An actual post

It's just after midnight, so it's Friday morning now, officially. I can't sleep. The apartment is dark, and I can hear three sets of gentle snores behind me--the baby, the husband, and the cat, in a snuffly sort of harmony.

I thought of a number of things this week that I wanted to blog about, and didn't, mainly for lack of time. I thought of blogging about the internet, and blogs, and what a difference a blog would have made to my life in high school, and how computers must now be completely rewriting the social landscape of adolescence. If I were still in grad school, it would be something genuinely dissertation-worthy. (Unlike the topic of my actual abortive dissertation, still in limbo on the laptop that was stolen from my apartment in 2001. The dissertation is dead, long live the dissertation.)

I also thought about blogging about the title of this new incarnation of my blog, which is an attempt to convey the strangeness and surprise of my life--in most ways a good, positive, happy surprise, but still generative of substantial number of moments. Moments that don't come with an adjective. Moments when you stop in the middle of what you're doing and wonder when the stage manager will yell "cut," or when the person who's actually living this life, who you're just filling in for while she's out on leave, will get back to take over. Moments. You know. Moments like that.

Instead, I think I feel moved to talk about identity and the nature thereof. [And since it's my blog, I can talk about anything I want. So there.] I started thinking about this while writing my post on the Amish/Jewish family... about how all of those tiny little markers of dress, the way you tie your headscarf, whether you wear suspenders or a belt, the buttons on your jacket, the freedom with with you chat with strangers of the opposite sex--all of those, in the right context, can carry the weight of so much meaning, so much identity. Within the spectrum of Jewish observance, the minutiae of dress can take on so much importance, rightly or (mostly, in my opinion) wrongly--whether there's a slit in your skirt, how much hair your show under your hat or whether you wear a wig instead of a hat, what kind of a wig or what kind of a hat, where the headband sits, the length of your sleeves, how you dress your children of what age, what color your shirt or suit or kippah is--all of that.

I was thinking about this again last night, while reading Renegade Rebbetzin's blog--which I've been reading, off and on, for a while. She's got a post on there about the word rebbetzin, and what it means in various contexts to various people. I myself, oddly enough, am a rebbetzin, for all practical purposes. (About those bechinas... shhh. He'll pass them soon, really.) My husband teaches religious subjects in a yeshiva. His students call him Rabbi, or, occasionally, since he's their teacher, rebbe. This makes me, his wife, a rebbetzin.

Now, something I should point out here. My husband is identifiably, visibly, Jewish and religious. Most of the time, while out of the house at least, he wears a white shirt, black suit, black kippa. The works. He has a beard, he has glasses, he has a very respectable-looking nose, he has tzitzis outside his clothes. I, on the other hand, am not so easy to spot, unless you know what you're looking for--if you know what the hat, and the sleeve length, and that kind of thing mean. My husband lives almost entirely within the Jewish community--he works at a Jewish school, goes to synagogues at least once and often more times a day to pray or learn, does most of whatever shopping he does in Jewish places of business. I, on the other hand, work in a secular office, have no Jewish co-workers, take the bus twice daily with almost all non-Jewish passengers, bring my son to a non-Jewish daycare, and generally am out in the world much more. Most of the time, nobody calls me rebbetzin or even Mrs. I'm by my first name, or nothing, and I could be anybody. I'm certainly nobody who gets any unusual degree of respect for being, uh, extra-specially holy or anything.

Maybe that's why the moment I had last winter, at the Chanuka party we had for my husband's students, struck me so utterly. I hadn't met any of his students yet, though I'd heard about them. I am uncomfortable with most teenagers (fallout from how I felt about them when I was one myself), so stayed in the kitchen most of the time, frying latkes and moving them out into the living room. The boys were very polite, cleaning up after themselves, asking for paper towels when one of them spilled some soda. Clearly on their best behavior, all of them. They were all busy with each other and my husband, and I didn't have much to say to them, so smiled and hid. And they ate latkes. And ate and ate and ate. And after a little while, one of them popped his skullcapped head through the doorway and exulted, "Rebbetzin, these latkes are AMAZING!"

Now, I must admit, I do make rather fabulous latkes. But that's not my point. My point is, that if anyone had asked me, fifteen years ago, to rank the likelihood of ever hearing this sentence addressed to me, I probably would have placed it somewhere between, "Repeat after me: On my honor, I solemnly swear to uphold and protect the Constitution of the United States" and "We are pleased to offer you the part of the Sugarplum Fairy." Just completely, randomly, impossible. Like winning the lottery, failing a spelling test, pleasing my mother, getting a tattoo, becoming a homeless cocaine addict. Not even positive or negative, an aspiration or a fear--just not something that would, could, ever be applied to me.

And now I am the rebbetzin. Latkes and all. It's taking some getting used to. It's not what I ever expected. Truthfully, it's a lot better.

And with that out of my system, it's time for bed.