Tikkun Olam Ted
Nicole Graev Lipson reflects on parenting, self-judgment, and an unexpected moment with her strong-willed son in Hebrew School.
Editor's Note: This essay is an excerpt from Mothers and Other Fictional Characters by Nicole Graev Lipson, which will be released on March 4.
In his first-grade classroom at Hebrew school, Jacob and I are drawing what we plan to do to repair the world. Nora, tagging along for the morning, is also completing this assignment, and though she’s slightly young for it, she gets the basic idea. She scribbles blotches of flowers on her paper while I add a woman—me?—beside a compost bin, depositing food scraps. I’m feeling pretty good about myself for being down here on the rug, in the thick of things, while most parents sit in a semicircle of chairs, watching from afar. I am a very engaged mother, I think. I am modeling enthusiasm!
It’s been a trying weekend, with Paul out of town, just me and the three kids alone—a weekend of back seat feuds and bedtime brawls, cereal bowls upended and dishes piled up in the sink. I’ve been vexed by an irritability I don’t feel entitled to, that fills me with shame each time I think of the millions of single mothers who do this day in and day out, while three days alone have chafed my patience. But I’ve made it to Sunday morning. Sun streams through the classroom window and the air smells of cherry-scented markers, and before me stretch three hours that I don’t need to plan, in a space—our synagogue—that feels like a second home.
Jacob’s marker scritch-scratches away. He bites the soft flesh of his lower lip and shields his work with his arm, and I keep a respectful distance, knowing how he loves to craft surprises. After a while, he snaps on his marker cap and holds up his work. I see that it’s not a picture after all, but a row of words wobbling across the page. My son, who as a toddler had a speech delay, has been struggling at school to write words beyond his name, and I feel a surge of pride in this effort—a surge that lasts just long enough for me to discern what he has written. Could it be? No. But oh my god, yes. I LUV MI PENES.
This message clashes so profoundly with the spirit of this morning’s event that I can hardly register it. We are here for an annual tradition at my children’s Hebrew school, Tikkun Olam Day. The phrase tikkun olam means “repairing the world” and captures an idea at the heart of Judaism—that the universe is innately good but imperfect, and that our task as human beings is to help restore it to wholeness. Tikkun olam is often associated with social activism, but as Rabbi Zecher—who made history at our temple by becoming its first female senior rabbi three years ago—has reminded the students during today’s opening assembly, our world teems with small opportunities for repair work. Conserving water is tikkun olam. Giving to charity is tikkun olam. Opening the door for someone, expressing thanks, welcoming guests into one’s home—these, too, are tikkun olam. I’ve long admired Rabbi Zecher, who is extraordinarily wise and learned and also beautiful, her face warmly luminous beneath a halo of silver-white hair. And while this introductory talk was meant for the children, it moved me, as her words so often move me, to remember all the ways that I can do better.
Later in the morning, Jacob’s class will prepare trays of lasagna for Rosie’s Place, a local shelter for homeless women. Their teacher Morah Elena, who has crinkly eyes and a pixie haircut, has just finished reading them Tikkun Olam Ted, a fictional tale about a boy who loves improving the world. “Ted is small, but he spends his days doing very big things,” this picture book begins. On Sundays, Ted scrubs bottles for recycling. On Wednesdays, he walks dogs at the animal shelter. On Thursdays, he waters the garden. Ted has a sweet round face and pink circles on his cheeks. On Shabbat, the Jewish sabbath, he rests and dreams of tikkun olam. This book’s illustrations, so cheerful, bright and simple, had strangely carried me away, and I found myself imagining all the small ways our family could start helping our earth, and our neighbors, right away.
As the children continue drawing, Morah Elena tiptoes around the room in her leggings and fuzzy sweater, murmuring encouragement for their bright yellow suns, smiling stick figures, trees and kittens and doggies. Jacob grins at me, his eyes gleaming. Whatever he hopes to see on my face is not there. Who knows what is there, what arrangement of features could possibly represent this unholy rainbow of feelings: shock, bewilderment, a full-body disappointment that won’t stop growing. Where did he learn to write this? What does he mean by it? And why has he chosen this moment to share it, exposing flagrantly and publicly my maternal failings? For these, it feels, are what this paper announces most spectacularly at this moment, in this room, where I’ve come expressly as an adult emissary of my family’s goodness.
