Posts Tagged ‘Mom’
Flashback Friday! (Who’s Your Mama?)
Every Friday, I post an oldie but a goodie blog for your enjoyment. To those of you who just started reading The Grownup Girl recently, enjoy the “new” blog! To those of you who have been with me from the start, but have memories like mine, enjoy the “new” blog!
And to those who were with me from the start and who already read this blog and burned it into your memory, word for word, photogenically, I say:
What are you doing wasting your time dilly-dallying on my website? Get out there and find me a book deal!
If you hate to read, just click on the audio link, below.
BatSheva (BatSheva Vaknin) – Whos Your Mama – the BLOG
The other day, while my 4 year old daughter was in her ballet class, my 2 year old daughter was leaping across the lobby, capturing all the ballet moms’ attention with her moves. Except mine. I was still watching my 4 year old through the glass window, so my 2 year old called out, “Ima! Ima! Ima!”
I felt compelled to explain at that moment to the confused mothers staring at me, that “Ima” was Hebrew for “Mom”.
What I didn’t explain was how an all-American gal like myself, living in America, with three American kids, wound up being called “Ima” by all of them.
I called my mother “Mommy,” and later, when I was too cool for “Mommy,” “Mom.” I only ever called myself “Mommy” or “Mama” to my firstborn, but he’s never called me anything but Ima. My husband is Israeli and he has always called me “Ima” when talking to our children about me. But that can’t be the only reason.
I’ve noticed that all my kids learned to say “Aba” (the word for “Dad”) way before “Ima.” It’s an easy word, it rolls off the baby tongue, like a happy baby’s babbles of “dadada” or “bababa”. I’ve also noticed that “Ima” (pronounced “Eeema”) rolls especially well off a crying baby’s tongue. This cannot be an accident.
For a while, with my son, I tried to correct him. To teach him. “Ima!” He would cry. “Yes,” I would answer… “Mommy’s here, what do you need from Mommy? Hmmm? Tell Mama. What is it?”
“Ima,” he would correct me, “Come here!”
I like to be in control. I live a completely different life than anyone else in the family I grew up in – I eat kosher, I “keep” Shabbat, and I take my Kabbalah studies very seriously. To them, I’m like a ‘born again Jew’ even though I really cringe at being called ‘religious’ because I see everything I do as spiritual – Kabbalah being a practice that, however Jewish it may look – actually applies to anyone and everyone, and is all about consciousness. I’ve never felt comfortable jumping on a bandwagon just because I share a skin color or religion with a group of other people. (Case in point: I was introduced to The Kabbalah Centre by a Catholic lesbian friend and my first thought when she invited me was, ‘if SHE feels at home here, then I’m willing to check it out, too.)
But names are a funny thing. I wrote about changing my name in a prior blog, but in that case, the change was something I asked for, chose to do, and implemented. (“Shana?” a co-worker would ask innocently. “Yes?” I would reply, followed quickly by, “by the way, it’s BatSheva.”) In the case of “Ima,” however, the name was wholly given to me by my kids – with some help, admittedly, from my Israeli husband.
It never occurred to me that my kids wouldn’t call me “Mommy.” And for years, I wasn’t completely comfortable with being called the foreign-sounding “Ima.” I didn’t even try to correct my next child, and now, with my third, I find myself calling myself “Ima” (as in, “Give Ima the stick right now!”) which is something I never used to do.
It seemed so strange, for so long, being called the Hebrew name for Mommy.
These days? Fits like a glove.
c/xo
“Ima” Sheva (BatSheva Vaknin)
The Best Mother’s Day… a Dream in Words
As I sat down to list the top five or ten things a mother REALLY wants on mother’s day (to be able to sleep all night uninterrupted, all the way until 11am if she wants to, to be given space and time to catch up on her favorite novel, to be treated by her husband to brunch, to be given flowers, jewelry, taken out to the movies – or allowed to go on her own), something occurred to me.
For our birthdays, we generally want stuff that we need or would love to have, but don’t have or want to spend the funds necessary to buy them for ourselves. Jewelry, new sneakers, a mani/pedi – these and other gifts are perfect for birthdays because they spoil us in a way that we’d like to spoil ourselves were we not so darned frugal.
The funny thing about Mother’s Day gifts is that the actual list looks similar to that of a birthday – mani/pedi or spa day, jewelry, new sneakers, a night out – but the idea behind them is very specific:
On Mother’s Day, we want to be given the exact things we can’t indulge in regularly exactly because we are moms.
