A FAMILY PESACH WITH SIX CHILDREN
BIG FAMILY GEMMA BLAKER
GUYS.” I beckon six little bodies to the table. “I need all eyes on me.” Twelve eyes focus reluctantly. “OK. Except those who don’t do eye contact. Or have a squint. Or conjunctivitis.” I lose five sets of eyes. “We’ve broken up from school. Who knows which Yom Tov is next?”
Tumbleweed. Someone is texting under the table. Someone else has surreptitiously re-started Minecraft. Someone else is drawing on their face with permanent marker. We pay out a monthly sum larger than our considerable mortgage to Jewish schools. “I’m looking for engagement here…”
“Christmas,” ventures a child. The atmosphere brightens considerably.
For this, I am driving the oldest Previa in Edgware. I flourish a J-cloth: “It’s Pesach!” The atmosphere round the table plummets considerably. Boy One starts getting into his pyjamas. “Wake me up when everything’s normal again.” In our family, we like routine, we like structure. We really, really like bread. And pasta. And crackers. In fact, we do not eat anything else. So, as you can imagine, we do not like Pesach.
Try as I might, I approach Pesach with guilty dread. The quintessential time for family can be hard if your family doesn’t want to be quintessential. If your kids won’t/can’t/don’t provide those Mah Nishtanah moments. We have six kids. Boys One and Three are autistic. Girl One has Down’s Syndrome. Boy Two is a grumpy preteen. Girl Two is a grumpy tween. Boy Four speaks solely in dialogue from Star Wars. At Pesach, the should-bes and could-bes of family life are strong in me, as Boy Four would say. “You must get such naches from your family at Pesach,’ says the butcher as I place my mega-order. “That depends,” I answer, “on your precise definition of naches.”
You can sail through Pesach with a large family if you plan everything in advance: shop, cook, clean the house and turn over your kitchen before the kids break up. So, when the holidays start, Mum is calm, prepared and ready to embark on fun educational trips and interactive baking sessions. You arrive at the Seder rested and inspired, not hastily wiping down your week-old tracksuit with a wet wipe.
Unfortunately, what actually transpires is that I book a whole load of fun educational trips and sit on the sofa reading novels and drinking coffee. I fail to shop, cook, clean the house and turn over the kitchen. Three days before Pesach, I am with the girls at “My First Ballet”, Ashley, my husband, is at the top of the Shard with the boys and the chickens have yet to be defrosted. Two days before Pesach we have day passes to Butlins Bognor Regis. Erev Pesach we are adopting two kittens.
Time to trot out my “families are a team” speech.
I sit everyone down in front of a mountain of Lego. Girl One promptly starts diving into it. “We are a team. We help each other out. Especially before Pesach.”
‘What do I need to do to get dropped from the team,” asks Boy Three. Funny, I was wondering that myself. “Suspension is not at option,” I tell him, “now start checking through this Lego.” “I’m not your slave,” he howls. The Pesach spirit has arrived. Boy Two is upstairs concentrating intently on his Haggadah. Is he really preparing for Seder? My spirits soar.
On closer inspection it turns out that he is meticulously sticking articles from Match of the Day magazine over the pages.
“This is the most creative, independent work you’ve ever done.” I tell him, patting his head affectionately. “Don’t let it happen again.”
The one certainty of Pesach is that we sit down to Seder eventually. “Eventually” being the key concept here. Boy Four arrives in full Storm Trooper regalia. I knock on his helmet. “This isn’t what I meant when I said dress up for the Seder.”
“I’m extremely impressed with the interest you’re showing in your Haggadah,” Ashley tells Boy Two, who accepts the compliment gracefully. I follow the story as Girl Two falls asleep on my lap. “Hey,” cries Boy Three with interest and disgust, “we learned this exact same story in school!”
Pesach for me is the story of momentous journeys, of pushing ourselves beyond our limits. I imagine the end of all familiarity. Leaving everything you know and embarking on a time of chaos but also wonder. Of trying your hardest moment-to-moment and hoping that faith and love will be enough. “Is Pesach over yet,” asks Boy One, emerging from his room as Ashley sings Chad Gadya and I swig the leftover Kiddush wine from the bottle. I pass him a plate of coconut pyramids. He recoils in disgust. Understandably.
“Sorry,” I tell him. “It’s only just beginning.”
www.3principles6kids.com
SMALL FAMILY RACHEL SELBY
WHEN I first made aliyah a few decades ago, I would go “home” to London to celebrate Pesach with my family. We were celebrating the start of our journey as a people from Egypt, through the desert and on to the Promised Land. Never mind all that, I got on a plane and left the Promised Land.
From my point of view at that point, the exodus from Egypt was just the excuse for a festival. The real celebration was family time, the Seders, the familiar mismatched crockery, and the oncea-year foods — fruit compote for breakfast, matzah brei, copious amounts of matzah, butter and jam or cheese, plava, and the holy trinity of macaroons, coconut pyramids and cinnamon balls in the biscuit tin. Even the eggs in salt-water were a treat.
Pesach also meant an outing, a country ramble or a visit to a stately home, with a matzah picnic. The picnic had to include matzah sandwiches, hard boiled eggs,
We like structure and routine, bread and pasta
triangle cheeses, a packet of stale crisps, and some plava. What else was there?
After a few years in Israel, I started celebrating here with friends. It was lovely, but it wasn’t the same as being with my own family. The tunes were different, the charoset was different, it wasn’t my father officiating, and worst of all, we were finished for another year after only one night. Seder was different with friends but not enough to make being in London a priority.
Then my daughter was born and everything changed. It was suddenly of paramount importance that she experience a family Seder. It wasn’t just that I wanted her to experience a Selby Seder, it was just as much that she should have a family Pesach with her own family. I didn’t want her memories of Pesach as a child to be as guests at various other families’ Seders.
Thus we have returned to London every year except one since she was born nine years ago.
The Selby Seder moved to my sister’s house when my parents downsized, mingling with my brother-in-law’s family traditions.
It has evolved from the serious business of reading the Haggadah to a more informal and participatory affair interspersed with games and quizzes.
I remember being bored as a child, counting the pages until “Now partake of the repast”, timing how long a page took to read, and then mentally calculating what time we would be eating. In those days, it wasn’t much fun for the children between the Four Questions and the meal. The songs at the end were always a highlight though, and they still are.
As I’m a single mother, it’s entirely up to me what we do and how we approach being Jewish in our home. I will never be one for following every detail of the law, I am more interested in the tradition and the essence of occasions. Pesach is an enormous undertaking and I need to have good reasons for us to go to all the effort.
In order to do Pesach “properly”, we have to spring-clean our houses. I love this aspect of the holiday as it connects us to the season and to everyone else, Jewish or not, spring cleaning at this time of year.
I try not to buy processed food during the year so Pesach is a great opportunity to put one ingredient shopping into strict practice and prove that we can eat a healthier, real food diet.
With age and maturity, I finally also acknowledge that we need to commemorate and celebrate the enormity of escaping from slavery; the fact that it led to us becoming a free nation with our own laws and our own land. We lost that land for a long while but we got it back at an all-time low in Jewish history, after the Holocaust. We now know how much we absolutely need it. I particularly like it that, coincidently, Pesach falls just before Yom Ha’atzmaut (Israel’s Independence Day). I see the connection and I celebrate it.
But Pesach for us means “next year in London.”
Rachel Selby blogs at www. midlifesinglemum.blogspot.co.uk/
As I’m a single mother, it’s up to me how Jewish we are