It was a cold December day near Christmas when my youngest daughter, Dahlia, and I happened upon a creche displayed outside a local Catholic Church. She paused thoughtfully in front of it. “Jesus looks cold,” she said. Before I knew it, she had unlatched the gate to the church yard to place her hat on Jesus’ head. I started to say: “Jesus is ceramic, I doubt he’s cold,” but stopped myself. When a 6-year-old expresses empathy, even if it’s for a ceramic Jesus, I think the only thing to do is roll with it. She had refused to wear that hat anyway.

Christmas has an undeniable allure to any child, but to my fantasy-obsessed daughter it is nothing short of magical. But for me the holiday brings up different associations. I was raised by a mother who converted twice (the conservative conversion wasn’t enough for Israel, so she had an Orthodox one when we lived there). With the zeal of a convert, she raised my brother and I with no mixed messages. Growing up, she was the driving force in our religious lives—making the Shabbat meals, sending us to Orthodox day school when we moved back to America, and organizing the holidays. I got the impression she had never felt at home in her religion. When her relatives sent a us presents wrapped in Christmas paper, my mom blanched, and my father scoffed. I learned that to make any allowances at all was to let down the ramparts–keeping Christmas at bay was somehow vital to our survival as a people.

Then I met and fell in love with a non-Jew, and we had a child together. He was more than willing to compromise; indeed, he even spoke of conversion to Judaism. But the voice of my parents was still there. I armored myself against any incursion and began a full-scale war with Christmas.

“Your mother is not to send Christmas presents; ONLY Chanukah presents!” I told him stridently. “You can’t get her Christmas pajamas like all the other cousins! No way!” I exclaimed (causing my daughter to cry). My demands were grating and impossible. At one point I might have asked him to sign a document that we were raising our child exclusively Jewish and not Christian, even though he had eagerly accented to this, even welcomed it. I was incorrigible, a dog with a bone I would not let go of.

I had a hard time accounting for my extreme reaction. Did I feel guilty that I was raising a child with a non-Jewish dad? Had all the lectures I’d received in elementary school vociferously cautioning us against intermarriage taken root? Was it residual sorrow that we had left Israel? Or perhaps an identification with my mother?

Regardless of the reason, over time I have softened about Christmas. I still flinch when my daughter gets excited to go to her grandmother’s house for the holiday. I’ve decided, though, that it’s like having an obnoxious great aunt: you don’t have to like her, you might seat her at the end of the table, but you must invite her. Her dad has been remarkably and endlessly patient with my Christmas struggle—I think somewhere inside he never really belonged in his religion either, just like my mom. However, despite his reservations about the religion, he delights in Christmas and its rituals. It makes me wonder at what cost it came to my mother to give all that up.

The next day Dahlia again paused in front of Jesus and cocked her head thoughtfully. “Today I think Jesus is hungry.” I shooed my oldest daughter, Yael, away when she began snickering.
“Well…what do you think he likes to eat?”
“Hmm,” she put her finger to her lips. “I think Jesus likes pringles.” She began rummaging around in her bag and found her lunchbox and deposited a cup of pringles at Jesus’ feet.
“There, now he won’t be hungry.” Her eyes shone and she smiled widely.
When we passed the creche that afternoon, the pringles were gone, but the hat remained.
“Where are the pringles?” Dahlia asked.

“Well, he ate them, silly!” She giggled. To my surprise, I was enjoying this. “What do you think he would like tomorrow?”

The week before we had passed a Salvation Army Santa on a street corner and Dahlia darted over to him, enchanted. Yael, whose dad is Israeli and has eagerly embraced my anti-Christmas stance, mumbled to her: “he’s just an out of work actor probably. Santa isn’t real.” Dahlia was crushed. When we arrived home after feeding Jesus pringles, Dahlia ran to her sister and yelled: “Jesus IS real, he is SO real! And he likes pringles. And so is Santa!” Yael rolled her eyes and stomped away. “Don’t kill her joy,” I said to her retreating back.

The next day Dahlia carefully placed a whole lunch bag, with two cups of Pringles in it, at Jesus’ feet and tried to put the mismatched gloves we had found on his tiny hands. Her innocent and whimsical take on Christmas has cracked open the door to the holiday for me. I wrinkled my nose at the “Chanukah bush” Dahlia requested and have not accepted the Christmas invites we have received over the years. Feeding Jesus, though, makes her laugh, and I live to make my daughter laugh. Here, finally, is a Christmas activity I can get behind. Maybe, after all these years, I have found my own version of the Christmas spirit.