Like a spa day. On a birthday, we appreciate a spa day gift certificate because it’s an indulgence we wouldn’t allow ourselves to purchase for ourselves. On Mother’s Day, we appreciate a trip to the spa because WE WANT TO GET THE HELL AWAY FROM OUR KIDS FOR A FEW HOURS.
Let’s get real, moms.
Being a mom is great but it’s hella hard work. “Mother’s Day” is every day for us – what we really want on Mother’s Day, therefore, are “Single Girl” gifts: flowers, jewelry, getting pampered for a day, or a movie night. Perhaps the best example of this is our favorite “Mother’s Day” Single Girl gift (take note, dads): 10 or more hours of uninterrupted sleep. (Single girls – you may protest here – I know you wake up early to go to the gym or work, and stay up late watching TV, partying, or studying, but really, how many of you can say you’ve spent 5 out of 7 nights a week getting woken up and then spending 5 to 120 minutes of those mid-night waking hours trying to soothe a child back to sleep? EVERY week? For SIX years straight? Thoughts not.)
Judge us if you want, but the real desire of every mother, every Mother’s Day, is not crayoned pictures from your little ones or breakfast in bed.
It’s a few hours – nay, let’s be real – 24 hours, of blissful quiet, grownup fun, and peace.
A Grownupgirl can always dream…
c/xo,
Sheva (BatSheva Vaknin)
This was the daughter (tall one in the back who looks exactly like I did when I was 6) who DIDN'T cry her lungs out during their school's most excellent Mother's Day brunch today.
Flashback Friday! (Technolo-Who?)
Every Friday, I post an oldie but a goodie blog for your enjoyment. To those of you who just started reading The Grownup Girl recently, enjoy the “new” blog! To those of you who have been with me from the start, but have memories like mine, enjoy the “new” blog!
And to those who were with me from the start and who already read this blog and burned it into your memory, word for word, photogenically, I say:
What are you doing wasting your time dilly-dallying on my website? Get out there and find me a book deal!
If you hate to read, just click on the audio link, below.
BatSheva (BatSheva Vaknin) – Technolo-WHO? – the BLOG
Ever do a task for like, 5 years, then find out a little free computer program could have sorted it out for you in under one minute?
ARGGGHHHHHH!
Not long ago, I had one of our interns busy for five straight days cutting and pasting emails from an excel sheet onto a Word doc separated by semi colons so I could cut & paste them as a group into a group email. (Like you care about the details.) Found out? My Oulook imports excel. So I tried to import said excel to my Outlook… and… it didn’t work.
Then I found out it didn’t even need to work, cause I can just cut & paste the email column from the excel into my Outlook & my Outlook translates it seamlessly into a list of emails.
Lesson learned: What’s wrong with the interns of today that they don’t know shortcuts?!
My mother is hilarious using her new iPhone – she was stumped for the first month, trying to listen to her voicemails. “I either delete them or call them back! I can never just hear what they said on the message! And if I delete the message, that’s it, I never heard what they wanted to tell me!”
“Mom – did you try just touching the message and letting it ‘play’?”
Silence.
“And you can still hear your deleted messages. Touch the words underneath your messages that say ‘Deleted Messages’.”
“Oh honey, you are so smart.”
Moms are really good for that, aren’t they? Making you feel smart in an area of life where Life would actually conspire to make you feel ridiculously stupid.
When my computer memory nears its full capacity, I literally want to throw it away because I cannot for the life of me figure out how to make it work again. I pay ridiculous amounts of money to compensate for my lack of IT knowledge. I’m the chick who pays $100 a year for an online backup of my hard drive, and the when my computer is stolen, I pay $97 to retrieve that backup, and then I never succeed to even begin to install those backed up files onto my other laptop despite numerous curse word-laden attempts to make the damn things open up and work.
Lucky for me my nanny “finds” my stolen laptop “from a kid trying to sell it on the street” a month after it was stolen. That was her story. I pressed her: why, according to her own story, did she wait 8 days before bringing me the laptop or telling me she found it?
Shrugged shoulders were all our 4 years of shared history, shared family (she stayed with my kids more than once when my husband and I left town), and shared secrets (she did clean my house for 4 years after all) got me.
I had to fire her, but I’m stuck with this giant black CENSORED bar over the part of my brain that is supposed to be telling me how to work the timer on my HD TV.
I’d better go turn it off the old fashioned way. By telling my husband to do it.
c/xo,
Sheva (BatSheva Vaknin)
Just once, I'd like a WOMAN to design my remote controls. I'd design one that you could read like a book, that had pretty pictures with WORDS that told you what each button did, and PICTURES that showed you what would happen. And then I'd design a real live fairy who would operate it for you.
