I’m writing about my soon-to-be-completed digital video, Tearjerker, an essay documentary on crying and tears. When I started writing this piece for Poetica, I began to wonder, is there something hidden in my Jewish background that piqued my interest in this subject? While Jews have certainly suffered their share of inequities, we are a particularly resilient bunch, and we are adept at using humor to heal. In any case, I’m not sure that any special relationship to crying or grief exists for Jews, although humor is another story!

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I don’t particularly consider myself a “cryer”, or a depressive type, although I’ve certainly gone through periods of intense grief and tears. A few years ago, I was browsing in a bookstore and stumbled upon a copy of Crying: The Natural & Cultural History of Tears, by writer and critic Tom Lutz. What most intrigued me were the many images of works of art from medieval painting to contemporary film stills. It seemed to me that crying was a visual subject, and therefore, a very cinematic one. I began watching as many films as I could that had well-known crying scenes, and getting recommendations from others on good examples. I also began looking into current psychological research and theories on crying, as well as on the physiology of tears.

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I started working on my project, a digital video consisting of interviews, footage of crying scenes from films and television, and original footage of actors crying, a baby crying, and a doll with a “crying” face, for example. I began to see a few themes emerging: crying from a physical standpoint, and how the body produces tears; as a cathartic act, and the effect on the body and mood after tears, which also includes the strong emotions we feel when experiencing works of art. Also, crying as it relates to gender, and whether or not crying is different for either sex; “faked” crying, or crying that isn’t genuine, but is used to manipulate others; and “magical” properties of tears. This last theme is strictly an artistic device, in which tears are seen to have some sort of supernatural or alchemic power.

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I’ve always been interested in situations and experiences that are ubiquitous, that we take for granted because they seem so common. We all cry as babies and children, even if we cry only rarely as adults. Crying is essentially part of an inevitable cycle – no matter how happy we may be, and no matter how hard we might try to avoid pain, we can always count on tears to happen at some point in our lives. I became most fascinated by the transformative power of tears. What makes us cry, and how is that reflected in art? One of my favorite quotes on crying comes from Madelon Sprengnether’s book, Crying At the Movies, in which she writes, “The lesson of crying is metamorphosis”. The act of crying transforms us from sad to happy and back again, in both life and art.

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Thanks for Reading JWorld Café, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Roslyn Broder, Guest Blogger

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Roslyn Broder is a Chicago-based graphic designer, jewelry designer, and filmmaker. She received her MFA in filmmaking from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her films and videos have been screened and awarded at numerous festivals and venues around the country. You can find her graphic design work at http://roslynbroder.com/ and her jewelry at http://www.etsy.com/shop/RedAvaDesigns. For information about Tearjerker, contact Roslyn at redorb123@hotmail.com. Follow her on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/redorb1/ - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

Yiddish was our language – my Mother and mine. It was the only common language Jews spoke to each other throughout Europe. There were two dialectics – Litvak and Glitzeaner. Mom spoke one, I spoke the other. As was always the case, she wanted me to speak her dialect and I spoke the other one, just because.

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I had two names – Sarinou and Saralle (sweet Sara and little Sara). My mother and I spoke only in Yiddish to each other. For me it was always on automatic pilot. No thought process was involved. When I heard her voice my brain responded in Yiddish. Although German was my first language, Yiddish somehow evolved in the refugee camp when I wanted to know what all the grown-ups were whispering about.

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My mother died in February of 2006. This conversation took place at her bedside several days before her death.

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Mom: "Raialle, (her sister in Israel) dost a bissalle perfume?" (Raia, do you have some perfume?)

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Me: "Vart a minute, eech ob a bisalle perfume in the car?" (Wait a minute, I have a little perfume in the car.) "Mom, dee vilst perfume?" (Mom, do you want some perfume?)

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Mom: "Nu, spritz meech oon. And lipstick, dee ost a bisalle lipstick?" (Of course, spray me on. And lipstick, do have a little lipstick?)

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I put lipstick on her - a beautiful bronze color. Kissed her forehead, kissed her eyes, kissed her face. She held her face up, the way a baby holds its face up when your rub lotion on. She looked a little brighter. She inhaled the attention and breathed a little easier.

