For Hanukkah, we light two menorahs. One is a minimalist silver piece that looks like a metal picket fence. My husband’s mother gifted it to him when he was in college, I’m pretty sure. I was around and I remember him receiving it, but after a while, the years all begin to jumble together in your mind like a clump of poorly stored necklaces, all the chains twisted together, painstaking to separate. The point is, this menorah is pretty old and covered in now two decades' worth of candle wax because we are terrible about cleaning our menorahs at the end of the holiday and the next year we dig out just enough dried wax to be able to insert new candles. But its age is nothing compared to our other menorah, gifted by my mother-in-law to my son on his first Hanukkah. Or passed down, I should say, as it is nearly forty years old and was used by my husband and his siblings when they were children. It is a Sesame Street menorah, made of nine individual candle holders that you can line up in any order you choose: four Oscar The Grouch; two Big Bird; two Grover; and one Cookie Monster. These Muppets have seen better days. They are chipped and peeling in spots, each one covered in a film of wax that has distorted their smiles into grimaces. Cookie Monster’s head appears sunken in, as though he has been beaten repeatedly with a baseball bat. There is something desperate and pleading about Big Bird’s eyes. It is truly one of the ugliest menorahs you’ll encounter and my son loves it.
Last night, for the first night of Hanukkah, he took charge of setting up the Sesame Street menorah. He helped prepare the latkes. He helped set the table. He lit the candles himself for the first time ever. He is getting so big, which is delightful and heartbreaking in equal measure. I am overwhelmed by that bizarre parental feeling of wanting to literally squeeze your child to death because you love them so much. But I get by just kissing the top of his head and breathing him in for as long as he’ll still let me.
He decided that Grover should hold the shamash candle, the helper candle, the candle you use to light all the others. “He seems like he would be the most helpful,” he explained, an opinion based on an extremely limited knowledge of Sesame Street and yet somehow surprisingly accurate for this group—Oscar too grouchy, Cookie too chaotic, Big Bird too childlike despite his towering height.
I do not operate from any specific framework or philosophy when parenting. I learned quickly to let go of any expectations about myself as a parent or my son as a person and to instead leave plenty of space for us each to grow and change, to learn from each other, and get better over time. But if I do have one hope for my son, one goal that guides the way I interact with him, it’s that he will maintain as much of his current sweetness as possible as he grows. Though he is naturally very loving and tender, there was a brief period when he was four years old when he started saying “I will hurt you if you say that to me,” anytime I said something he didn’t like. It was an empty threat—he never actually tried to hurt me, never hit anyone, always burst into tears himself if he even accidentally caused someone else pain—but still, it really bothered me because I couldn’t help but picture him as a grown man, rising to anger whenever someone pointed out his failings, questioned his behavior, or even slightly bruised his ego. The kind of man that unfortunately never seems to be in short supply.
I sat him down, this sweet-faced four-year-old caught halfway between a pudgy toddler and a lanky little boy, and told him that he needed to stop threatening to hurt me when he felt mad. “Right now you are a little boy,” I said, “but someday you’ll be a big boy and after that a grown-up man, and when big boys and grown-up men threaten to hurt people, even if they don’t actually mean it, it can be really scary.” He asked me why and I told him because a lot of men do hurt people, they hurt women and children and even animals. They get angry and instead of finding better ways to deal with their anger, they hurt someone else. “So it can be scary,” I told him, “especially if you’re a woman and a man threatens you because you worry that maybe he really will hurt you.” He then asked me if men had ever made me scared and I told him honestly, yes. Many times. He took it all in. Said he would stop. And he did. We brainstormed some other ways for him to respond when he felt mad at me, and he changed his behavior, not gradually like I expected would happen, but immediately. The threats stopped right away.
I don’t know if this conversation would be considered good or bad parenting, and I don’t care. All I know is that I’m raising one boy and I have another on the way and I believe that young boys have an outsized responsibility to learn how to manage their anger and frustration in ways that don’t place anyone else in even perceived harm, much less real harm. Sorry boys of today, you must carry the burden of making up for the men of the past.
At nearly 7 months along, I am visibly pregnant and frequently get asked if I know if I’m having a boy or a girl. We didn’t find out with our first. After 49 hours of labor, when the baby finally emerged, my husband and I were both so exhausted and dazed that I don’t think it occurred to either of us that we were still waiting on that piece of information. The midwife had to remind my husband that he had requested to be the one to announce and, momentarily stunned, he looked down, said, “oh, a boy,” and then they quickly whisked the baby away because he was blue and not really breathing at the moment. I found out early this time because I was horrifically anxious during my first trimester, as a result of a thyroid imbalance it turned out (I’m fine), and I needed something concrete to hold on to, any little piece of information about this soon-to-be-person that could anchor me to reality. That and we wanted to be able to tell our son if he was curious, which it turned out he was not really, though now he talks frequently about his little brother coming, and damn if it isn’t heartwarmingly adorable. But now when people ask and I tell them I’m having another boy I can see something cross their faces, a moment where they need to recalibrate their immediate reaction, a brief feeling of sadness for me. “Oh well that will be fun,” they’ll say. Or some will actually ask me how I feel about that, wanting to gauge my response to this news before offering their own. I find this the most irritating, to be honest. How should I feel? And what’s it to you? I get the sense that mothers are supposed to want girls and fathers are supposed to want boys and that getting one of each is like winning the two-child household jackpot. In truth, I don’t really care. If I were having a girl that would be fine. But I’m having a boy and that’s fine too. Either way, I am raising someone who has to learn how to be a person in all the beautiful, ugly, painful, joyous, and complex ways in which we exist in the world. Either way, I will come to the end of another year and I will think, I did some things well and I did some things poorly, and a new year will begin with its own successes and failures awaiting me.
When I came downstairs after putting my son to bed last night, the Hanukkah candles had already burned out, which was too bad because I like to witness the moment when the flame fades to a thin wisp of smoke. Tonight we will only light the silver menorah because we don’t have enough candles to light both on all eight nights, so we are saving up what we do have to use both menorahs on the last night when all candles are lit and the light is the brightest. The last night of Hanukkah is on Christmas this year. We will spend the morning celebrating Christmas with my family and then we will return home to watch movies and order Chinese food. When it gets dark, we will FaceTime my in-laws and light the menorah and my son will open one last gift from his grandparents, and then all that is left of the holidays will be the candles burning brightly on our windowsill. As the flames slowly fade, the wax will drip down over the faces of Oscar and Big Bird, Cookie Monster, and Grover leaving them worse for wear but still going strong after another year of use. In the morning, I will think maybe I should try to clean them off before I box them up and put the menorahs back on the shelf, but I know that in the end, I won’t bother. We’ll pull them down next year, the four of us this time, and they’ll still be covered in this year’s wax, this year’s mess and we’ll once again dig out just enough to get the new candles to fit. Just enough to start again.
To accompany this post, here is an itty bitty unpublished poem I wrote a couple years ago.