I played with the phone cord in my hand as I sat in a hotel room in Chiang Mai on a lumpy red bedspread. The steamy heat made my shirt stick to my back. What would it have taken to tell my father that I hated that dog? I definitely didn’t want to leave Thailand early to go home to bury him.

A year earlier I had left a home ruptured by divorce. I was a senior in high school when my parents separated. So bitter was the split that it forced me to choose sides. Desperate to please my father, I chose to live with him. For the most part, he left me to my own devices that year, and I took advantage—hosting parties when he was out of town, staying out late, often skipping school. I told myself I was happy being unsupervised. But by the time most of my classmates were heading off to college, I felt unmoored, as if the ground beneath me had turned to quicksand.

I knew I had something to figure out, but I didn’t know what it was. So, I deferred college, stayed in my father’s house, and began looking for whatever it was I had lost.

More than thirty years later, I sat at my dining room table with my teenage daughter, only a few years younger than I had been when my parents separated. She asked me about that year—a year that I had somehow left out of the stories I had told her about my life.

The year had begun with a job as a teacher’s assistant in a preschool for abused children. The place was poorly run, with teachers routinely quitting. I would often walk home from the school dazed by what I had learned of the children’s stories, missing turns I knew by heart. One day a silken-haired child named Colt overturned the fish bowl and ground out one of the fish’s eyes with a pencil. As he stood menacingly with the pencil in his tiny hand, the stench of wet and something rotten in the air, kids and teachers screaming, I collected him in my arms and rocked him until his heaving sobs subsided.

“That sounds dangerous.” My daughter’s eyes shone as I described those months at the daycare. She seemed surprised. As the memories came flooding back, so was I.

“Were you ok?” she asked.

Was I? No one had bothered to ask me that year. My father didn’t notice my silent retreat any more than he had noticed my acting out the year before.

Eventually, after I got pneumonia twice, and a concussion after one of the kids hit me with a metal Tonka truck, I quit and planned an escape to Europe with my best friend. We bought Rick Steves brand backpacks from REI and headed off. After a short stint in Italy, we ended up in Turkey, where a group of guys offered to let us join their group to travel to the south.

“What would you say if I told you I met some random guys and decided to travel with them in a country where I didn’t speak the language?” my daughter asked, dumbstruck. Come to think of it, it did sound crazy.

“I… ended up getting really sick in Turkey,” I continued. “The guys we were traveling with saved my life because the rural hospital we had gone to an hour outside Antalya was making me worse. They helped us go to London to get medical care.”

“But why were you in Turkey at all? And why did you get sick?”

Under my daughter’s persistent questioning, images came floating into my mind’s eye—memories of the scary, barren hospital room, the deliriousness after a bad case of food poisoning gave me a kidney infection, the guys storming into the hospital amidst shouting, and ushering me out in my thin hospital gown.

And then I remembered that the same guys had performed another rescue only the week before when they’d overheard a hotel owner discussing a plan to sneak into the hotel room I was sharing with my friend and rape us. We left in the middle of the night, after the guys broke into the hotel office to retrieve our passports.

“You decided to travel with random guys, you got really sick and then went to London to be hospitalized? What? I can’t believe you did all that!” This was not the mother she knew.
She almost seemed impressed.

In London I was admitted to the hospital with a 106 fever, and remained there for almost three weeks. I’m pretty sure if either of my kids even sprained a wrist I wouldn’t let them be alone in a hospital. But neither of my parents came.

In my last week at the hospital, an elderly third cousin in London, a Holocaust survivor, offered to take me in. I think she was lonely, living in her drafty apartment near Hampstead heath. I took her up on it. We took long, brisk walks every morning while she told me stories I had never heard about my family in Germany, and I regained my strength after my hospital stay. Like my grandfather, also a Holocaust survivor, she wouldn’t let me throw away tea bags. They accumulated in a lumpy pile on the sink, trailing runny, brown stains down the sides.

“You lived with an old woman you just met?” my daughter gaped at me in amazement.

It was true, I explained, puzzled myself. Yet in some ways she felt more familiar than my own parents in their new post-split lives. What was I doing? I had no idea; I just knew I wasn’t ready to go home. On impulse one day, as I walked by a Domino’s pizza, I applied for a job. They hired me on the spot. I spent the next month rolling dough in a windowless back room with Senegalese immigrants, who told me harrowing stories of their escape and immigration over cheap beer in a local pub.

Newly flush with money, I decided to go to Thailand, motivated by a vague idea of going somewhere as unfamiliar and mysterious as possible. On my last day, my relative gave me a locket I still have with a picture of herself at around the age my daughter is now. She also packed me a Nutella sandwich for the airplane.

