Read Online The Jewish Daughter Diaries by Rachel Ament - Free Book Online

Brooklyn and see a three-legged dog with his loving owner, I regret having not adopted Ranger. How could I have been so image-conscious? Ranger was a good dog and he deserved a loving home. I should have been his mom. My mom would have been that dog’s mother.
    My mom particularly excels at the mitzvah of bikur cholim , otherwise known as visiting the sick. It doesn’t matter who is sick. It doesn’t matter if my mother even knows the person. If my mother hears that someone is going through chemotherapy and can’t keep food down, she starts cooking blintzes. I don’t know why or how, but people who are going through chemotherapy can hold down my mother’s blintzes.
    This is a fact: my mother’s blintzes are vomit-proof. She discovered the power of her blintzes—and proceeded to make, freeze, and deliver them by the dozen—when a friend of hers went through chemo and narrowly skimmed above starvation by eating a blintz a day. Maybe it is because my mother mixes blueberries into the sweet cheese filling. I suspect it is mostly because my mother made them, and she is the mother of all sick people.
    I recently asked my mother what she was up to. “Well, I’m making blintzes for JoAnne Shmoe’s brother-in-law. JoAnne told me he is going through chemo.”
    â€œWow, Ma, that’s really nice of you,” I said. “Do you know him?”
    â€œNo, but JoAnne said that he can keep down my blintzes.”
    JoAnne Shmoe’s brother-in-law isn’t Jewish. He probably had never tasted a blintz in his life. But you know what? He is getting enough calories to not become a skeleton because my mother—a stranger—makes him blintzes.
    As one would expect, my mother also makes chicken soup for sick people. When I was writing this essay, she had recently made chicken soup for a lady who died a few days later (not from the soup). The lady told her it was the best soup she had eaten in years. My mom had never met her.
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    The downside to having a mother who is the mother of all children and all animals and all old and sick people is that my mother never stops moving, and therefore neither do I. I once asked my psychiatrist to rate how crazy I am on a scale of one to ten. “You’re a two,” he said. “If ten is psychotic, you are a two. You obsess. You’re neurotic.”
    Knowing that I fall low on the crazy scale was a relief to me, because I often feel like I am one step away from ending up in a mental hospital. This is because everything is important to me, and like my mother, I must succeed at every little thing. It is hard when I don’t do everything the right way, as my mother does.
    I don’t think my mother has ever been wrong or has ever failed at anything she set her mind to do. I, however, am a walking failure machine. I take on projects that are too big and then can’t manage the details. I make promises that I can’t keep. Somehow my mother does not have these problems. She can manage everything.
    Despite my inability to make time to save the world one act of chesed (that’s “kindness” in Hebrew) at a time, I do sometimes live up to the example that my mother sets. I was very proud of myself when I stopped some kids in my apartment building from beating up their brother. I was also very proud of myself when I saw a little kid walking alone on the street and made sure that his mother knew where he was going. I carry extra fruit to give to homeless people on the street. Once I bought a homeless guy a can of chewing tobacco.
    That chewing tobacco incident shows I am becoming my mom, but also that I am not at all my mom. Instead of buying that guy chewing tobacco, my mom would have lectured him on the dangers of tobacco, which she is very against. She is also very against baking brownies from a mix. And she is against drinking and driving. It became a joke that she lectured us every single night at