On Monday, Ted makes inappropriate jokes. On Tuesday, he mocks the endeavors of well-meaning people.
Fumbling, I pull Jacob’s paper from his hands and slip it into my bag. Did any of the other parents see? I scan the room. It appears not, but this brings little relief. It turns out it isn’t fear of outside judgment that has seized me, but my own self-judgment, more caustic and piercing than another person’s eyes could ever be. I know there are child development experts who believe in the power of nature over nurture, who would tell me my son is his own person, and that I’m no more responsible for his lapses than I am for his triumphs. But I’ve yet to meet a parent who can untangle their children from themselves this cleanly. In real time, on this real Sunday, my logic works more like this: because I am a mother, I am the moral epicenter of my family’s universe; my son’s fissures must therefore ripple out from some primal fracture in me.
I glare at Jacob in a way that’s meant to sink deep. My jaw is a hard dam, stanching what threatens to pour out. We’ll talk about this later, I hiss. Later. In private. Far away from this cramped amphitheater of good men and women and their very good children, seeking to better the earth. A few feet away, a girl in a silver headband sketches herself raking leaves. Beautiful, big-hearted, orange leaves that burst across the page like rising flames.
It’s not too late, I think, to put this behind us. Probably, I’m taking this too seriously. Probably this is something he picked up from a first grade classmate, one with several sweaty older brothers and no limits, whom he’s now imitating. He is only six. I pass him a fresh piece of paper and a handful of markers. His eyes narrow and his shoulders curl in like the edges of a shrinky-dink, but he grabs the paper from my hand, sullenly compliant, and then turns his hunched back to me and gets to work.
On my other side, Nora has drawn purple dashes above her garden. “What are those?” I ask hopefully, and she tells me they’re a bird family. While the birds soar, thoughts descend on me like flies. I think about how we can never fully know our children’s minds. I think about Freud and try to remember what I can about the phallic stage. But mostly, I think about how mothering my son so often feels like trying to steer a bike with a wobbly wheel: no matter how determined I am to aim the handlebars, we go crashing together off the curb, again and again.
Jacob is finished with his new drawing. I ask to see it, but he demurs, covering it with the floppy arms of his sweatshirt, and I keep a respectful, and now wary, distance. Soon, the activity wraps up and the room begins to bustle. One of Jacob’s friends comes over, and they start talking and giggling, and then they’ve turned their markers into knights’ swords. The paper slips free from under my son’s elbow.
A sea of white, two bobbing words at the center.
FEK MOMMY.
When I recount this incident to friends later, I turn it into a funny story, with all the character and color of a work of fiction. There we were, in the middle of repairing the world day, and he’s dropping F bombs on me! I get laughs every time. With three kids and ten years of experience as a mother, I’m practiced at the parental art of turning suffering to comedy. There’s the time Nora had the flu and threw up all over me on the prescription pickup line at CVS—ha ha! And the time when, dizzy from lack of sleep, I took my colicky firstborn daughter out in the stroller, and it flipped over when the wheel hit a crack in the sidewalk. There she was, hanging upside down like a cured ham—he he! “Humor is just another defense against the universe,” the comedian Mel Brooks once said. When it comes to parenting, it’s felt like the most powerful defense I have against the orbit of crisis and rapture that is raising children.
But on the floor of my son’s Hebrew school classroom, my insides crumple in a way that isn’t funny at all. They crumple deep in my center, in the vast, quiet place where he spun into being, where his heart first quivered to life and his somersaults sent ripples across the flesh of my stomach so that I no longer knew where he ended and I began. I crumple because he’s spun out into the world, turning and turning and turning—and because I can’t seem to stop him from turning on me.
