Second Seder

For second Seder we went over to the Dolgin’s who do a really big one, like over fifty people. We know them through Jacob who is best friends with one of their sons. We went last year too.

Even though the Dolgin’s are so nice and make you feel like their most special and welcome guest I was going through some periods of feeling extremely alienated throughout the ceremony. It would have been better if Larry was sitting beside me and I could touch him like he was last year but this year he was across from me.

It’s just there’re so many things that are part of the ritual that I don’t know. I could learn them, but I don’t care to. So you see where that puts me? I would say it puts me in one of my usual positions, that of feeling like a child who has no choice, like a victim of my circumstances.

I was thinking, what was I thinking, converting to Judaism? I was thinking how it was just another one of those things I could say, okay, sure no problem, I’ll give you this, to. I’ll embrace this whole entire religion with rituals and a different language with different letters. Why not? What’s the big deal? Why wouldn’t I add another way to feel overwhelmed and alienated from the world? What’s the difference?

I was crying, thinking of my mother. My father told me recently that when he met my mother she pretended to be Jewish. She did. She did it because her mother cleaned houses for Jewish people and my mother got it in her head that being Jewish was better. Can you imagine my converting all equaling some perverse way for me to please my mother I could never please? I didn’t even know.

Escaping from Egypt is a story that lifts you because it’s a story. Sometimes I think all stories are lies. I was thinking about the ritual of it, of the parallel between that escape and escaping from the lies of pretending to be what I am not, an inherited tendency from my mother, my mother who I don’t talk to, because she expects me to be something I’m not, rejects me when I won’t.

I didn’t used to like Passover so much. I was more a fan of Rosh Hashanah, about planning, looking forward, the power of living inside a metaphor with a productive God-driven purpose, how the Moon is always in the same shape and the same place in the sky when you’re going to break the fast after synagogue on Yom Kipper. I found Passover too much about looking back, too bitter. All the plagues.

For first Seder we did it at our house. I couldn’t bear to go to my mother-in-law’s again. Her place is always so stuffy. You feel like you can’t breathe. And Larry hates all his cousins. We couldn’t go to one of their houses. They act so superior.

I made a really nice meal. It was a lot of work. Jenny, my mother-in-law brought the gefilte fish. A ton of other things. Larry’s brother Mike came from London with his wife who didn’t convert and didn’t want to read from the Haggadah, “no thanks.” She was sitting beside me at the end of the table like after her it was just the emptiness of infinity.

Thinking of Magnolias

I let Jacob sleep in because he couldn’t get to sleep last night. I didn’t feel like getting up either. But then I was just lying in bed. It was thundering. Thunder is so special this time of year, like it’s the frightening secret behind what makes things blossom, because there hasn’t been any for a while.

Jacob pretended to be much more tired than he was. The grey outside to go with dark clouds in the sky to go with thunder was getting in the house.

I put the windshield wipers on the fastest. Jacob sat in the front seat which he didn’t get to do before because of air bag safety. “Where does your air bag come out of?” he asked. I pointed to the area in the middle of the steering wheel. I asked where his was. He showed me a spot above the glove compartment.

Jacob said the windshield wipers looked angry with each other. How they were taking turns attacking each other. I told him I could see that. I told him, no more chocolate before bed because it makes your body go all - and I made this zapping jolting spasm holding my arms out spastically too of my body - and then you can't get to sleep. Jacob observed an especially big splotch of rain fall on the windshield just as I was doing my imitation monster of Frankenstein. He noticed how it was the perfect dramatic finale of my contraction.

The rain fell harder and the rain drops spread bigger on the windshield despite the angry wipers’ efforts to get to and at each other. They look like mini-bullets from a helicopter, Jacob said.

Than I dropped him off late at the school where last year his French teacher suggested he might have a learning disability because he doesn’t pay attention to the dumb way she teaches French which is just about rote and facts and she would never think of how when there’s a story behind something it makes it that much easier to understand.

When I think of her saying that it makes me feel like an angry windshield wiper trying to get at something but instead only able to wipe away the tears that are also the rain.