yanoblog

I am blessed with a great mother-in-law (as far as I know, she doesn’t read this blog, so I’m not even going for brownie points).

So, this story is not about me.

We have some friends, let’s call them Alice and Bob, to protect the innocent (them) and, as a side effect, the guilty, Bob’s mom.

A few months ago was Channukah, a relatively unimportant holiday on the Jewish calendar. In the States, we have the I-used-to-think-silly-but-I’ve-thrown-in-the-towel “tradition” of giving gifts on each of the 8 days (usually just to the kids?).

Last Channukah, Bob’s mom sends Alice and Bob’s daughter a book (I believe she went to the trouble of overnighting it (from her office).

The book, Papa’s Latkes appears from the title and cover to be a sweet tale of a nice Jewish boy who learns to cook. Remember, this was a gift from Alice’s mother-in-law.

So, Bob starts to read the book to his three-year-old daughter that night (they also have an infant girl). Page 1 opens with:

Selma and her little sister [Hey, Bob’s daughter has a little sister too!], Dora, were waiting for Papa [Hey, Bob’s daughter calls her dad Papa too!] to come home. It was their first Chanukah without Mama [insert sound of needle being lifted rapidly off of an LP]. Selma’s heart ached when she remembered how sick and thin Mama had looked last summer. Thin enough to be blown away by a light summer breeze. And then, right before school started, Mama died.

I’ll stop there.

Now, I think it’s great that this book exists (and sad that it needs to). There’s obviously a specific market for whom something like this is important. It can help cut against the isolation that children coping with actual grieving no doubt feel.

But, let’s review.

Mother-in-law. She’s always been kinda mean/passive-aggressive to Alice; sends Alice’s daughter for Channukah a book about Alice being dead; claims that she didn’t look inside the book before buying it.

Bob consulted Alice–in French–about what to do and she suggested changing the story so that the kids were sad because the mother was traveling on business during Channukah. The on-the-fly edit worked.

I rescued this book from their recycling bin and was giving permission to write this blog entry. Three months later, here you go. I once had pretensions of doing a survey of the child-in-grieving literature market with additional title suggestions for future holidays, but have since decided that, A, that would be too depressing and, B, a good blogger has to know when to put they keyboard down and declare the post finished.

That said, the story improves. That holiday season also saw Bob’s mother give Alice a… well, I’ll just quote her (names changed):

My Christmas gift from [Bob’s] mom: a loose, shapeless sweatshirt from [Hippy Dippy] organic farm thingy…. With an illustration of… what? What’s that? Are you 9 weeks postpartum and feeling sort of shapeless and blah but very hungry? Great! Then here’s a picture of a freaking PIG on this sexless sweatshirt! Enjoy! (And no–no chuckling or implication that this was a “joke” that I was in any way in on.)

p.s. She asked for my wish list this year. I received nothing from it.

p.p.s. Bob either.

Jane, if you are reading this and you’ve ever felt I don’t appreciate you as a mother-in-law, I apologize. I love you.