Last week, I was planning on writing something about parental PTSD. I had run into a friend in the park whose son was struggling through phase-in in his first time in a nursery school situation. His mother told me, with tears in her eyes, that leaving him at school flashed her back to leaving him in the premature care ward in the hospital (we was born several weeks early).

I thought about all of the women I know who are carrying around some kind of traumatic baggage from their pregnancy, attempts to conceive, birth and afterwards.

And then my younger daughter broke her arm.Read more

I am my children’s leader and their faith in me is a key element in our relationship. They rely on me for so much and my decisiveness and confidence, my ability to point in a clear direction gives them a sense of security. But I am often unsure of what to do.Read more

“It can’t all be hard, you know. If nothing’s easy, you won’t know when something is actually hard,” she said.Read more

There is a common misconception that a woman becomes a mother and a man becomes a father the moment birth occurs. It is propagated in television shows and romcoms. Biologically, this is true. But in reality, it can take days, weeks, months and even years to make the transition.Read more

In an instant, all those plans went out the window as we shut our doors and locked ourselves inside for the foreseeable future.

I went from being a freelancer, a choreographer, dancer, journalist, teacher, text consultant and a few other things to the director of a modest, mixed-aged home school.

And the strange thing that I am experiencing these days is relief.Read more

Last year, at the end of the weeklong celebration of Purim, my older daughter declared that she would like to dress up as a character from Disney’s Descendants next year. For the other days, Famous Day, Pajama Day, Countries Day, we made a plan a week in advance. We knew exactly what she wanted to dress up as on each day. The night before the first dress-up day, we tried on her Frida Kahlo costume (which was gorgeous I must admit). She looked at herself in the mirror, beaming.

The next morning, as she was going to get dressed she said,
“I don’t want to dress up.”Read more