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Mom: "The government owes me a lot of money. And when they pay me, Saralle, we're going into business. You know 86 is not too old to go into business, is it? Dee ost g'zain dain tatte?" (Have you seen your Father? He'd been dead since August 2005 and they had been divorced since 1976. We hadn’t told her he had died.)

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Me: "Eech ob im g'zain." (I saw him.)

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Mom: "Git, sz’nisht git ts’zain broyges.” (Good, it’s not good to remain angry.) "Sarinou, eech gay shtarbin?" (Sara, am I going to die?)

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Me: “Mom, you want to die?” (I am completely taken off guard, for how are you ever prepared to lose your parents?)

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Mom: "Lobin zeech klapen dem kop in deir vant!" (Let them knock their heads into a wall!)

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My knees almost gave out, while I’m trying not to laugh hysterically. I sat down next to her bed, my brain racing. Her body is shot. She can lift her right arm and her head a little bit, and she can talk, boy, can she talk. I had a good teacher. Here she is with her body broken, though her spirit, her heart and soul are telling the angel of death to go knock his head into a wall and come and get her if he dares.

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I guess if you can escape the wrath of Hitler, be homeless for seven years beginning at nineteen, bury your parents and your first born and leave your sisters behind in Uzbekistan - all before your 25th birthday - travel thousands of miles to Munich, survive a refugee camp with rations of peanut butter, margarine, and white bread, travel by ship three months to America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, and all before your 30th birthday, what's a little dying?

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*This was written from Yiddish translated notes at her bedside 26 Jan 06 in Scottsdale, AZ when she was in the hospice. Nusha died a week later.

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Thanks for reading JWorld Café, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Sara Fryd, Guest Blogger

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Sara Fryd is the author of the book, You Meet No Strangers, a collection of 24 stories about growing up an American daughter in an Eastern European family. It is available in paperback at Amazon, https://www.createspace.com/3564631" target="_blank">Createspace, and in electronic digital format for Kindle and Smashword. She also writes the blog Sara Arizona, with visitors from 180 countries. – Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

I’m sitting on a lawn chair in our backyard in Skokie, my relatives all ringed around me, the sun beating down on our heads, mottled through the leaves of the trees overhead. There’s a lot of boisterous conversation going on around me, but I sit there staring straight ahead, the idiot American granddaughter. They talk around me, over me, under me, like I’m a vegetable. I don’t understand a word they’re saying. They’re speaking Yiddish.

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I’ve made a concerted effort not to learn Yiddish. For some reason, from the moment I hear it as a small child, I cast it off, decide it’s not for me, that it’s a relic of the Old Country. I resist Yiddish, fight its penetration into my brain tooth and nail. I give my mother a blank look when she tries to speak to me in it. I make her translate.

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I give myself several reasons for my antagonism. First of all, I decide right off the bat that it’s a dead language, so there’s no reason to learn it. After all, only the grown ups around me speak Yiddish, none of the kids. I figure I can wait this thing out. I’ve also absorbed my parents’ desire to be American in all things, to cast off the Old World and embrace the new, and so I cast off the Old World’s Yiddish and embrace the New World’s English. Of course, they don’t mean to do that with language; they want to be able to speak to their children in their mother tongue. And, last of all, since Yiddish is used to hide everything interesting and tantalizing from me, I have a certain amount of hostility towards it.

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My refusal to learn Yiddish causes some problems because one set of grandparents, my father’s parents, never learns English. They resist English as well as I resist Yiddish, eventually dying without letting a syllable touch their lips. And why should they learn it anyway? Yiddish serves all their needs; they commission their sons and daughters to learn English for them, to handle all their transactions with non-Yiddish-speaking merchants, to handle their communications with the outside world. These two grandparents of mine seem to know that it just might not be worth the time and effort to learn such an elaborate, messy and confusing language like English before they die.

