Posted December 19 2007 by Rachel Krich
The making of a modern day neurotic Jewish mother….
I have a secret that has been passed down from Jewish woman to Jewish woman since Sarah, and I am going to let it out here in the open right now. I am going to break the covenant…..don’t try and stop me….here it goes…
As soon as a Jewish woman has a child, a group of elderly women who look like CIA agents with chicken soup come wake you in the middle of your post labor slumber and induct you into their cult….the cult of the quintessential Jewish Mother. Its true, scout’s honor. Ok….it might also be the huge dose of narcotics, but they come into your room and teach you all that you will need to know to make sure that you will never sleep again and your sweet child, who is sleeping peacefully in a nursery down the hall, will need many many years of therapy.
Well, that’s not all true. But what is true is that something happens to you. I don’t mean to be sappy, that you become this new person who lives for nothing else but this child. But you do go a little crazy in that direction. However the role of the Jewish mother has changed and I feel that I am part of a new generation of neurotics, just this time we pick and choose our neurosis. For example, the Jewish mother of yesteryear would do something like this:
My mother-in-law was on her way to the hospital with my father-in-law when she was in labor with her first child. On the way my grandmother-in-law had them stop by her house so she could give my father-in-law a sandwich. And they stopped. I was not as agreeable when I was on the way to the hospital; I did everything short of taking down the license plate numbers of people who would not let us merge on the GWB and tell the CIA they were planing on blowing something up, let alone stop over so my husband could get something to eat while I suffered for the next 12-24 hours with nothing more than ice chips and a saline drip.
So that is the kind of thing I would NEVER do. I also don’t sanitize pacifiers (I do wash them if they seem to have been on the floor for more than 10 seconds); I don’t have a religious feeding schedules (baby hungry = Feed Baby; not 3pm = Feed Baby), I hold my child when she seems about to get agitated, I don’t believe in crying to sleep at 7 weeks old; I don’t know how to make chicken soup; and I take her out far more than a child born in the winter ever should be. However, I do check to make sure she is breathing about 100 times a day; that just comes with the territory.
So what’s the point? Well, first it is plain to see that I am extremely tired, have not really slept since Oct 28th and am making proclamations and really bringing people to the brink and leaving them with nothing. But there is a point in here…..I don’t know what kind of crazy things I as a Modern Jewish Mother am going to do, but I am sure it will have something to do with not knowing how to make chicken soup.
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