Enough is (never) Enough
You know that thing, when your boss wants you to work until 11pm every night, and your husband thinks you’re not helping him enough with his business, and your kids hang on your legs as you attempt to move around the house and burst into tears every time you prepare to leave the house without them, and your spiritual teachers talk about how we must study more, more, MORE, if we are ever going to make any progress in our path, and how that extra 10 lbs just kind of clings to your middle because you don’t quite exercise enough or restrict your diet enough or sleep through the night enough to make it finally go AWAY?
You know that thing??
Turns out, I know that thing quite well.
Nothing like being an overachiever to make you feel like you can’t quite get anything right!
It shouldn’t come as a surprise… growing up, my role model was my mother. My mom – sometimes divorced & sometimes re-married throughout my childhood – managed to raise an average of 5 kids (step ones too) who collectively had around forty thousand after-school activities they were beholden to, while successfully navigating a career path that rocketed her from full-time motherdom to President & CEO of her own lobbyist firm.
Not too shabby.
These days, my role models include women I know through the Kabbalah Centre – spiritual versions of the “Do it all Mom.” Karen Berg, Monica Berg Michal Berg & Ruthie Rosenberg… to me, these women are giants. While their ages range from ‘younger than me’ to ‘old enough to be my grandmother,’ they all accomplish the miraculous on a daily basis – raising grounded, caring, motivated and bright children, caring for busy, accomplished husbands, taking time to care for themselves, spending time with friends and tending to their endless students around the globe, who seek their companionship and advice… oh yeah, and also working full time – and by “full time” I mean in jobs that never clock in or out. They are always accountable, always producing, and always stretching to do more, more, more…
Are you as tired as I am after reading that paragraph?
It’s exhausting sometimes, trying to do it all. I miss getting 8 hours of sleep a night. Heck, once upon a million years ago, I used to get TEN hours of sleep! (During college, it’s called “scheduling all your classes to take place in the afternoon.” After college, it’s called “unemployment.” It’s also called “not yet a parent.”)
On the other hand… it’s exhilarating. I LOVE being a mom to three amazing kids, I love my husband, I love to work at a job that is high-pressured and creative, I love to study Kabbalah and live Kabbalah, I love exercising and trying to improve my body, I love to go out, I love to be with friends, I love to try new things, and I love to write and perform.
I know, I know, I’ve exhausted you again, right!?!
So what’s new under the sun…
c/xo,
Sheva (BatSheva Vaknin)
My mom... the original role model. [You'd never know she's already fed 20 people, had 3 conference calls, made 2 business deals and planted a new garden, all right before this photo was snapped, right?
The Reindeer
My mother kindly reminded me that – contrary to my insistence that The Wedding Dress I received at age nine was my Best Christmas Present EVER – my actual BCPE was most certainly the REINDEER she gave me around age seven. Blast my mother with her faulty memory which turns out is, nonetheless, less faulty than my practically-nonexistent memory!
(Note to my newer blog readers, yes it’s true, my memory is horrible. Mostly, I don’t remember things, and when I DO remember things, there’s a 50-50 chance I’ve made them up – or, you know, “remembered” my imagination, and turned it into a “real” memory. Consider yourselves forewarned.)
BTW, I was just kidding, God. Don’t blast Mom! After all, she gave me The Wedding Dress. And the Reindeer. Which, for those of you who don’t read my blog comments religiously, was a reindeer statue my mother gave me one year which measured about half a foot high, one foot long, and was covered in real animal fur. Squirrel, possibly.
Yes, it’s true, The Reindeer was the BCPE, mostly because I was obsessed with reindeer in general during that part of my life, and I may have turned suicidal if Mom hadn’t given me said reindeer. (Or – not, but Mom couldn’t know that, otherwise she may not have searched the entire metropolis of Washington, DC, looking for a reindeer in mid July.)
Wait a minute – the reindeer wasn’t a Christmas present. It was a BIRTHDAY present!
The Wedding Dress still holds the title.
Then again… there was that llama…
The minute I got the reindeer, I supplanted my reindeer obsession with a llama obsession. And my mother, being my mother, rewarded me with a majestic llama statue (real llama fur, natch!) the following Christmas.
Which would make The Wedding Dress… 2nd favorite?
…and then there was that year I got a car…
…Nahhh! Wedding Dress still takes the cake.
Nothing quite like a pre-teen obsession, is there?
c/xo,
Sheva (BatSheva Vaknin)
My other pre-teen obsession - the one even my mother couldn’t give me for Christmas.