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My Dad’s parents are determined to spend their days in America relaxing and enjoying their new status as “senior citizens” in this new country, even if those days stack up together into years and even decades. They never get over the novelty of safety; never take it for granted. They never stop marveling at the amazing American innovations. The convenience of grocery stores - so much better than starving! The traffic signals on every street corner regulating the cars - so much better than cars and horses and wagons all insisting on going at the same time! The mild weather in Chicago compared to Poland and Siberia - a heat wave!

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Just because I can’t speak Yiddish doesn’t mean that I can’t understand some of it. I do understand adjectives and imperatives and direct commands and reprimands. If my mother is mad at someone and decides to hurl an insult under her breath, I can understand that too, the goniffs, the schlimazels, the yachnehs. But the regular conversational ebbs and flows, the make up of ordinary sentences with nouns and verbs, that escapes me.

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My other grandparents, my mother’s parents, learn English, my grandmother better than my grandfather. She understands every word I say; there’s no escaping her, tricking her, or pulling a fast one on her. She’s watching me all the days of my life with eyes magnified by her glasses and ears sharp with the nuances of five languages. All this while my grandfather sits nearby in a suit, his fedora always on his head, even inside the house, practicing the words he has just learned on me.

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“Linda, mameleh, tell me again. Beetles are bugs, nu? Monkeys are animals. But now the Monkees and the Beatles sing songs on the radio? How can this be?”

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Holocaust Memorial Day reminds me of my grandparents, all Survivors, and the Yiddish in our family, now long gone, so today I ran a blog post that is an excerpt from my book,  Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie, available on Amazon.

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Thanks for Reading JWorld Cafe, The Poetica Magazine Blog

Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

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Linda Pressman is the Blog Editor of Poetica Magazine and a freelance writer. Her book, Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie is available on Amazon and other venues. Her work has appeared in the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix, in Brain Child Magazine, and has been anthologized in several works including Mizmor L'David, an anthology of work by children of Holocaust Survivors. She blogs at Bar Mitzvahzilla and on Open Salon.

When I was five my grandmother read Grimm’s Fairy Tales to me. As a child I liked this and I loved when she read both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament to me, especially the stories of Esther and Daniel, over and over again.

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But there was a dark side to Grandma. Her religion. She really believed the world was going to end in nineteen eighty, and that the bulk of humankind was going to be cast into hell. At ten she began telling me about the fate of the damned, the Rapture, the False Christ and the False Prophet. And then, just when all the religions of the world were worshipping the false god, the devil, then the rapture would come. She told me, “Just before you’re about to die at the sword of the anti-Christ, God will intervene and those saved will go to heaven and the rest, all of the members of this false Church, will be cast into a lake of fire.” Sometimes she ended even more ominously, with a judgment about the fate of our family,“I don’t think all of us are going to make it to heaven,” she’d say.

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As a Christian, I never really knew what to do with the scary, sadistic God of my imagination after that time. I had nightmares about God. I felt as though my faith was strangled in the crib.

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Finally I left my faith when I was in college. Strangely enough, I was quite grief-stricken at my loss of faith. I felt desolate and found myself wondering things I never let myself think, “Was there a God? What kind of morality existed separate from religion? Did morality exist separate from it?”

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As a child I was interested in Judaism. I don’t mean the Talmud, which I didn’t know existed; I mean Anne Frank’s diary. I pored over her diary; I was even in love with Anne’s boyfriend Peter, or thought I was. But then I saw the pictures of the victims of the Holocaust along with the tragic fate of Anne and her sister Margot. I had never seen or imagined such suffering. It was one of the early hints - before Grandma’s eschatology - of the dissatisfaction I had with the religion of my upbringing. Why had this been done?

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At the same time, a good belief if unacted on, seemed meaningless. And yet I saw—or thought I saw—that you could believe in something fervently and yet do nothing. I struggled with this. I saw myself as evil. Finally I simply left. At the end of that semester I changed my religious affiliation to “Unitarian.” It would be a full year later when I decided to give Judaism a try.

