Expanding My Mind . . . or Makeup

Between Ma and I, I used to be a Sephora VIB Rouge member (that meant I spent a small fortune during their sales). But hey, I was unmarried and had few hobbies. Plus Ma really liked the Algenist eye serum. 

With marriage, Ben's arrival, and COVID, my makeup spending shrank to . . . nothing. I had stockpiles of makeup to last me through. 

I stopped researching products. I stopped researching application methods. I was focused on other things now, like sleep. 

But as COVID masks came off, and family simchas began again, I started to feel the loss. I still loved makeup. I still wanted to wear it. But I felt a little . . . outdated. 

I've always believed that you can't get complacent. If you don't learn anything new, you regress into ignorance. The new TorahAnytime app has been a delight. My phone is chock full of bookmarked recipes that sometimes work, but mostly don't. I don't mind the failures. I exult in the new discoveries.

My under eye lining, for instance, is in sad need of improvement. I like a nice swath of black liner along my lower lash. But because I need like ten layers of concealer, the liner tends to run. Not cool. 

It's hard to find tutorials about such a subject, because most focus on dark circle concealing only, or lining the lower lash, but not both. So it takes some time to stumble across the right literature and guidance. 

I dipped my toe in, and found an interesting suggestion: When setting undereye concealer, don't swipe; press the powder in with the brush instead. 

Ah! Not a total solution yet, but progress.

Then, I came across an article about lipsticks that stay on under masks. Yay! 

So when Sephora had their sales recently, I cheerfully purchased some oldies and some new goodies too. Which I will try, and then return if needed.

I'm still a frumanista, ha ha ha. 

Five Minute Face as Shabbos Face

 In my single years, I was a regular shul goer. Nearly every week, I would spend precious minutes before lechtzin hair styling and makeup applying. 

Now, that makeup routine was serious stuff. It was practically bullet proof. 

With Ben's arrival, however, the previous enjoyment of shul waned. When he was tiny, being up at night with him meant I stayed in bed in the morning. When he got older, and COVID became less worrisome, he would whine and complain while I struggled to get dressed, then he continued to whine and complain while I struggled to get him dressed, and by the time I finally made it out the door we were both sweaty and tired. 

When I would arrive at shul, he would refuse to go to groups, and after having my own davening disturbed too many times by youngsters I would refuse to bring him in, hovering outdoors and feeling rather stupid. If Han insisted on taking him in, I spent the time wincing whenever he emitted a peep. 

Or, if I didn't time it right, I would have spent all that effort getting it together to find shul is over and I got dressed and ready just to walk Han home. 

Blah. 

I decided instead that I would spend Shabbos morning going for a leisurely walk. I can't do that in the afternoon lest Ben dozes off in the stroller and is then unable to sleep at night. So morning it is. 

Well, do I really need a bulletproof Face just for a walk? When I'm wearing sunglasses? Through a pretty deserted route? 

Enter weekday Five Minute Face. 

Surprisingly, the above stays on rather well through Shabbos morning, giving my ego the slight boost it needs to be seen by strangers in public. When it fades (when you have a toddler, it will fade) it does so gradually, not patchily. Which is nice.

Lipstick will need to be of clingier stuff, though. A long wearing one.

Makeup doesn't have to be all or nothing. There's plenty of room in between. 

"Deserve"?

"Deserve" is a word that makes me nervous. 

It's a word that is bandied about a lot nowadays. Strangers on social media, for instance, exhort that all of the individuals amongst the faceless masses "deserve" love.

I hear parents say that their kids work so hard in school, they "deserve" a vacation. 

This mentality is one that I find disturbing. As we very well know, life on this earth is not based on merit. Hello, how many children were murdered in the war? How many innocents were slaughtered over the millennia? That's not counting good ol' fashioned disease and famine and whatnot. 

But today's generation likes to say, "You deserve!" 

Judaism is about responsibility, not rights. We have to do our part; there's no guarantee we'll be thusly "rewarded." Kids still have to do their homework even if they won't get rewarded for it. For me, one of the last line of Koheles says it all: "The end of the matter, all having been heard: fear God, and keep His commandments; for this is the whole man." A Jew gotta do what a Jew gotta do. That's it. 

