A Real Yom Tov

I’ll always remember that Pesach as The Year We Skipped Shefoch Chamas’cha. And also as The Year I Found My Mother Crying in the Kitchen.

We had been married for eight years, we had four kids, and we had yet to make our own Pesach or Succos. Not because I didn’t want to, mind you — I would have been thrilled to make Yom Tov myself. But my husband Ari felt that as long as his parents and mine wanted us to spend Yom Tov with them, we should make the effort, even if it was hard for us.

And it was hard. In my parents’ house, there was one bedroom for our family of six; our older kids slept on mattresses in the playroom. We were a bunch of married couples, plus a few younger siblings, all of us sharing one bathroom, and the crowding was a challenge each time anew. When you spend two or three days of Yom Tov in close quarters, it’s hard to stay on good terms with the people you love.

Plus, my mother was often overwhelmed — by the nonstop cooking, by the noise, by the mess. I felt constant pressure to be on top of the kids and make sure they weren’t waking someone up, or spilling their drinks on the floor, or fighting with their cousins. I also felt obligated to help my mother prepare, serve, and clean up — which meant that I couldn’t be supervising my kids at the same time. So I felt stuck between a rock and a hard place. Ari was good about watching the kids, but what ended up happening was that the two of us never had privacy or time together.