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Then, by luck or design, I found a copy of Spinoza’s Ethics. I started reading it and after classes were out I got my own copy of the work. His key insight to me was in understanding that human ethics benefit us in this life. I had never really thought of the practical nature of ethics. However, Spinoza occasionally came to weird conclusions in spots: he believed that cowardice was actually good because ‘bravery’ was liable to end in death. This was where I thought a Deistic way of understanding God made more sense: those who suffer unjustly in this life will have some sort of afterlife although I wasn’t always sure on this point.

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Years later in Judaism, I found that the simple acting out of mitzvoth was therapeutic. I also made one decision early on for my sanity’s sake: I was not going to try to be Orthodox. It couldn’t be like back when my grandmother used to read me Grimm’s Fairy Tales; that I had to believe everything that was in her bible. I study the Bible but I don’t believe in all of it. When I was Christian, I felt like it had to be all or nothing. I never want to have my religion that way again.

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Thanks for Reading JWorld Café,

Jennifer Alderson, Guest Blogger

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Jennifer Alderson was born in Topeka, KS in 1978. She moved at age eight to Wichita, finished high school at East High and went on to Friends University. In between starting and finishing school in 2001, Jenny started what would be an unusually long conversion process to Judaism from her original Protestant faith, converting eventually with a rabbi ordained both Orthodox and Conservative. Although she attends both Reform and Orthodox synagogues, she considers herself Conservative. She is a writer and poet whose work has been published in Poetica Magazine and Mim'amakim. She is presently working on her book, The Bible According to Eve. - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

Today was my larger family's "mock Passover" party.

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After years of forcing them to do Passover my way, with a seder table stretched across my house, with a Haggadah for each person, with - hopefully - songs and discussions, I gave up, realizing that it was only my small family that wanted a real seder. The rest of my family is happy with a get together on a Sunday near Passover, with some traditional foods, and no seder. I can attend as long as it doesn't conflict with the real holiday. My sense of loss about this ended a long time ago, about the time I finally stopped trying to turn them into me. 

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But tonight there was a new sense of loss. We drove my elderly mother and stepfather to the party and my daughter's best friend was in the car, a girl my mother has met time and time again over the years; one who's even been to her house.

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And my mother said, "Who is this girl? I've never seen her before in my life." Like someone - or something - had erased this girl from my mother's brain.

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My mother has Alzheimer's Disease, though sometimes, and this might seem really stupid, I think she doesn't. Sometimes she remembers appointments better than I do, or the most minute ingredients in recipes when I don't, or directions all over a city in which the streets weave around mountains.

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And then sometimes, like tonight, my denial comes to a crashing halt in the face of some irrefutable evidence of the disease. My mother has completely forgotten her first person. Last one in, first one out. An inconsequential person to her life, after all. Just my daughter's best friend. But still. Who's the next one? When will she forget my kids? After all, she just met them eleven and fifteen years ago. When will she forget me?

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Sometimes I can write about this, other times I can't. Sometimes I have to and sometimes, after I've written something and become convinced again that she's been misdiagnosed, I become embarassed by my own words, ashamed that I said she has Alzheimer's when she so clearly doesn't. And then sometimes, like tonight, it's like a door slamming. She does.

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Prior to tonight, my mother had completely forgotten how to cook in the last six months. Yet tonight she buoyantly entered my vehicle, a dish of latkes held in her hands like a trophy. And, since I've turned into a younger version of her, I quizzed her on the ingredients, concurring that she got them all right and telling her that I've spent the last two days cooking. Off of the recipes she gave me. 

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Thanks for reading JWorld Cafe, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

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Linda Pressman is the Blog Editor of Poetica Magazine and a freelance writer. Her book, Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie will be available this week on Amazon.com and other venues. Her work has appeared in the Jewish News of Greater Phoenix, in Brain Child Magazine, and has been anthologized in several works including Mizmor L'David, an anthology of work by children of Holocaust Survivors.  She blogs at Bar Mitzvahzilla and on Open Salon.

I hate roller coasters. The only time I rode one was on a dare on the boardwalk in Santa Cruz, California. I had just gotten engaged and Craig, my husband-to-be, jokingly said he would not marry me unless I rode the Big Dipper. As expected, I loathed every second of that 60-second ride. So, if I want a rush of excitement in my life, I sign up for a Torah reading. Reading Torah is my roller coaster ride.

