Here’s a story about parenting.
We’re at the celebration for returned Israeli hostage Eliya Cohen in his hometown (and mine) of Tzur Hadassah, and a junior reporter wielding a red microphone from Israel Hayom locks eyes with me from across the crowd.
I know what he wants, I was him once.
My daughters are standing around me as a I wave a flag (I know the flag did me in, possibly my red glasses and gender as well) and my oldest girl quickly understands – “The news is here! And he’s coming to us!”
“Can I interview you?” He’s calling towards me with a smile from across a horde of children.
My daughters are בהלם.
I say yes while they simultaneously tap my arm and squeal, “Omg Ima are you going to do it?”
The thing about parenting is recognizing that, fairly or unfairly, some moments matter more than others. When that reporter locked eyes with me, a behind-the-camera creature from a species I am well a part of, I knew that I had a very matterable moment here.
“אני ביישנית” – a common refrain from my youngest daughter.
“It’s too embarrassing to speak in class” – a constant admission from my oldest daughter.
“No way.” – the typical gut response from my middle daughter.
Something I learned sometime after high school was to build the kind of carefree confidence it takes to blindly say yes to sudden, weird, random, wholesome moments and worry about it later. Moments that are formed in ignoring your gut.
I’d love for my girls to pick this up earlier than I did.
So I did the thing I didn’t *want* to do. I got interviewed on camera in Hebrew surrounded by a mass of cheering children, in true happiness for Eliya and his family.
But there were really only three members of my audience.
My girls, who were huddling around me and beaming. My girls who kept saying on the way home ‘we’re gonna be on the news! Ima was on the news!’ My girls who didn’t harp, for once, on how ’embarassing’ eveything is.
Being generous to myself, who definitely finds it awkward af, I will declare that I deposited some serious parenting credit. I just have this feeling that for all my tech career woman persona I’ve shared with them, this little moment of flag waving vulnerability and shining discomfort may have mattered way more.
Whadya got: