hodayot [thanksgivings] for today

8:40
My Body, my Partner, my God
I give thanks to you for already having carried out
so many "Handgriffe und Fusstritte",
which is such a handy term in German, missing in Hebrew & English,
for the daily things, which my fingers and hands, my legs and feet
accomplish,
so as to full-fill all the routine operations, which "keep me going".

10:20 I am grate-full for the song about little Moses on the waves,
which I learnt, because Mika wanted to see- hear it over and over again.

I am even more grate-full for the new lyrics,
which created themselves while swimming~swirling in the pool,
words which contain the lesson of Riding~~~Retreating with the Waves.

Finetuning to my Present

When we came close, E. screamed: "Hurry up! We want to go home!"
And I, who only recently reported here about my "hurrying-up-pattern",
"chose" exactly this delicate situation to NOT hurry up.
Ayelet, who had hardly related to me during our togetherness on the beach,
suddenly drew my attention to something, which was behind us.
I turned my head and though I walked on, this seemed to E., that as if I defied her.
She screamed two more times: "Hurry up!"
"This did it for me", as one says in English,
when the triggering has become too much.
I did the rare thing - in general, and certainly towards E. - and screamed!
"You stop pouring out your anger on me. You stop NOW!"

I had nothing to pack, asked if I could carry something
and started to leave for the car..
Somehow I found myself suddenly alone with E.
My pattern "thought", I should take advantage of the "intimacy"
and tidy up the situation between us rightaway.
Of course, only more anger came out from both of us,
and what was worse,
Micha and his kids, whom we failed to see, became witnesses.
I had said Good Bye only to Arnon, not to Micha and Ayelet.
Suddenly Micha called us from a distance of 10 m:
"Good Bye! And go on quarreling, it's alright!"

That was the last thing I wanted to happen.
Some people in my family cannot understand,
how mother-in-love and daughter-in-love can live together as we do.
'He may misinterpret this rare quarrel as something that characterizes our relationship', the shame in me said.

"There you are " , a voice said on the inside:
"you still care for being considered righteous,
you still are afraid of being judged as bad or of being bad.
Is this truly an issue - considering what is really at stake?"

While we sat in the car, I coped with this shame
and I could indeed let go of my "righteousness".

But there was a new challenge.
Everybody including Mika insisted to stop at a road restaurant.
I only wanted to go home, shower and rest Body and Feeling.
The discussion was on an easy level
and it seemed, that the "quarrel" was done with.
We drove into the place they had in mind,
and after I came back from having dressed,
I found E. in a good mood, telling me from afar:
"We'll go somewhere else, it's much too crowded here."
So I told her about my "shame-parade":

"I didn't know that we would go to a restaurant,
I had changed only the upper part of my bathing-suit, not the lower part.
In order to change, I had to walk through all those people to find a toilet.
Though I was told, where it was, I couldn't discern any door there.
I met I. and told him so in despair, he came with me and pointed to it:
The door looked like part of the wooden wall, with nothing written on it,
and to pass through it I had to pass the edge of the table where people ate."
She laughed, and I laughed too.
But the experience was very similar to the kinds of shame-dreams
I had so often in my (former) life:
being naked or half naked , peeing, shitting among people etc.


On our search for a restaurant we also passed through Ramla,
"a town in which I never was", said E., "have you been here ever?"
I told the funny story:
"Yes, when we started to work on my bus,
in a village nearby, January 1985.
One day Itzik, who worked on the electrical system, missed a part.
To not loose time, he gave me the keys of his car.
So I drove an unfamiliar car to an unfamiliar place
to buy an unfamiliar part,
and I succeeded with all three!"
"Are there Arabs in this town?"
"Yes, in 1948 there were mostly Arabs here.
And the commander Yigal Alon, a man whom I later came to appreciate,
gave the order "to evict as many Arabs as possible", from Lod and Ramla."
"It seems to be a terribly neglected town, how can anybody live here?"
"Yes..."

Chatting like this we came near Modi'in.
Unfortunately Immanuel gave us the choice between "Aladin" and "Greenhouse".
T., who was most eager to go to a restaurant,
since he disliked most of the fantastic food his father chef had prepared at home,
couldn't make up his mind, and I kept silent.
Later I regretted that: 'If I had chosen Aladin, maybe...'
Finally Immanuel said: "I'll take the decision: Greenhouse".
The advantage of the place is the little pond and waterfall with bamboo clusters,
which create a calming atmosphere.
BUT - two things disrupted it.
One: T. didn't like what he had ordered and said:
"Abba, we should have gone to Aladin."
This was too much for both Immanuel and E. and they got down on him.
Two: There was no table for the five of us and T. sat alone.
Here my pattern of "identification with the oppressed" came in again,
I projected it on T. that he probably felt left out,
and said: "It bothers me that T. sits behind us."
This time it was me who got on I.'s and E.'s nerves,
the more so as T. didn't seem to identify with my feeling bothered for his sake.

This "it bothers me, that T. ..." was the beginning of the deterioration which followed
when we came home.
It started with T's egotistic statement:
"I'm the first to use the shower".
I. took Nella out and when he came back, T. was still showering.
Of course, his father expressed his anger, and I would have done the same.
In fact, I had a "chance" to do so soon after.
I showered shortly and in order to free the shower for Efrat&Mika,
I put a towel around my body, took my clothes and went to dress in my room.
But there was T.!
He sat at the computer, though he is not allowed to do that.
I said gently: "Please let me have my room for dressing and resting a little!"
It was a situation which brought out in T. what makes everybody mad!
"You can dress in the bathroom!"
"Please get up, I also want to rest a little, I told you."
"In another 5 minutes!"
I felt my anger raising and did not want to risk another eruption.
It had been bad enough with E. there at the beach.
So I succumbed and went to the bathroom to dress.
When I came back, he had moved to his father's computer.
He wasn't allowed to open this either without permission, but I did not intervene.