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My earliest memory of hearing the Torah was on Rosh Hashanah morning. I sat with my grandfather as a small dark man, a Yemenite Jew, read the story of the binding of Isaac. I was mesmerized by the sound of the man’s strange, nasal chanting. I sat there wondering, how does he do that and when do I get my turn?

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Within my Conservative synagogue in New York City, boys preparing for their Bar Mitzvah were required to attend services on Saturday morning. Girls were required to go on Friday night. Girls would chant their Haftarah on Friday night and boys would be called to the Torah on Saturday mornings. It was never questioned or debated if girls should have a larger role participating in Jewish communal life. That’s how it was.

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We were taught that after our coming-of-age ceremony, boys were still required to go to shul but girls didn’t have to. Our rabbis, all Orthodox, said that girls were more spiritual by nature, thus relieving them of the obligation to attend services. They said if men were not required to go to shul, they would never go.

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It’s true. I did feel a natural spirituality. Each Friday night, I followed along with all of the melodies of Kabbalat Shabbat, the service where Jews welcome the Sabbath as a bride. On the evening of my Bat Mitzvah, I chanted my Haftarah with much confidence, never realizing that if my family continued to belong to this synagogue, it would be the last time I would be allowed on the bimah for ritual reasons. I would not be asked to join a minyan if they needed a tenth, because I was not a man. I would not be asked to read from the Torah or participate in services ever again. It made me feel as though I didn’t count, and on a certain level, as a Jewish woman, I didn’t.

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I had great respect for my Orthodox rabbis and teachers who I believe gave me a more solid supplementary Jewish education than my own children are receiving in our egalitarian synagogue. And I do have great respect for Modern Orthodox Judaism, which, I have been told, is considered the Conservative Judaism of my childhood. I admire their commitment to observing Shabbat, the hospitality they extend to guests on Saturday afternoons for lunch, and their dedication to Jewish day school education.

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When I became a mother, I also grew to appreciate why it is that women are not obligated to participate in time-bound mitzvot which could interfere with their tasks of mothering. I respect those who believe there are separate roles in Judaism for men and women. But what I cannot accept is where “not obligated” evolved into the extreme of “not allowed.” I also took some cues from Blu Greenberg, who wrote in her book On Women and Spirituality, that Judaism for women should not be a spectator sport.

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I finally learned how to read Torah at age 37. The first time I read, my heart beat so fast I could barely catch my breath, but my chazzan said never mind and encouraged me to take further readings. I would wear my husband’s old tallit, until he bestowed me with my own on my 38th birthday. It is sheer and silvery and I feel embraced by Craig’s love, God’s love, and my Jewish community each time I wear it.

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For me, I have come to realize that learning Torah is not an exercise in perfection, rather an act of participation and performing the mitzvah of studying Torah as a full-fledged member of the Jewish community. Just like that person getting strapped into the seat of a looping roller coaster, know that there is no turning back, but know you are in for a thrill.

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Thanks for Reading JWorld Café, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Stacy Gittleman, Guest Blogger

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Stacy Gittleman is a freelance writer and has been a Jewish educator in Rochester New York for 10 years. She lives in Rochester with her husband and their three children. She blogs at http://transplantednorth.wordpress.com/  - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

I never told my father when I finally finished my conversion to Judaism. He knew I was converting, mind you, but I knew - everyone knew - that he might be an embarrassment if he attended the ceremony. He would put on an unpleasant face for those there, those who cared. I privately wondered about the sincerity of his own faith, after all, how many devout fundamentalists act the way my father does, miss as much church as my father does?

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His own religion lost some of its luster (although I had already left it) when his second wife left him. That he didn't take his wife's leaving well turned out to be something of an understatement. At one point I said, “But you still have my sister and me.” Dad replied, “It’s not the same.”

