Lizrael Update: babbling about the expat life since 2004
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Koala update: thirteen years
Onward teenager! It’s a bizarre time… Gone (temporarily, I promise) are the days of babbling and bright eyes and demanding of the world. In: hooded sweatshirts, always up. Sorting through developing dark humor. Navigating new friends at new school, which involves a fair share of fast food, Marvel movies and midweek sleepovers. It feels like […]
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Zooey update: six years
I’ve spent six years looking at your pretty face, and marveling that there is nothing at all physically resembling mine – you’re a carbon copy, visually, of your dad. Well, there’s one thing – your freckles. We share that. But what I’ve spent the last year realizing is you have something else we share. Or […]
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Bebe update: eleven years
Been trying to remember what it was like being 11. It definitely wasn’t like how you do even 10, to be honest. So mature, so ahead of your time, and still so fun-loving and free and not bothered by what other people think. Let’s start with sister – man I wish I had an older […]
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Nettles update: eight years
You were born a bullet train, and eight years later, this is still an express line. If I hem and haw on a decision, you take it into your own hands (and footstool, and cellotape, and whatever you need to get it done when my back’s turned). You’ll get it done, if you want it […]
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Stand up.
So many lovely awesome people I’ve worked with or know professionally feel they “don’t get it.” If we’re already dedicating a day to women, it’s time to start getting it. It seems especially hard for many to understand the snowball effect of years of keeping silent. I hope more and more people will not only […]
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Heartbreak.
The heartbreak is heavy. It’s an anchor, weighing me down, weighing my finger down when I’m about to click ‘play’ on the livestream. It’s so heavy that in the last 18 hours I can’t bring myself to refresh anymore. The first week, I absorbed the news every spare chance I had. At my desk while […]
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Sense.
Do you also get the sensation that you can’t remember what life was like before February 2020? It feels like pre-2020 reality is a fading dust, I can barely feel it on my fingertips as it floats away… And I’d been feeling this for long before a Jewish President of Ukraine became a global symbol […]
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Tired.
I don’t know why this notice is any different. They’re all exactly the same. .הורים יקרים The joke is that those are the two scariest words in the Hebrew language right now. Dear parents. I’m tired. It’s the kind of tired that you feel in your chest, not your head or behind your eyes. It’s […]
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Let’s have a wordle
I introduced my 12-year-old son to Wordle. At the same time, I introduced him to וורדעל. I love that both prospects are exciting, and we’re chatting with each other throughout the day about it (I still shudder at the fact he has a smartphone even if whatsapping together is a huge comms improvement). You know […]
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Twenty Years
Political Violence (part 1) It took place in an off-the-beaten path classroom, not a modern lecture hall. We were maybe 30 students, and the few times we had met before – maybe it was two? Three? – we had already covered some ‘basics’: what peacebuilding is, Rwanda, a bit of Bosnia. When I registered for […]
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Fellow working moms – it gets better.
I came home from the office one day last week and had this realization. It’s gotten better. Or… it becomes *different* as the kids get older, and so much becomes more tolerable, doable, and you know what? Also better. Do my pre-teens still mime at me from behind my laptop while I’m on a Zoom, thinking I can […]
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In awe of nature, fire, and humans – another day in Tzur Hadassah.
On Friday, while driving back up the hill from an Ikea run, I found out my kids had been picked up from home by a friend because a forest fire went rogue coming too close to our residential area. By the time I saw the giant smoke cloud rising on the horizon, a text had […]
Questions? Comments? Advice?