In the Wall Street Journal, Crispin Sartwell expresses similar misgivings in "What Have I Done to Deserve This?" He lists all the things he's been told he deserves, by people who don't even know him, and observes: 

. . . if I believed that I already deserved all good things, I might stop trying to improve. After all, I couldn't become worthier or more deserving than I am right now. Nor could you or anybody else. . . some quibble that praising everyone in exactly the same terms makes saints and monsters morally equal. It's about time, is all I can say to that. Even the worst person in the world deserves the most reliable 5G network. 

Wait—can that be right? 

Constantly being told what I deserve puts me in a state of anxiety. . . I'm not entirely sure I deserve . . . I reflect on all the things I've done wrong . . . 

Sometimes I worry that I actually deserve to be penalized rather than awarded . . .  

He's being sarcastic for most of this piece, obviously. But you get the point. The world doesn't operate on a merit system. 

I was listening to a shiur about Dina, about all the various commentaries and their takes on it. This one says it was her fault, this one says it was Yaakov's fault, this one says it was Leah's fault. But the Abarbanel says: It was no one's fault.  

Following contemporary tragedy, we don't try to find causes or reasons. The good die, or live. The bad die, or live. There's no cause to be found. Dina was abducted and raped the same way many women have been since the dawn of time. To put it crudely, **** happens, and there isn't always a message to be learned. There isn't always a way to prevent tragedy.

And we definitely do not get what we think we deserve.  

Singles Shame, Continued

Iliza Schlesinger, Confirmed Kills: 

". . . The moral of that story is I was in a relationship and I wasn't happy so I left the relationship. I'm not advocating leaving the person you're with. What I am advocating for is this: If you're not happy, there's no reason to stay out of fear of being alone. 

"We like to scare women. And I'm sure there are men that feel this way. But we like to scare women when they're single and we like to be mean to them and we label them. We say mean things to them. She's a spinster. Old maid. 'Really involved with animal rescue.' We have names like that. 

"And we like to question them, as if there's something wrong. 'Why are you single?' 'Because the last one was a **** and I'm not stupid.' Like, that's why you do it. Nobody wakes up married. Nobody is born betrothed to someone. We have to be kinder to women and stop doing it. 

"And we have the audacity to have magazines, self-help books, articles, posing the question, 'You're single. Now what?' 'You're single. Now what?' What do you mean, 'Now what?' Now I shave off an eyebrow and take up with wolves. What do you mean, 'Now what?' What do you mean, 'Now what?' I got a mortgage! It's so stupid. 

"What upsets me is that women spend so much time and energy flogging themselves mentally for being single, and changing, and trying different methods, and looking for guys. And men don't have to do that. They have the luxury of relaxing because they don't have eggs. There are no articles in GQ like, 'You're single. Now what?' There's none of that."

Us frummies really do think, when it comes to the singles, that we are in a unique position. That the secular world doesn't have to put up with this hooey. That we are alone in our seemingly endless quest to find a good man to be a spouse, and if you don't put his ring on it, then there will be no one else for you.  

It happened to me often enough. "Well, you said yourself he's nice, so how can you say no?" But I feel nothing for him, except a burning need to to walk briskly away in the opposite direction. "But you're single and he won't beat you" is not a good enough reason to marry someone. 

Maybe that would have been sufficient reason to marry three hundred years ago, but hello, people, we ain't in the shtetl no mo'. We need more from our relationships, and that's not a bad thing. 

Browbeating a single girl into a yes isn't helping anyone. It doesn't solve anything. All she would know, going forward, was that she is not in this relationship because she wants to be. So why postpone the inevitable, when she finally can't go forward and breaks it off after the 15th date or an engagement? 

Singles aren't mental defectives, or children (for the most part). They don't need to be told ghost stories in order to get them to commit out of terror. 

They may just be waiting for what is right for them. 

(And by the way, Schlesinger married 2 years after this special, at the age of 35, and is now expecting.)

"Too"

And you will always be "too much" for some people. Too kind. To friendly. Too sensitive. Too giving. Too loud. Too quiet. Too loving. Too hopeful. Too passionate. Too scared. Too frigid. Too soft. Too much of this and too much of that. Too much every single thing that makes you the person that you are. Don't change yourself because you are "too much" for people who are too little. Just remember that your "too much" will never make sense to those who put boundaries where there should be none. — ruby dhal

Singlism

 Frum people sometimes think the grass is greener on the other side. "Oh, if I wasn't frum, such-and-such wouldn't be an issue." 

Singles certainly have those moments. "Oh, if I wasn't frum, it would be no problem to get a relationship." That (erroneous) belief stems from the current day restrictions to meet potential dates—bars, clubs, or even basic social interactions are off the table. 

