From my Table: Caramelized Toffee Kichel

I’m not the kind of mother who functions well on no sleep, so when I’m up late, all I can think of is the kind of self-restraint I’ll need in the morning. But at the same time, it was important to me to take a few minutes for my son to have something special to wake up to in the morning. He’s only been talking about his birthday for the past six months.

I peeled out of bed and pulled something together, and all I could think about was the challenge of weighing two things of relatively equal importance at the same time.

This challenge presents itself often around Yom Tov time. We want things to look a certain way, to be a certain way, to be ready by a certain time, yet we also have to function in other ways, and sometimes our two wants contradict each other. While I don’t have an answer to this game of tug-of-war, what has helped me is to try to lower the bar. To make the “want” easier to fulfill. The conflict doesn’t go away, but at least I can try to control it.

This cooking and cleaning season will have lots of wants that we hold at the same time, but if we take out the guilt and consider the scaled-down version of what’s important, we can rise to the challenge.