missing menorah
I work with children and young adults to help them manage their learning challenges. As I read about strategies, I realize that it’s high time that I implement a few. (Full disclosure: when I was in graduate school, studying the many learning disabilities that people face, and how to remediate and/or help people with them, I felt like I had almost every disability that I studied: ADD, check, ODD, at times, OCD, not often, but it’s lurking, dyscalcula, sure, maybe that explains my math challenges, etc. etc. It was like being in med school and feeling like you caught, or might catch, every disease you studied.)
Executive function, and self-regulating, turn out to be two of the most important domains for learning and life. This always comes home to me around Hannukah, when I search the house for the menorah. I believe that our family now owns two, and I often find them in mid-July when cleaning out a linen closet, or moving things into the garage, “oh, there’s the menorah,” I’ll say to myself, promising to remember it’s location when December rolls around.
“Wrong, pea-brain,” as my siblings used to say to me when we were young. It is now December. I have purchased beautiful beeswax Hannukah candles, at great expense, from the local natural grocery store. I am trying to dredge up in my mind where I last saw a menorah, any menorah. I feel like the squirrel in my yard, whom I’m watching tear around and dig up the dirt, looking for a buried apple or pine cone. I’ve hurt my back crawling around in our 3 ft. high attic, I sidled by the table saw (table saw!!!??!!) in our garage, looking on the book shelf (don’t ask) for the menorah that I could swear I saw last August.
I’m feeling a little desperate. I may have to resort to our original menorah, the bottle cap one with birthday candles that my younger daughter made when she was in preschool. (She’s now a sophmore in college.) That’s the menorah that started the whole thing. . . reconnected me with the holiday rituals of my father’s ancestors. Now if I could just remember where I put it. . .