Adventures in Mama-Land

I’ve been posting more lately, here and at my other blogs.  But the short answer about whether I’m really back is… not officially. We’re standing right on the cusp of the 2-year anniversary of when I stopped blogging – July of 2015.  That’s when we flew to Canada and life kicked into high gear in so many ways.  (Or, as I usually put it, “all hell broke loose.”) Essentially, my ongoing attempts to work as a freelancer began taking off the minute we arrived in my mother’s basement in Toronto in July 2015, leading to a flurry of nonstop activity that was good because that, in turn, led to money, but was bad because it took time away from blogging, which I love. Oh, yeah, and my family.  I may be home a lot, but I’m not with my family as often as I’d like. And blogging has had to fall by the wayside.  As clearly it has.  I mean, the stats don’t lie.  Here are numbers for each year of each of my blogs: This blog, Adventures in MamaLand : My aliyah blog, Adv...

What are your standards of modesty when it comes to clothing? Do your kids know what these are? As a religious Jew, I dress in a certain way. To sum it up briefly: I wear long sleeves, long skirts, and I cover my hair. But don’t assume for a second that it’s been easy, or that it is easy for me on any given day.  It isn’t. And it hasn’t been easy sharing these ideas with my children – sons and daughters – along the way, either. The other day, though, a friend shared a post on Facebook by a parent who proudly wrote that she doesn't enforce any modesty standards in her kids. She wrote that "Modesty is too subjective and true modesty is about attitude and our heart." (The page it was posted on has two owners; I'm going to assume it's the mother, Jessica Martin-Weber, who's writing. Apologies if I’m wrong!) I agree with Jessica Martin-Weber’s second claim in part – yes, attitude and intention are important! - but not necessarily with the first. Where does the id...

It has been three years.  What is there left to speak about for the yahrzeit of a person like my brother Eli? There is the fact that almost all of us know somebody with a mental illness; that Judaism has always urged compassion, understanding, inclusion, and humane treatment. This is a topic which is most vital to talk about - but I've spoken about all of this before. And then - there is the idea of turning to something my brother loved. So that we may find common ground not only with one another as fellow-travellers, but with him as well, though he is no longer here, and was a pretty strange character even when he was. There was nothing my brother loved more than math. I love math, too, but not in the same way. If math is a language - which, of course, it is - then he was a native speaker, while I am very much an outsider who enjoys the music of it tripping off the tongue. There are so many ways that math intersects with Judaism that actually the topic seems almost purpose-built f...