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His wife had been adopted and she had finally met her biological father. But her biological father didn’t like dad and convinced her to file for a divorce. At first Dad was only sad and I felt bad for him. However, after a few months he became angry. He contested the divorce, claiming my stepmother was too unstable to make the decision. I think he even believed it himself, but my sister assured me that he’d made this up. He then enlisted the aid of his church to help him get her back, going to each fundamentalist church in Lawrence, Kansas begging for prayers for her return. And he said her father was going to hell for supporting the divorce. He told strangers in the grocery stores. He spoke of nothing else at either my grandmother’s funeral - even claiming her leaving caused Grandma’s death - or my cousin’s funeral a few years later.

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And then there’s the fact that he mysteriously discovered his faith after seventeen years of refusing to go to church with my mom. And when he did go his main interest didn’t seem to be church, it seemed to be in winning Mom back. Later he blamed my conversion on my mother and her Methodist ways.

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So, perhaps I should feel grateful that my conversion matters to him so little, especially in light of how he acts when things matter to him a lot.

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Now when I go to see him, we have nothing to talk about. His politics have moved to the right; he watches Lou Dobbs on CNN and has completely brainwashed himself. He speaks disparagingly of China and Mexico. He comments to strangers about the “funny laws” I have to keep as a religious Jew and often forgets that I am a vegetarian. He sometimes hints that Barak Obama is a Muslim or that Lincoln had African ancestry. Of course, he always laughs at my other Grandma’s jokes about Jews and Catholics.

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What happened to the man I thought I knew as a child? Did he ever exist? I remember when my Mom left him when I was four, I wanted to stay. Where’s that father? Where’s the father who spoiled me, who bought toys, who paid child support? The father I later talked to about politics, religion and music. Where’d that father go?

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Somewhere along the road of me growing up, he turned into another father, the father who came to see me during my first hospitalization for Depression at age thirteen and said, “I’m probably the reason you’re here.”

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Thanks for reading JWorld Café, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Jennifer Alderson, Guest Blogger

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Jennifer Alderson was born in Topeka, KS in 1978. She moved at age eight to Wichita, finished high school at East High and went on to Friends University. In between starting and finishing school in 2001, Jenny started what would be an unusually long conversion process to Judaism from her original Protestant faith, converting eventually with a rabbi ordained both Orthodox and Conservative. Although she attends both Reform and Orthodox synagogues, she considers herself Conservative. She is a writer and poet whose work has been published in Poetica Magazine and Mim'amakim. She is presently working on her book The Bible According to Eve. - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

Over the years I have had many reasons for writing, the childlike desire to create like drawing with crayons, the need to find a safe place to vent adolescent frustrations, and as a young adult trying to find a direction for my life. Once the words were strung together and the ideas explored, I thought I would find the hidden treasure of personal contentment. While raising a family in my strange new world of suburbia, the writing became a tool to help me improve my outlook on life and soothe myself. My journals were a hiding place and a way to put things in perspective. I had always helped friends write term papers in college and as a fundraiser I was writing all the time, letters, speeches, event brochures, and promotional materials. Most recently I have been helping friends write speeches for their children’s Bar Mitzvahs.

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The one thing missing from my writing repertoire was a way to share my creative writing. I never figured out a way to describe to people what I meant when I said I like to write. So I decided to “come out of the closet.” I started a Blog. The resulting essays, and observations I posted were like pictures hung on an invisible wall (the internet).

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I first began scribbling notes and using writing as a way to escape the pain of losing my father when I was 9 years old. When he was alive, I was the center of his world. I was the singing and dancing sensation starring in my very own variety show every Saturday night in our living room. I had a captive audience. I did not know and it did not matter that I was probably off key, and clumsy. My audience adored me. I made the room light up. When the lights went out on March 9th 1970, my show ended. No one wanted to see me sing or dance and I was not particularly interested in performing anymore anyway. Silence seemed more desirable than music. Pen on paper and pain in hand and heart led me in a new direction. I have no idea where most of those old spiral notebooks went.

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When a child loses a parent the world becomes very confusing. It is no longer a matter of what is for lunch, who am I going to play with, will I get that shiny red bicycle? Suddenly there are questions that simply cannot be answered. I don’t mean “why is the sky blue?” types of questions. I mean questions like “What is the meaning of life? What is a soul? Why can’t you hug a memory? Who is going to protect me from the bad people?” The writing was my way of making a map to lead me out of the foggy mental landscape where I suddenly found myself wandering.

