Such was the case with my mother-in-law and me. We were so very different: She was an intelligent, proud, strong-willed woman who kept her home as spotless as a museum and believed that children should mostly be seen and not heard. I was an easygoing American who got married straight out of graduate-student life, where housekeeping was little more than a pesky footnote to the more compelling business of reading, writing, and teaching; I’d been raised with a permissive American approach to childrearing.
But four years after my marriage, my in-laws decided to spend the month of Tishrei with us, and suddenly my mother-in-law and I found ourselves spending long hours in the kitchen together preparing meals for the chagim.
My in-laws traveled from Israel to Brooklyn on the heels of a family tragedy: My brother-in-law Jo had passed away at age 43, after suffering for years from a chronic illness. At the time, I was a week overdue with my third child.
With a baby imminent, my husband couldn’t go sit shivah with his family in Israel, so he sat at home, a sad and lonely affair. (I still remember struggling to get out of bed at 6:30 a.m. to waddle to the corner to buy bagels, cream cheese, and orange juice for the men who showed up for the morning minyan; Sephardim, unlike Ashkenazim, make a point of eating in a shivah house so they can make brachos l’ilui nishmas the niftar.)
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