But I've only gained a pound in the past week or two.) When I lay down a couple hours ago, I noticed that my belly kept its shape instead of flattening out a bit. That was a freaky moment too! Seeing such a dramatic change gave me that "holy crap, I'm really pregnant!" moment all over again.

I am loving my pregnant body. I feel at my most beautiful, and kind of wish I could stay in this state for longer! Everything I am most self conscious about with my body has improved with pregnancy. My barely B breasts are becoming rounder and fuller, growing into what I kept patiently waiting for them to be when I was an adolescent. I stare at them and hold them almost every time I undress, and sometimes even when I'm dressed. I'm just amazed that my body can change like that, and I also know it will be short-lived so I'm reveling in the awe of it all. My already round belly (I've always carried my weight in a way that has sometimes led people to think I'm pregnant) is finally round for a reason, and I can actually wear shirts that flatter this shape, shirts I could not wear when I wanted to DE-emphasize the pregnant look while not pregnant. I can now emphasize it, flatter it, embrace it. I don't have to worry about sucking it in or hiding it. I don't have to worry about how skinny my legs look in comparison to my round belly, because for just these few months, it's SUPPOSED to be like that. And because my stomach has more shape and my breasts are filling out, my broad back/shoulders don't look quite as broad since they're in context with everything else.

My blood pressure is lower (for now), my blood sugar is lower, my hair is thicker, my mood is sensitive and emotional in a way that might be inconvenient at times but feels awfully damn authentic and in the moment. I feel lighter, more graceful, more careful, calmer.

I can't wait to meet baby. I often get 5-year-old-on-Christmas-Eve giddy thinking about it, feeling impatient even as I tell myself to enjoy this time and these last moments of peace and solitude and "just us." But even so, I kind of don't ever want to be not-pregnant again.