A few days later, I found myself wandering through Bangkok accompanied by a piercing loneliness. One night I narrowly avoided being hit by a car as I crossed the street and afterward, shaking, I wondered who would have identified me. Still, I did not want to leave. Thoughts of home brought little solace.

“Why did you hate Gingi?” my daughter asked, bringing the conversation back to the hapless dog.

I hated Gingi, I explained, because he had my father’s affection without needing to work for it. My father was devoted to that dog in a way he had never been devoted as a parent. But now he had asked me to come home and, even after all I’d been through, such a summons was more than I could refuse. I flew back to Seattle, buried my father’s dog under a light rain, and packed for college.

Looking back on that year though my daughter’s eyes, I ask myself: What was I looking for? Why did I court danger: run towards trauma—my own and others? If I was trying to ignite my parents’ concern, I failed. But perhaps it was more than that. Everything I thought I had known about where I belonged wasn’t true anymore; maybe I was seeking proof that I did not need my parents to find my way. In foreign places, taking risks I had no business taking, stepping into a different kind of unknown than the fractured landscape that awaited me at home, I was repeatedly rescued by strangers. They reminded me that safety is far more complex than being free of physical harm or danger.

I lost touch long ago with the brash, courageous guys who rescued us, but I wish I could thank them for saving me, not just by warding off rapists and incompetent doctors. The hospital in London treated me for 3 weeks and when it came time for payment and I was broke, they let me just walk away. My third cousin whom I had never met visited me in the hospital almost daily, then took me in for a month. The camaraderie and joy I found with my African pizza-making friends buoyed me at a time I desperately needed it. The warmth of people I met in Thailand made a deep and lasting impression. Returning to Seattle, a flight attendant gave me tissues and rubbed my back as I inexplicably started sobbing as we landed.

“You know what that year was really about?” I turned to my wide-eyed daughter, smiling. “I think all those wild chances I took? I think that surviving them weirdly made me feel safe again.”

“You won’t even let me take the subway after 8, “ she answered dryly.

“Well,” I said, “I wouldn’t say it was the ideal way to grow up. But maybe I’ll have to rethink the subway thing.”

The missing year in the story that I told about my life—describing it to my daughter made me realize how formative it had been. What I learned was that belonging doesn’t reside in a place, a family, or a set of beliefs. It is something that is alive, that travels with you, and you never know who will help you find it.

The door slammed hard in my face and I slumped against it. This wasn’t the first time a conversation with my 14-year-old daughter about leaving dirty dishes on her bedroom floor erupted into screams. When Covid-19 hit NYC and we relocated to our house upstate, our formerly close relationship unraveled. Our contact became stilted and tentative on the best days, explosive on the worst. She was exasperated by everything I said. At a particularly low point she didn’t come out of her room for 12 hours. (I used a screwdriver to pick the lock and peek in on her when she was asleep). We may have escaped the storm engulfing the city, but it was clear there was no avoiding the one we had precipitated under our own roof. For the first time in our relationship, I was at a loss.

Deep down we all carry the versions of ourselves we learned as children. Mine was: you’re not good enough as you are. One withering look of disdain or mere mention of disappointment from my father was enough to send me into spirals of shame.  I grew skilled at finding ways to please him, but in the process lost the ability to please myself. It was not until much later that I learned the importance of being known-to myself and others–as I truly am.

By contrast, my identity as a parent to my first daughter came smoothly. I was determined from the outset that her needs would come first, and our bond made that easy.

We were that irritating unicorn mother-daughter duo–the ones giggling in the grocery store and sharing inside jokes. I knew how to soothe her. We got each other’s humor. When there was a Gilmore Girls pop-up in Park Slope we woke at 5 am and waited in line for two hours to sit at a replica of Luke’s diner, pretending to be Rory and Lorelai. We snickered when someone sitting next to us marveled, “You guys have the dialogue memorized?”

I learned Tik-Tok dances and hosted sleepovers. Far longer than might have seemed appropriate, she wanted me to sing her to sleep. Over the course of yearly trips to Burma, she developed an intense friendship with a former political prisoner, a dear friend, who taught her art while I was conducting trauma trainings. Once, he caught me off-guard: “You know she might not always want to come here?” he said. It was the first time it began to occur to me that she might one day choose her own path, even foregoing these beloved trips to Burma, over the one we shared.

Eyes flashing, she snarled “You don’t understand me, and you never did!” The explosion came after I had suggested she sit at a desk during online school rather than in the dark corner of her bed. She knew how much those words would hurt.

One day, the first time she had left the house in days, much less showered, we passed by a swan in a lake, her neck improbably high and elegant as she floated by. Absently, I commented on her beauty.

“Swans, seriously, swans? You think I want to look at a swan? You are so clueless. You  disgust me.” She charged ahead.

