Of Heating Pads and Soul Searching

As I write, I am sitting at my desk with an electric heating pad pressed against my lower back. This is awkward, since 30 teenagers are now witness to my decrepitude. I wish I could say the injury was sustained on some marvelous adventure, but this is not the case. Yesterday, I leaned over to tie my shoe and when I stood up...I couldn't. I was stuck. I was also in great pain. I yelled a word you shouldn't say in a school building and waited until I was recovered enough to hobble home. In other words, I'm getting older. But despite the aching back and the anti-wrinkle cream in my bathroom, I feel like I'm just now beginning to sort out who I am.

I didn't do a lot of soul-searching in my 20s. Things were changing too rapidly to sit still and reflect. I moved from college in North Carolina to my first job in Boston, then to Manhattan, and eventually to Brooklyn. I was a new teacher who was trying to survive being the sole adult responsible for a roomful of 10-year-olds during the day, and I was going to graduate school at night and on weekends. Those early days of teaching were rough. I distinctly remember one little girl climbing into a cupboard and refusing to get out, while a little voice inside of me said, "Maybe it'd just be easier if you let her stay in there." And I'll never forget the melody of Rihanna's "Rude Boy," which was the playback song of a student's mother that I called on a regular basis. The only searching I wanted to do at the end of the day was of the inside of my eyelids.

Trying to sum up what happened shortly after I turned 30 is tricky. Maybe it was an existential crisis? A quarter-life crisis? Just a good, old-fashioned freak-out?  The bottom line: never stopping to figure out who you are is a recipe for disaster. For a good amount of time, I was grappling with some pretty big questions about who I was and the expectations I had for my life. Only recently have the fears and doubts that were clanging around my brain like a mariache band started to ease up. 

The first decision I made when I started to feel like myself again was that I wanted to be Jewish. It was the most sure I'd felt about anything in a long time. With the mariache band quieted, the little voice that was telling me, "You should do this!" was finally loud enough to hear. I remembered that I had even purchased some books on converting years before and "hid" them so haphazardly they begged Moses to ask me about them (typical guy, he didn't understand that I wanted him to do so and instead just thought I was bad at hiding things), but the venture had gone no further. This year, in the days leading up to the high holidays, I cracked them open again. As I read, I became convinced that the rituals and community I was reading about could help me become a stronger, more self-accepting version of myself.

I don't expect converting to solve all my problems. It's not a cure all for worries and anxieties, nor will it grade the pile of papers on my desk or go to the gym for me. But I can't dismiss the joy it's brought me thus far, either. It has reminded me of the parts of my identity I'm proud of, like my ability to find and build community, and my love of language and writing.

And at the end of this process, being a Jew will be part of my identity, too. I'm curious as to how far the label will extend into my psyche. The last two things I've "become" are a teacher and a partner. Both changed my life tremendously, but were roles that centered around my relationships with other people. Becoming Jewish is an inward process. So I wonder: will I feel like a different person at the end of the conversion process? Will I be stronger for the soul searching that adopting a new religion will demand? Will I learn enough about myself that the next time the mariache band shows up, I can wave them away without any hesitation?

But now the muscle relaxer I've taken has started to kick in, telling me that I've done enough rambling for one day. Next up on the blog: meeting the rabbi and our first week of Jew class!

In the meantime, what about you? What experience most changed the way you saw yourself and your place in the world? Comment or email me at loveandmatzoballs@gmail.com. 

Where did God go?

I remember believing in God, but only vaguely. I remember saying prayers--some were just wishes, but most were pleas for everyone I loved to be safe and healthy. My prayers extended to anyone I knew that was suffering somewhere in the world, and often they'd go on-and-on. I thought if I could pray hard enough, I could protect everyone.

I was a nervous kid. Like, really nervous. We weren't allowed to have the news on because it made me too anxious (to be fair, it still does). My first grade teacher often asked me if whatever I was worrying about would cause the world to end. Going down the slide? Risky. Riding a bike? Terrifying. Sleeping in my own room alone? Unthinkable. If my parents had known about Xanax, they probably would have mashed some up in my apple sauce and we'd all have been better for it. Alas!

Looking back, I wonder if part of this anxiety came from experiencing the disappearance of a girl named Jenny. She was the daughter of my dad's law partner, and she died before I was even old enough to understand what it meant to be sick in a way that made people go away and never come back. I'm sure I didn't mourn her like the adults around me did. Like I said, I didn't understand. But I remember having an awareness of something awful having happened in the time that proceeded her death. There had been a little girl named Jenny, but she was gone to Heaven, to a better place, but her mommy and daddy were very sad.

Maybe because of this, my prayers were fervent and meant to ward off bad things. I didn't want God to take away anyone I loved, so I tried to be very good. But I worried. I still worry a lot. I'm working on it, but it's like second nature to me. When I was a waitress, the manager said, "If you have time to lean, you have time to clean." I've spent 30 years living in a state of, "If you have too much time to think, into worries you will sink." That last line isn't a real adage, but if you'd like to proliferate it, feel free.

I stopped praying eventually. It hadn't worked. Tragedy was all around us, and if God was punishing us for being sinners, who needed him? Better to think there was no God than a cruel one, right?

For me, one of the most attractive qualities of Judaism is that it seems to make room for questioning. Immersing myself in Jewish texts hasn't provided me with answers yet, but it has made me feel like my own experience with doubt is acceptable.  It was comforting to read Rabbi Harold Kushner's description of his own experience, "that childhood faith did not last. War, crime, serious illnesses affecting those we cared about, the emerging truth about the Holocaust, and the inevitable disappointments of life cost us that simple faith of our childhood..." (Nine Essential Things I've Learned About Life). When I stopped praying, I'd felt the same way.

So now that I'm immersing myself in a faith, I have to grapple with the same doubts that robbed me of any sense of the spiritual in my life. Looking for divinity in a world as chaotic as ours feels like a fool's errand. On the other hand, there's a feeling I can't shake that there's something more than skin and bones holding us all together. I'm not sure yet what that means, but I've never felt more certain that I need to explore it. Maybe that will take a life time and I'll never get closer than this. Maybe I'll write in a month that I've got it all figured out. I know that I'll never revive the simple faith that I had as a kid--that belief that, "Duh, God exists!" and how else did we all get hatched (it was simpler times, like I said). But I'm hoping that any relationship with faith, even if it's a complicated one, I'll still find something to help shoulder some of my worries, and to shine a light into the darkest of storms.