Memory Jar 2024 (two years later) ~

 

 

my list -

massage and pedicure birthday treat

got my spray paint on!

getting my Aliyah approval on my late mother's birthday 💙

the IDF rescue of four hostages

all the beautiful moments of watching my son grow and thrive

my 'Sinwar-taschen' were bangin' this year! (as were my latkes and suvganiot)

Passover!  I cooked all the things!

I made Besamin, and herbal dream mix

deciding to finally make Aliyah

Eden Golan singing Hurricane at Eurovision

leaned in to the joy of making potholders

more potholders 

finishing long ignored projects

My Fabulous Porch

Shabbat birthday with chocolate pudding pie

summer of joyous unemployment

growing tiny mutant vegetables

getting a gift on Mother's Day

solar eclipse!

learned to prioritize myself

Eli Kopter, Moti Rola, Gal Axy  😂

Spa at Essex hot tub birthday

I baked lots of wonderful challah

experienced Jewish joy amidst heartbreak

his list - 

Buckethead

DOOM 2025

listening to Led Zeppelin on drugs

cereal milk

getting big 

GWAR

for many years, my son and I had the tradition of writing down cool things that happened in our lives on pieces of paper, and saving them in a jar to share with each other on New Year's Eve to relive the joy we experienced throughout the year.  as he got older, he shared less, and every now and then I'd ask him if he had put any good memories in the jar, or encourage him to think back and see if there was anything he felt like sharing.  2023 wasn't a great year for our relationship, though we still had our personal joys that were becoming more specific to ourselves, and less about events in times and places that we shared.  and that's ok.  kids are supposed to grow on their own, away from their parents, in their own unique and beautiful ways, and parents...well, we have to learn to re-center ourselves within our own lives as our children need us less, and in fact often tend to push us away.

it's been pretty hard for me after being a relatively hands-on parent for the past 20 plus years to feel that relationship sever and break, and while I have enjoyed remembering who I was before I was 'Mom', it was heartbreaking to lose that closeness we had shared for so long, and to live with such greatly heightened tension in my own house.  I know I said and did things I regret, and I hope some of the terrible things he said and did have caused him to reevaluate some of the ways he chooses to treat me in the future, though I'm not seeing evidence of it yet.  I remember when the same developmental stage in my own brain snapped the cord between my mother and I, and I do my best to remember that while it took a few years, I did finally realize that she wasn't the devil, and began to offer her the respect the deserved (when she deserved it).  I hope he gets there soon, because I truly miss him.

 I honestly don't even remember what I did for New Year's in 2024, and my facebook is currently disabled for some bizarre reason so I can't look back and check.  more likely than not, I spent the day packing and getting ready for the international flight I was taking three weeks from then, and went to bed early.  I know I started this post around then, too (I think the time stamp said Jan. 2, 2025).  looking over my list, I see that I had a great time cooking and baking, taking advantage of being unemployed to get my craft on, engaging in self-care, and making the second biggest decision of my life (the first being to birth my child knowing I would be taking the parenting journey alone) - moving to Israel in the aftermath of the October 7th attacks, and the resulting extreme rise in antisemitism that affected my everyday life, which eventually cost me my last job in the States.

did I put a new tag on the jar for 2025?  I left it back in the old apartment with the kid - did he put anything in it during the course of the past year?  and what about me?  did I take the time to record and save any of my good memories from the past year?  10 years of memories shared with my kid was a wonderful experience for me (I hope it was good for him, too), and I know I was hoping that even though we're geographically far from each other now, that we could keep the tradition alive, but alas.  it seems it is not to be.  and I can still continue the tradition for myself, because...well...why not.  if I tried, I could probably make a list of the cool things that happened for me last year, but that would have to be a separate post.  at this point - 2 years later - I'm making this post because every now and again I look over my list of unfinished drafts and try to make a go with one of them, and since it's January, this one caught my eye.  I wanted to finish out the 'Memory Jar' posts at a nice round '10 year mark', so here we are.  if there's to be a 'Memory Jar 2026' post, it will be of a different nature.

writing this post - and my facebook/instagram being disabled - did get me to look over my blog a bit and do some 'behind the scenes' editing, such as going over the list of other blogs I follow, and seeing if any of the collective postings I used to engage with are still active.  I unfollowed a lot of people who either don't post anymore, have taken their blogs down or moved them elsewhere, and those I'm simply no longer interested in, like the ones I followed specifically for a job I was doing at the time.  the world and the 'blog-o-sphere' have changed around me, and I seem to be at the point where I wonder, 'who even blogs anymore' (even though my reading list says I'm not the only dinosaur still out here)?  I'm sure 'the kids' would laugh at me and tell me I'm fifteen or so iterations of social media platforms behind, and do people even still read (I do)?

there was a point at which I had started to print out my individual posts to have a 'hard copy' in case I ever wanted to do anything with some of the things I've written here, but there's a lot of content, for better or worse, and I guess some circumstance or other ended up taking precedent and I didn't finish that project, either.  it was a few years ago already when I said that I didn't need to start any more projects because I have enough of them filed away to keep me busy for the rest of my life.  so, here's one more post knocked out, and on to the next.  I'm sure some of those unfinished drafts will end up deleted, but I need to take the time to review them in order to decide which.  I had attempted to start the process, and the oldest draft in my folder is from back in 2020 and has a ton of links attached - I was trying to write it like a research paper, and it's pretty involved, so I got overwhelmed and walked away.  we'll see.  at least this one is done.

below are the links to Memory Jar posts past - enjoy! 

 

2014  2015  2016  2017  2018  2019  2020  2021  2022/2023