But marriage is not just a numbers game, that if I just meet as many people as possible one them would be my spouse. While I didn't date with proficient regularity, Han certainly did (he lost count at some point, but I did some lame math and yeah, he met LOTS of women). 

Additionally, frum singles seem to think that secular/gentile singles don't get flack for being unmarried. But according to this article on TED, yeah, they do: "The Price of Being Single" by Jessica Gross. 

DePaulo has coined two words that are essential to this discussion. “Singlism is the stereotyping, stigmatizing and discrimination of people who are not married,” she says. “The flip side of that is matrimania: the over-the-top celebrating and hyping of marriage and coupling and weddings. So if you’re single, you get it coming and going.”

OOOOH, those terms sound fun! 

DePaulo and her colleagues created biographical sketches of people who were identical — except that half were single, while half were married. Participants judged the hypothetical singles to be less socially mature, less well adjusted, and more self-centered than their otherwise identical married counterparts. The effect was starker for hypothetical 40-year-olds — who, by cultural standards, are at a should-be-married age — but persisted for hypothetical 25-year-olds, too.

Yup.  

As the article relates, "singlism" is not considered to be a form of prejudice, even though singles can be discriminated against. Additionally, while there may be supposed studies that "married people are happier," that can't really be substantiated. People are happier when they first marry, but over time they end up where they were before. Plus there are divorces. Obviously those people, when they were married, were unhappy. 

A married couple are not "better" people than singles; marriage does not mean the couple is more mature or more selfless; they are not necessarily happier. 

And just because you are single doesn't mean others have the right to treat you badly.

Book Review Continued: "Group"

The second aspect of the book that I noted . . . 

It's not like Tate came from an abusive home. Her parents were solid Catholic Texans. There was no fighting. She mentions her siblings in passing, and they seem to be fine, married and settled. 

But Tate's upbringing did leave a mark. She was a tween when she witnessed a horrific accident, and her parents did not know how to deal with it. They told her to buck up, to put on a happy face, to power through. At some point the school sent her to a therapist who was not a good fit, and she lied to her parents after one session that she was good to go. They were happy. 

It made me think of Thomas Boyce's dandelion and orchid theory. Some children come into this world mentally and emotionally sturdy. No matter what life throws at them they can cheerfully trundle along. (A neighbor once said about Luke, "You could send him to public school no problem." Yeah, total dandelion.) 

But other children are more sensitive. They need more support, more nurturing, more attention. If they don't get that from their caretakers, they flounder. If they do, they flourish, becoming ever more than a dandelion can. 

My thought on this was—besides for the belief that Tate is an orchid, and many messages given consciously or unconsciously to her by her parents and teachers left deep marks—that what if it doesn't have to be so extreme? What if there is a plant that falls between a dandelion and an orchid? (My botany is not proficient, so I don't have an example there.)

Life is rarely black and white—it's not like children are either one thing or the other. Some kids can be more sensitive in some ways, and less sensitive in others.  

Chanoch l'naar al pi daarko—it's a toughie. Parents can do everything "right," and the kids will still end up on a therapist's couch complaining about their upbringing. 

Ben is too small for me to be worried too much right now. He's content with regular meals, a good night's sleep, and reading the same book on a loop (I'm going mad). I'm curious as to what he is, but I think it's neither dandelion nor orchid. I have to be in tune for when his personal sensitivities pop up, so I can be ready to accommodate them.

Book Review: "Group"

I don't usually read much non-fiction, but I seem to be drawn to therapy memoirs. The first, Lori Gottlieb's Maybe You Should Talk to Someone was from the perspective of both therapist and patient; the second, Catherine Gildiner's Good Morning, Monster was strictly from the therapist. I recently finished the third, Group: How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life by Christie Tate. 

She's obviously a patient. 

The book opens with Tate in her late 20s, wishing for death. She's smothered by loneliness. She wants a significant other. But the only men she's been attracted to thus far are incapable of relationships. 

She goes to a therapist (Jewish, of course) who has an atypical method of treatment: it's group therapy, and EVERYTHING is shared. His belief is that secrecy is damaging, as secrecy is tied to shame. 

That's not quite my outlook on secrecy (isn't there a difference between secrecy and privacy?) but the therapy does wonders for Tate. We see how she progress step, by step, by step. Sure, there are some missteps too, but the seven years that she details is fascinating, although I could have done without some of the EVERYTHING she relayed (warning: very UA). 

