*sometime in February, 2023?
this would have been our 9th year of Memory Jar posts, but I dropped the ball...or was I three weeks in my new apartment after having lived in the car for half the year, and had no idea where the Jar even was? I remember watching Rocky on New Year's Eve '22/'23 because I'm making it my new tradition to do so, and I watched the whole Rocky franchise (up to Creed 2) this past New Year's.
2022:
my list ~
Z graduated BOCES
Z got into his 1st choice college
Z got $100 fitness scholarship
standing with the guitar teacher during the kid's last solo
Medicine Day
Being invited to work at AW
Getting an apartment! yay!
Hannukah at the local synagogue
making Z spit eggs by saying "Peanut Butter Falcon!"
breakfast sandwiches
"Tantar, make Mama some perogies"
grateful to have my son home with me
his list ~
skipping
catballs
have a Snickers
300 lb. leg press first try
burgers
climbing to the top of the rope
pre-workout
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
September 26, 2024
I just finished my ritual of burning the memory slips before starting the process of filling the jar up again. it mostly took me that long because I don't really have a great place to burn things in this apartment other than the porch, which makes me nervous, so I burned them a few at a time in my bathroom over a fireproof tray, with the ventilation fan running. then I took a look at my facebook activity log starting all the way back in January, and wrote down the good times I felt important enough to share with my social media network and friends, and put them in the jar. I will ask my son to take some time out of his increasingly busy life to add a few, and I'm sure after some rudeness, eye rolling, unnecessary aggression and argument, he may oblige me a scrap or two with a word or so. we'll see.
here's why it's important to me:
I'm making Aliyah.
(for those of you who don't know, that means I'm moving to Israel.)
it's going to be increasingly important to me to figure out ways to stay in touch with my son (who won't be coming with me), and our small traditions that we shared while he was growing up in my care, as he feels the inevitable need to pull away from me. not that he has much choice if I'm leaving the country...but it is time to strike out on his own, even if I'm the one doing the 'striking'.
and we have almost a decade of memories showing the same tendency, as his lists have gone from running in tandem to mine, while we enjoyed many of the same happy moments, to his moving year by year towards his own joys and experiences, as they should. I'm not 'in on' several of the moments he shared, as I'm sure readers can tell, and similarly don't understand.
we've had a rough couple of years. from the ongoing need to move constantly whether it be from eminent domain, the landlord selling the building, or only having a one year lease so my son could graduate high school with his class (for which we were grateful), to my mother dying, and the general hormonal bullshit that I had to put up with between my male teen and my own peri/menopause. then we had homelessness and non-college-preparedness before we were both finally able to settle down into decent work situations and figure out where our lives were, individually, and in relationship to each other.
at the moment, we're both in a pretty good place. the Young Man is fine, and I'm going to do my best to stop talking about him as much as I do, because he's an adult now, and I owe him his privacy, but I'm sure news of him will sneak in here and there because he's my baby and I love him the most. let it suffice to say that he has a good job that he enjoys doing, a few good friends (one of whom he is intimate with), and enjoys an active social life pursuing his interests and hobbies. I was working at a job that I really liked, doing work that I felt was important, until the underlying toxicity of the administration that I had been overlooking in order to keep paying my rent finally caught up to me, and I walked out in frustration one afternoon. it didn't take long before I had another job doing similar work, and in that case, it was the administration that got frustrated with me for pointing out the inconsistencies in their policies, and how it was actively harming their guests. no worries...I got another job offer a few days ago, and will probably get another one before the week is out. I can get jobs - I sometimes have a hard time keeping them.
if you're familiar with this blog, and have visited the 'freebooting' tab, you'll see that I've engaged in a wide variety of work activities, and have never settled on a 'career' because I am a multi-disciplinary artist who rarely has the necessary time or space to engage with my art as I'm so busy hustling to survive all the time. for instance - there are 78 unfinished drafts for posts on this blog. 38 of them are from 2020, 26 are from 2021, 6 from 2022, 5 from 2023, and 3 so far this year. if I manage to publish this post, there will only be two from this year. we'll see...
I have a lot of work ahead of me for this upcoming move, and I've once again been doing my best to whittle down my belongings to what I can take overseas with me, and there are years of backlogged art projects that are getting dragged out of the closet for me to force myself to contend with. I haven't been doing that badly, and several finished products have made their way to their final destinations, and it has definitely been clearing my energy to see those items come to fruition. there are some bins that are harder to deal with than others, and I'm in the middle of one of those, now. talk about memories!
so we're back to the point I was making at the beginning of this post, which is that our family tradition of saving memories to reminisce over at the end of the year hit a snag due to my lack of financial solvency, as I haven't yet gleaned the secret to being a single working mother who can give my art the same time and energy I need to devote to my 'job' so I can manage to keep a roof over our heads, and all that. the Memory Jar didn't get filled because I was working. the posts didn't get finished because I was working. the art didn't get done because I was working. I made more money this year than I ever have in my entire life. and that was amazing. but what did I have to sacrifice for it? it was when I got fired and decided to move to Israel that the projects got dragged out of the closet, so here we are.
2023 was all about the Benjamins. make more doing less. I gave everything to my employers and the people we serve, and had barely a thing left over for me, let alone anyone else. I ate well, I upgraded my wardrobe & my phone, got some work done on the car, did volunteer work in the community, and served on a city council committee. I donated money. I also experienced more anti-semitism than I ever have in my entire life, mostly in my workplace, and after that, in community spaces meant to offer mutual aid. I learned that people will take every single thing you give, and offer only their ingratitude in return. I watched people die in the streets while our representatives in the government slept soundly in their appointed mansions. I lost a lot of fair-weather friends claiming to be sisters-in-arms when I demanded that these staunch feminists acknowledge the atrocities of October 7th, which they continue to deny matter, let alone the plight of our dear hostages, still being held captive by genocidal terrorists.
but these are topics for a different post. like I said, 2023 both was and wasn't great, and none of that made it to our jar. but the slips from 2022 got burned and buried, and there's a '2024' tag on the jar now, with a pile of new slips in it. I hope more get added, and I look forward to reading them with my son on New Year's Eve, however that may look.
I look forward to hearing from you again ~
memory jar posts past:
2014 - 2015 - 2016 - 2017 - 2018 - 2019 - 2020 - 2021 - 2022 - 2023...