I love my son as I love all my children—which is to say, staggeringly, with an intensity that sometimes takes my breath away. When he emerged from my body and revealed that he was a boy, I was elated. We had our daughter Leigh then, and while I would have welcomed another healthy baby girl with joy and gratitude, I secretly thanked the universe for giving us this opportunity to parent a boy as well. I felt thankful in a very particular way for Paul, who lost his own father when he was seven, and who now had the chance to honor his dad’s memory in perhaps the most cellular way possible—by being for his growing son all that his father had been for him. And I felt thankful that I could now experience what was by all accounts—or at least the accounts of my friends with male children—the uniquely tender bond that develops between a woman and her son. “There’s just something between a boy and his mama,” I remembered my friend Laura saying. Here was my chance to learn what this something was.
But from the very start, there’s been nothing easeful or simple about the interplay between Jacob and me. I ought not—I know, I know—to compare my children, but the fact is there’s an inevitable controlled experiment dynamic to parenting multiple kids, each one moving through the same stages of growth in more or less the same petri dish, announcing their differences whether we want them to or not. As infants, both of my daughters nursed calmly like painted cherubs, their tiny bodies nestled in the crook of my arm. Breastfeeding Jacob was more like a wrestling match, with him suddenly writhing and wailing at my breast until I lifted him away, and then writhing and wailing more furiously until I pulled him close again. Back and forth we’d go, his face growing redder, each round leaving me sweatier and more despairing than the last. If Paul were close by, I’d snap at him, enraged by his bodily freedom, and he would snap back, injured by my anger. If I could stay calm enough to remain pitiable, he would sometimes relieve me, gathering Jacob up and bouncing away with him to another room, shushing and shushing. It wasn’t that Paul could always subdue him—but he could, somehow, weather his cries in a way that didn’t feel to him intensely personal.
As he’s grown from baby to toddler to little boy, Jacob and I have continued to wrestle. My daughters, too, have their moments of upset, of supermarket aisle meltdowns and late-day tantrums and pre-adolescent stomps across the kitchen floor. But with them, I can usually find some way to help restore equilibrium, whether through hugs or soothing words, distraction or minor bribery. My daughters have received and absorbed whatever comfort or perspective I offer as a mother, unfolded and burgeoned in response, whereas Jacob seems slightly suspicious of it. The tools in my maternal storehouse so often bounce right off him, leaving me powerless to mother him. I’m reminded of the time his Lego helicopter fell and broke, and he collapsed on the floor in a seething heap. I knew enough not to downplay this mishap, which would make him feel belittled; or to assure him we could rebuild the helicopter, which would enrage him. So, on a whim, I kneeled down and shared with him something I often do when seized by strong emotions, which is to take three slow, deep breaths. “Do you want to try this with me?” I asked.
He covered his ears with his hands. “Stop talking to me about that yoga stuff!” he yelled.
Later that evening, as Paul and I cleaned up from dinner, I told him about this moment. “It’s like he’s impervious to strategy,” I said. Paul listened, scrubbing away at a pan. Then he shrugged a little, laid the pan on a towel to dry. “He is who he is,” he said, a response that in its understated mercy pretty much sums up why I married him.
Nicole Graev Lipson is the author of the memoir in essays Mothers and Other Fictional Characters. Her writing has appeared in publications such as The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review, LA Review of Books, The Millions, and River Teeth, where a version of this essay first appeared. Her work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, shortlisted for a National Magazine Award, and selected for The Best American Essays anthology. She lives outside of Boston with her family.
Five tiny delights
Getting lost in thought while staring into space
Dancing—anywhere, anytime, but most of all with my children and husband
Running long enough to get a runner's high
Being with my closest woman friends
Reading in bed
Five tiny Jewish delights
Dancing the hora
Making my Grandma Charlotte's criminally delicious kugel recipe
Performing Tashlich with my children on Rosh Hashanah
Eating chocolate babka from Zabar's
Feeling the warm flames under my palms on Shabbat
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