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While I was growing up, my mom was always filling my head with stories about her life, the Great Depression, being homeless, dozens of cousins with complicated lives. This was her way of making me resilient. She was telling me to look at everything our family had survived. I learned I could rely on her and that I was made from strong stock. During one of my cleaning sprees in her apartment I discovered a paper bag filled with black and white photos in her bedroom closet. They were all there. Her cousins, old neighbors, and the dog she had growing up. We spent hours every week at the kitchen table putting the photos in albums and writing down all her stories in the white spaces next to the pictures. I think that was some of the most important writing I have ever done.

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I spent my life afraid of losing my mother. Would she “disappear” from my life just like my father had? Even though I was a grown, married woman with children during the time my mom and I made those books, there was also a 9-year-old child inside my head questioning why “no one lives forever.”

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Lately I’ve had difficulty writing. I’ve abandoned my blog. It’s sitting there waiting for new entries as I struggle to find my way in the world without my mother. Maybe I really did think she was going to live forever? I should write about her so all the good things she gave me will travel through eternity where we will meet up again.

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I should write.

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Thanks for Reading JWorld Café, the Poetica Magazine Blog.

Benita Haberman, Guest Blogger.

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Benita Haberman is a writer who lives and works in Chicago. Besides blogging at House of Mirrors she is a stay at home mother of a 14-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl. She also uses her writing skills to assist people with writing speeches and toasts for a variety of special occasions from Bar Mitzvahs to Wedding Anniversaries. She has taken stand up comedy classes at the Improv Playhouse in Libertyville, Illinois and her first two 5 minute debut performances are posted on youtube. You can reach her directly at benita-houseofmirrors@blogspot.com  - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

In May of 2009 I came up with this great idea to begin writing a blog and use it as a countdown to my 50th birthday. On my actual birthday in 2010 I would do a stand up comedy show (a life-long fantasy) and share what I had written with all my friends. The topics were all over the place, essays, humor, and memoir. One “series” of posts related the stories of my grammar school days. I loved telling my children funny stories about all the nasty teachers I had. These posts were my form of literary revenge. I did it with humor at first, but the tone changed when I wrote about 4th grade. I had to recount what it was like being a 9-year-old whose father had just died in March and having the class art project being the construction of a Father’s Day card.

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On that day in June of 1970 I made my most meaningful Father’s Day Card. It was all about my mom and how now she was both my mother and my father. When I gave the card to my mom she cried. She knew how hard it must have been for me. My mom and I moved forward together, getting closer and closer as the years went by. Our relationship often confused people. It evolved into a complicated, all encompassing place that only she and I understood. We were both afraid of confrontation with anyone except each other, leaving our relationship one of love, loyalty, matching personalities and yet containing an element of volatility. Our relationship was the only place where we each felt truly safe.

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My mother’s life read like a Dickens novel. When I was growing up she would tell me the stories of her troubling childhood. She was the youngest of five children. Her only sister was the oldest, and there were three boys in between. Because of the Depression, my mother had to start working at the age of 8, officially ending her childhood. The “hard” life seemed to follow her everywhere. But her naturally outgoing disposition carried her through all the difficulties.

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When my own childhood started getting more complicated I slowly learned the value in the lessons of my mother’s stories. I was only six-years-old when my mother began to lose her siblings, first a brother and then her only sister died. A year later, my dad died. My mother’s main source of emotional support, her sister, and our family’s financial support, my dad, were both gone. Two years later my grandmother died and my mother and I found ourselves immersed in grief yet again. All this shared loss bound my mother and I into a thick rope of determination and hope. We tied each end of that rope tightly around our waists so we would never lose each other in the stormy waters where we found ourselves adrift.

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As my mother got older she dealt with horrible pain from arthritis and even had a triple bypass, yet she never seemed “sick”. Her love of life and people kept her going and often kept other people going as well. She was quite popular in her retirement home. She loved dinner with friends, playing bingo and beating me in cards. Her mental acuity never waned.

