November 2011

Grateful

by MomGrind

thank youFor my health. Because mom is right: Health is the most important thing. With ill health, it’s very difficult to enjoy life and to focus on anything other than one’s ill health.

For my husband, who is also my best friend and biggest supporter. I’m still at awe whenever I think of how we met, narrowly escaping never meeting at all. Fate? Perhaps. Luck? For sure. I’m the luckiest woman in the world to share this journey with you.

For my children, who bring me immense joy (and also angst, let’s be honest) every single day and certainly keep me on my toes and keep life interesting.
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I Don’t Have Grandparents Anymore

by MomGrind

I’m so sorry I didn’t get to say goodbye, oma. I love you. You passed away peacefully, at home, in your sleep, at the age of 95, surrounded by family. You were fairly healthy up until last year, when you started deteriorating, your systems systematically shutting down. The past couple of months were rough, and I scheduled a flight to Tel Aviv, hoping to see you this Thanksgiving holiday, but I didn’t make it. You didn’t make it. Which I am told is a good thing, because you were suffering. It was your time and you had to go.

I am crying as I’m typing this, thoughts swirling in my head, and as always sadness turns to anger and I’m angry. I’m angry that although death itself is often very peaceful, the end of life that leads to death is so violent, degrading, vile, and entails so much suffering and loss of dignity. Even in the case of someone like you, who simply died of old age, those last few months were horrible.

I’m angry at myself that I didn’t come to see you sooner. And that I’m here in the States, as much as I love this country, and my dear family is back in Israel, so many miles and hours away.
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Too Cool for Halloween?

by MomGrind

cool teenagerI’m old, I know. My opinion doesn’t really count and I “don’t get it.”

Or maybe I do.

I was a preteen once. It wasn’t 200 years ago, although admittedly it was two and a half decades ago. I then went on to being a teen. Believe it or not, we rebelled too. We too felt that our parents were clueless. We too worried about being accepted by friends and being popular (which is the word we used back then, before “cool” was invented).

But I’m older and wiser now, and even though I know you will not listen to me and will refuse to learn from my experience, I just have to say this.

Life is too short to worry about what others think about you.

And that’s why I object so strongly to the concept of being cool. Being cool, or attempting to become cool, is the very definition of allowing what others think about you to take over your life. You might secretly think Halloween is fun, you might miss the days when Halloween meant dressing up and going trick-or-treating and getting piles and piles of candy. But your cool, couldn’t-care-less, too-old-for-kids’-stuff exterior, the one you had worked so hard to build, will not allow you to admit that if it were up to you, you would be out there on the streets, dressed up, carrying a bag and going from house to house asking for candy.

Coolness makes me sad. And on Monday night, when I heard that several of the kids in our neighborhood have decided that they’re “too old for this,” even though they are really very young, I felt sad for them. For you. For all of us, who were once happy chortling kids, jumping up and down with joy at the sight of anything that made us happy (be it our parents coming back home or a pile of candy), and now must carefully hide our emotions for fear that we’d be laughed at.

Worrying so much about what others think about us? Way uncool.

All Grown Up, Still No Manicure

by MomGrind

manicureI always assumed I would have beautifully manicured nails when I became a grownup.

“Your hands say so much about you,” women’s magazines would warn, urging me to get weekly manicures or else, and I, a teenager, an eager consumer of those magazines, believed them. Dyed hair, manicured nails and high heels were what separated hopelessly unfashionable women from the stylish ones. Looking at my chipped nails, I knew I couldn’t afford weekly professional manicures – but someday I would.

As a college student, still lacking the funds to pay for professional beauty services, I stopped doing my own nails and went for the no-nonsense, cut short, bare nails look. Even when I started working as a professor’s assistant and making some money, my nails remained bare. Law school was hard and required lots of work – I just didn’t have the time to sit at a stupid salon leafing through women’s magazines, I reasoned.

But deep inside, I knew that someday, I would get a weekly manicure and would finally be the polished, successful woman I was always meant to be.

When I joined the workforce and started making real money (finally!), there were really no more excuses. So I attempted growing my fingernails and getting a weekly manicure. But I soon found out that (a) Long nails are the enemy of contact lenses; (b) long nails are the enemy of fast typing; (c) The 20-minute wait until a manicure dries completely is torture; and (d) Manicured nails don’t last a week (at least not for me). Under the best-case scenario, they last maybe a day or two.

So I stopped getting manicures and went back to my rebellious, college-days look of short, bare nails.

I am forty years old. I am most definitely grown up. I have money. If I don’t do manicures now, I probably never will. I feel bad about it, and yet I can’t bring myself to get regular manicures. My bare nails look bad, but manicured nails are just not me.

My friend has beautifully manicured nails, and as much as I’d like to say that she’s stupid and lazy and does nothing all day, I have to admit that she’s brilliant and smart and accomplished and does plenty of things every day apart from sitting at a stupid salon and getting her nails done.

I envy her beautiful nails.

Yesterday I noticed that my nails were becoming rather long. I went to the bathroom and picked up a nail file, deciding that the very least I could do was file my nails instead of just chop them off as I usually do. It took exactly four filing motions, back and forth, back and forth, for me to realize that I did not have the patience for even that. I chopped them off.

But I refuse to let go of the dream.

Some day, when I’m *really* grown up, I just know I’ll have perfectly manicured nails.