Back at the house, we faced off.

“Now what, where do we go from here?” Even as I asked the question, I knew she had no answer. Wearing a Harry Styles sweatshirt two sizes too big, her dark brown eyes heavily lined in black, she flashed a look of disdain and stormed off, slamming her bedroom door behind her. This was no ordinary teenage temper tantrum, even in the time of Covid.

The next day, I was scrolling through Facebook when I landed in my neighborhood chapter of “Buy Nothing,” a national group based on sharing what is already owned rather than owning more. Typical pre-Covid requests included a pirate costume in need of a sword, a specific French board game, a seatbelt extender, or marshmallows (made urgently at 9pm by a member about to make Rice Krispy treats). As the pandemic wore on, posts displaying the group’s interconnectedness began appearing: A free pumpkin pie because “maybe someone needs one?” Legal advice to a woman who’d inquired about a divorce lawyer. A woman proudly showing off the blanket she’d knit using “buy nothing” wool, and free beer from someone who had received a homebrewing kit from the group. One particularly poignant post came from a woman who had requested a carpet to fend off a neighbor’s noise. Not only did she receive multiple rugs, but also noise-canceling headphones. Later, she disclosed that the group’s gifts had helped her better manage her PTSD.

The moments of kindness on Buy Nothing became a counterpoint to a world that felt increasingly small, fragile, and self-absorbed. I spent my days slogging through my patients’ worries, my children’s online school, the tedium of wiping down groceries and finding toilet paper. After my fifth colleague died of Covid, someone offered a brand-new vibrator to the group with the caption: “self-care takes all forms during a crisis.” After I’d attended yet another Zoom funeral, someone offered their apartment to a stranger who was a first responder. After an extremely hard day during which a patient, an ER doctor, had broken down describing the horror he was witnessing, someone asked for help clearing out the room of the baby she had just lost. The group offered her comfort, solace, and concrete help.

As the true horror of Covid descended upon us, we reached a kind of unspoken consensus that what we all needed was one place where people were nothing but kind. Times had changed, and so had the group. Noticing this change helped me understand something about my daughter. We had to become something new, too.

Underneath our closeness there had probably always been a cold fear lurking based on my own experiences as a child. Growing up, my father’s needs defined my identity. I checked out books from the library on how to excel at Scrabble because I knew it would impress him, the Scrabble champion.  I’d wake up hours before everyone to study in order to make sure I got good grades. My coach cut me from the track team because I chose to attend my dad’s college reunion rather than the important state meet. My mother told me it was a mistake. I didn’t listen.

Realizing that pleasing my father would never actually make me happy was a punch to the gut, but one I finally accepted. After two years of deferring, I decided against going to law school. “But that’s what you always wanted,” my father snarled, before adding the coup de grace: “I’m so disappointed.”

At the time it didn’t occur to me that he hadn’t bothered to ask me “Why?” Nor could I, in my shame, ask him why he cared so much. Choosing an indeterminate path over the security of law school was the most rebellious thing I had ever done. It took many years of therapy to untangle what this meant, and even longer to find my way to an identity on my own terms. Then I became a parent and endeavored to create a new story.

All this time, I had thought that by encouraging my daughter to express her depression, anger, doubts, and fears, I was offering her an alternative to my own experience. I felt so connected to her whenever we had an argument and worked it through or sat up late under the covers while she cried. I felt I understood her. I went out of my way to not express disappointment. What I didn’t see was that I had simply exchanged one identity for another: the dutiful daughter had become the hovering mother. My need for my father’s approval had transformed into a greed for closeness with my daughter. Somewhere along the way, my connection to my daughter had become more for me than for her.

It began to dawn on me that my daughter’s anger wasn’t the problem, it was my own need to save her from a fate from which I had only barely saved myself. But her fate was her own to discover, not mine to bestow. Unsurprisingly, my expectations were just as oppressive to her as my father’s had been to me. Unlike me, she wasn’t going to submit to them so easily.

“I’m trying—I am trying to understand you,” I told her one day as I sat at the foot of her bed, careful not to make eye contact.

“I just don’t want you to know me anymore,” she responded. “ I don’t even know myself!” She was right.

A day after Thanksgiving, I posted on the Buy Nothing group asking for a turkey wishbone. For years my mom would save the wishbone for my daughter, and they would delight in the ritual. Someone responded, and, after a contactless pickup, I walked the wishbone home, carefully wrapped in a paper towel.

As I unwrapped it, I was prepared for my daughter to scoff.

Unexpectedly, she lit up. “I want to make a wish,” she said.

“Hold on tightly.” She pulled on the wishbone and it separated. Our eyes met, and I let go.