I got up in the middle of the night and noticed it was 3:30 a.m. For those of you who don’t know, this getting up at night business is a middle-aged thing. I went back to bed and couldn’t fall back to sleep – also not uncommon in my stage of life. It didn’t matter how tired I was or that I tried my usual mind-clearing, deep-breathing and muscle-relaxing techniques. Nothing seemed to work as 3:30 turned into 4:30 then 5:00. Once I realized that sleep wasn’t in the cards, I allowed my mind to wander and thought about my plans for when the sun finally came up. But until it did, I didn’t want to get up and wasn’t in the mood to start the laundry or put up a pot of chicken soup.

 Well, here we go. I’ve started making my Pesach lists as I sit here eating Purim chocolates, which I should have given away or thrown out but of course didn’t. Has a year gone by already? This has been the fastest year yet. I’d like to blame it on COVID which kept us constantly moving from one thing to the next. Maybe I’m just getting old because I’ve always heard older people talk this way about how time flies. Nah, I’ll just blame it on COVID.       

I remember Purim last year, when we all sat in shul listening to the Megillah. No one thought about “social distancing” as we broke our fast together in packed social halls. The term hadn’t been invented.. Those successive urgent email messages from the Agudath Israel hadn’t begun yet either. And masks and gloves were still primarily worn by doctors and nurses. But before too long, the world as we knew it had completely changed, and we started to wonder when it would ever be the same again. Remarkably, our lives began to transform in good ways, too. We became more focused on davening, and our learning had more meaning than ever before. We rose to the challenges that Hashem put before us and forged ahead.

I was eating a sandwich a while back when, without warning, I suddenly felt a small pebble in my mouth – only it wasn’t a pebble. Upon closer inspection I saw that it was a piece of my molar. I felt around the affected tooth with my tongue and discovered a small crater. I’m one of those women who belong to the petrified-of-the-dentist-No- I’m-NOT-going group. Don’t misunderstand me, I don’t mind going to the dentist for my biannual teeth cleaning. I’m okay with everything from plaque removal to teeth polishing. I’ve even learned to tolerate – well, put up with – the occasional filling, as long as the dentist has strict instructions about Novocain and my need for it. But this tooth breaking-off episode clearly did not fall into any of those categories.

I remember the days when getting ready for bed meant washing my face and brushing my teeth, something that took all of five minutes to accomplish. These days, however, my nighttime routine has turned into a time-consuming evening event. Let’s see, I now use make-up remover before washing my face and an anti-oxidant facial serum for I don’t even know what, but my sister-in-law said it’s a good thing to use, and besides she gave it to me for a present. After flossing my teeth, I’ve started using a water pick and an electric toothbrush, both recommendations from my dentist. Next, I apply creams and lotions and oils because over the past year or so, my skin has dried up.

Thinking back to the days when I was a young mother surrounded by my little children, I remember sometimes wishing I had live-in help. I even thought about how nice it would be to just wiggle my nose and make everything clean and sparkly. Don’t get me wrong; I loved being a full-time mother. I enjoyed taking care of my children, spending time with them, teaching them, playing and reading to them. It was the household details I found never-ending and exhausting: the endless dishes to wash and the loads of laundry to do. It seemed like I was always washing dishes. Apparently, my children thought so too. I remember one day when we were going out together as a family and my young son informed me that I couldn’t join them because I had to wash the dishes!