Alone Together

One effect of the virus that’s kept us all home is that our perspectives have so quickly and drastically shifted on so many of the “regular” things that frame our lives.

• Family members have been sharing with me some recently-circulating Mommy jokes, like this one: And just like that, no one ever again asked a stay-at-home mom what she does all day. And this one: Mother overheard saying, “I’ve really got to get to sleep…tomorrow’s another week.”

If there’s newfound appreciation for one of the world’s most complex and important occupations – being a mother to young kids — it’s not just because people are getting to see and experience first-hand what mothers do every day of the year. It’s also because jobs without big salaries and prestigious titles are devalued out in the “real” world. Until something cataclysmic happens that puts all that money and prestige in perspective, and we realize the world inside the home is where most of the stuff that really matters happens. Let’s hope this lesson, like so many others being painfully learned, sticks for the long run.

• I was at a family chasunah the other week on a back porch, and it’s beauty was in its simplicity. Without all the ritzy, glitzy trappings getting in the way, people were able to focus on what was actually taking place, the founding of a new outpost of hashra’as haShechinah in Klal Yisrael.

Of course, it was understandably emotional, too; a chassan and kallah, after all, wait for this day for so many years, and this isn’t how they imagined it. Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about how many young women we all know who’ve also been waiting many years, sometimes just for a date, let alone a wedding date. They’d give anything right now to be a kallah under a chuppah, anywhere. At Terrace on the Park, or just in a park.

To get a sense of how far we’ve come so fast, just today a rav told me of another recent backyard wedding he attended where the grandfather brought a few live chickens to roam around free during the chuppah, just to give it the flavor of a wedding back in the shtetl in the Old Country. And from what I’m told, not one person present cried fowl.