Two aspects jumped out at me from the book. 

The first:

There is a raw scene when Tate expresses her desire for a family of her own. The members of the group are inviting her for the holidays (all are married), but she wants her OWN family. It was at this point when I began to relate to Tate. 

That understanding continued as she describes one of her relationships. She has made progress with the sort of man she dates, but these attempts have not ended happily. The next relationship she's in, he's, well, a bit odd. But he has a stable job, a stable personality, suitably boring. She expresses her misgivings to the group, but they all firmly say that this is what she needs. She herself swallows her misgivings because, after all, this is the best she's going to get. 

. . . I fantasized about calling him later to say, "Have a nice life."

But I didn't think I was allowed to let go. That was literally the word in my head: allowed. I'd been bellowing about relationships for years. I'd invested thousands of dollars in therapy . . . I'd recently been involved with a married man. Therefore, I wasn't allowed to walk away from [him]. He was single, solvent, and kind. . . I knew I wouldn't break up with him. The urge to flee was overpowered by my need to prove I was willing to do the hard work I was sure intimate relationships required. 

And there we have it. 

This group of people love her. When you spend hours upchucking your emotional guts to a group, of course you feel something for each other. They socialize together outside of sessions. And yet, and yet, they encourage her to ignore her gut because this is the best option—so far. 

Well, does that sound familiar. 

During my dating years, I certainly heard this message enough. I heard mothers say it about their own children, how they told their kid that they must commit to the current option. Sometimes that works out—and sometimes it doesn't. 

Thankfully, Tate's boyfriend finally raises a red flag high enough that she could break up with him with the blessing of everyone. That irritated me, that she was told to ignore all those other flapping signals, supposedly for her own good.  

This breakup, unlike the others, carried something novel: a strong whiff of relief. Now I could stop pretending that [he] was my soulmate and get on with my life. 

In the end, it's not all those other random people who will be present in a relationship. It's two people, alone. Shouldn't they be the most comfortable together as possible?  

The second aspect in the next post. 

Taste of the Jewish Nation

Continuing on the idea of Jewish food, Padma Lakshmi's "Taste the Nation" had a Jewish food episode circling around Chanukah. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised she focused more on kosher style as opposed to actual kosher food. 

She goes to the Lower East Side, for some reason, and pretty much remains there, despite the fact that the Lower East Side isn't really the New York center of Jews anymore. 

There, she samples the typical fare of lox, cream cheese, and bagels, which seems rather limited. There were latkes, obviously, considering the theme. 

I thought it a shame she didn't head out to Brooklyn to experience the food there. For one thing, Boro Park, Crown Heights, Williamsburg, Flatbush, and Downtown boast a dizzying array of "Jewish food," along with a booming populace to go with it. OK, gefilte fish is not something we should proudly share, but what about a hearty cholent? Kneidlach? Rugelach? Delkalach?

Then the conversation veered away from food. Lakshmi went to visit Ruth, who she sorrowfully describes as a Holocaust survivor. 

I sat up straighter, interested to hear her story. Lakshmi's voiceover explains that Ruth came to the US in 1939, at the age of 11. That left me confused, as the Holocaust hadn't really revved up yet.  

It turns out that Ruth's family fled Europe following Kristallnacht, and for 10 months she was separated from her parents while they worked to get the paperwork to leave. 

Ruth explained how traumatizing that experience was for her, and I don't doubt it. But then Lakshmi prodded her (in an obviously staged way) why telling her story was so important, and Ruth compared her situation to the separation of children and parents at the southern border. 

So now we have made the connection from "Holocaust survivor" to "contemporary hot button issue."  

Umm . . . 

Yes, Ruth and her family were driven out of Europe by the Nazi regime, but in my opinion, but that doesn't make them Holocaust survivors. It makes them very, very lucky that they were not interned in death camps or hiding from SS soldiers in the woods. Ruth was 11 in 1939; chances are, if she would have been deported, she would not have lived. So I'll give her a "refugee" title, but I'm not cool with "survivor."

I was reading Yaniv Iczkovits' book review of Dara Horn's book, "People Love Dead Jews," and my peeve was right there: 

We look for universal lessons in lieu of attending to the actual persecution of Jews.

There is little to no relation of the current policy by the US border to, say, GENOCIDE. I don't exactly appreciate that sort of comparison, Lakshmi. Eating a bagel doesn't make you an honorary Jew of sufficient status to make such a claim.