But when 2009 began winding down, so did my mother. My goals for 2010 suddenly changed, from writing my blog and planning a party, to spending time managing my mother’s increasing medical needs, and realizing I was counting down to something far more important than my 50th birthday. I was running out of days where I could count on my mother’s love and support to get me through whatever difficulties life brings.

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My mother’s strength of spirit could always be felt by the power she had in her voice. It had an indescribable tone she could summon up on demand when needed. It was that voice that always relieved my fears. It was that voice that was starting to falter. On April 20, 2010 my mother untied her end of our rope and left me alone to tread the waters in this turbulent world. I am surrounded by the invisible grief no one else can see. I had no idea how heavy emptiness can feel.

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Thanks for reading JWorld Café, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Benita Haberman, Guest Blogger

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Benita Haberman is a writer who lives and works in Chicago. Besides blogging at House of Mirrors she is a stay at home mother of a 14-year-old boy and a 12-year-old girl. She also uses her writing skills to assist people with writing speeches and toasts for a variety of special occasions from Bar Mitzvahs to Wedding Anniversaries. She has taken stand up comedy classes at the Improv Playhouse in Libertyville, Illinois and her first two 5 minute debut performances are posted on youtube. - Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

Today the blog returns from its two-week hiatus with new topics and a call for guest bloggers.

Sadly enough, the events involving the shooting in Arizona - where I live - and Congresswoman Giffords on Saturday, feed into one of the new topics - loss and how it affects your writing.

I happened to be enrolled in my very first Creative Writing class ever on September 11, 2001. It was the fourth class of the semester, a Tuesday, and my day off from work. I had dropped my kids off at school that morning - one at a Jewish Day school and the other at a Jewish preschool. In my car on the way home I had my radio on and the news alerted me to the fact that a plane had crashed into one of the Twin Towers in New York.

The news that day got worse and worse. By noon Arizona time it was obvious, to me at least, that there was the distinct possibility that terrorists were fanning out across the country, attacking various targets. Were the Jewish schools next? I did a U-turn in the road on my way somewhere to go pick up my kids as a precaution, just as my phone rang with the first of the two schools telling me they were closing for the day.

For a bunch of really ridiculous reasons, I had waited until I was forty-one-years-old to ever take a writing class. So, even though as the day was unfolding, writing was looking like the most stupid occupation in the world, I asked my mother to watch my kids so I could go.

I walked into the class and, surprisingly enough, so did all my other classmates. By then, we knew the devastation that had taken place in New York. We all felt embarassed of our writing, of even thinking of writing ever in our entire lives. How could we have ever been involved in something so self-centered as writing, we asked our professor? People were dying, jumping out of buildings, planes were crashing, and we were sitting there writing.

And she said, "Don't ever believe that the work you do is unimportant. It's the writers who will define what happened today for generations to come. It's the writers who will write the books and the articles and explain what life was like on this day so historians can write the history of what this day was like. Without writers, we'd know nothing about the Vietnam War, nothing about the entire history of the human people. It's the writers in a society who put form to experience. Never feel bad about writing. Writing is an important job."

I've been grateful many times for those words of hers, as a matter of fact, anytime something horrible happens. Instead of recoiling from my pen, my pen is my only answer, my only outlet. The only salve I have is words. And I no longer downgrade this task, of putting words onto  pages. I realize that writing about the world, even in a tiny corner of it, is a noble task, and carrying on even while being touched by tragedy is not a contradiction in terms.

JWorld Cafe's new topics come from the topics brought up by the guest bloggers we've hosted. The bloggers who have written movingly of how their illnesses sparked their creativity, of how they wrote themselves through a devastating loss, and how they struggle with labels - being either a Jewish writer or a writer who is a Jew, or if faith has no place in their artistic and creative world.

Thanks for reading JWorld Cafe, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Linda Pressman, Blog Editor

Linda Pressman is the Blog Editor of Poetica Magazine and a freelance writer. Her memoir, Looking Up: A Memoir of Sisters, Survivors and Skokie will be released this month.