A bit later, when I had the chance to meet both Immanuel and E. in T's presence,
I said:
"I want to exclude an unnecessary problem once and for all:
is it still agreed, that whenever I am at Shoham, that room is my room,
and though I'm sorry that T. does not have his own room here,
I must insist, that he will not use this room nor the computer,
unless we've agreed on being in that room or on that computer together."

Of course, they reiterated that agreement,
but the problem was, that my very quest implied my denouncing T's behavior.
I, who so much wanted to win over E's love for her stepson,
I gave her another pretext for not-loving him...
No wonder, that T. by now was not the T. of yesterday, to say it softly.

By the way, after all the thinking I've been doing for 3 days now,
this "item" in my list of failures came to my consciousness only this minute.
And seeing clearly what I did, I find it ghastly!
My mind believed !!! that I wanted to avoid a reason for a clash with T.,
but underneath was anger, feeling humiliated by T. and the wish for revenge.
I could not handle this piece of my drama with T. alone!
I needed the intervention of "grownups".
like they need the intervention of a lawyer and maybe the Court.

On the other hand I wanted T. to be "normal" , cooperative.
"Do you want to go out with me again?"
"No!"
Usually he wants to show me songs on the Internet.
But now he didn't want anything from me.
E. saw my pattern and warned me:
"Let him alone, you are courting him again.
But not you need to court him, he needs to court you!"
I accepted this completely,
but I also heard myself saying
it is very difficult for me to part from somebody in anger
(T. - when his father drove him home- said, that he had nothing against me).

In other words:
I was maddening E. by being all the time concerned for T.
I. went to sleep and so did Immanuel.

I don't remember really what went wrong from then on.
There is a fog in my head.
I had a talk with I. and when this was completed I said:
Now I'll leave you with your son.
When will you take him home?
"We'll have coffee and then we'll go."
I see myself returning to my room,
but when time became too long and I wasn't called,
I imagined that I was "needed" and went to the veranda.
There I saw E. smoking, T. sitting on a chair doing nothing,
and my son - yes my son - was busying himself with a crossword puzzle.
I had never seen him doing this in all his 45 years,
and seeing him doing this now, while I thought he would be with T.
was unbearable for me and I voiced this - clad in a naive question:
"You are solving crossword puzzles??????"
(Later he told me, that he had tried to communicate with T. for half an hour,
and only when he simply couldn't get his cooperation for anything,
did he turn to the puzzle - instead to the computer, which would have been worse)

E. felt the sting in my question and began to defend Immanuel.
And what happened then?
There is - up to now - a total blackout in me.
Immanuel and Tomer left, while E. bathed Mika.
And the last thing I remember is,
that - while dressing Mika for the night -
terrible things came out of her mouth concerning the future of T.
I had heard things like that before but this time I couldn't take them.
"You are talking nonsense!" I screamed,
and she: "don't scream in the presence of Mika",
"who started to scream here!"
I had lost all control! why did I answer at all?
It was as if a civilized person fell back into the behavior of a monkey.
We stopped soon, but enough had been said.
And it makes me mad now (March 31, 23:21)
that I don't remember, what was the final trigger,
which caused this huge eruption of the volcano.

Immanuel came home, he felt that something had happened.
I only said: "We need to talk, the three of us."
He said: "Later".
But then I heard them talk in their open bed-room.
I came out of my room and stood in their door,
believing, that we should talk together, the three of us,
yet another error on my part.
Immanuel : "Let us talk alone".
After some time he came into my room:
"She does not want to talk, not together with you and not even with me."
So we sat on my bed opposite each other.
He started with what I noted already:
"your pattern - trying to solve things "NOW"
instead of waiting until the situation will be right
for solving and correcting things."
I said, that everything started with my sentence in the morning,
and that I still wasn't sure, if it had been wrong to say it.
"Totally wrong, absolutely wrong!" he exclaimed,
and he convinced me by pointing out two opposing feelings of E. which I triggered.
I cannot report those here.
He on his part understood better,
why it is an "impossible mission" to never intervene for T.'s sake.
I don't do it in 100 cases, when it is for T. only,
but when I feel, that my perspective could help to bridge gaps ...
"It will not help! It will only make things worse,
and also, what you feel for T., is often your projection."
Etc. - we parted for the night - a night of unhappiness for all of us.

As agreed with him, I went through the morning routine as usual,
taking Nella out, paying attention to Mika, being present.
Mika was very sweet (which she often isn't after waking up),
we had some cute interactions and when her mother took her to the door,
she pointed to my cup on the table: "Drink your coffee!"
I accompanied them to the elevator as usual, singing as usual:
"shalom, shalom, lehitraot"

Another 20 min. lesson in sound-editing, for which I had asked before,
and off we were, - walking the 7 min. to E's office to take the car
and I. , on his way to an appointment with what had been the family therapist,
but was now only his personal therapist - brought me to the airport station.
I asked him, how he felt, and gave him a chance to express this.
I also asked him what he felt towards me and he stressed;
"no hard feelings, neither now, nor yesterday"
and he let me know, that he envied me a bit for being able to go into my solitude
and cope there - "alone."

you are so rich and pure and wide

like an awakening garden