Nicole Graev Lipson’s Pushcart Prize-Winning Essay “Tikkun Olam Ted”
By Nicole Graev Lipson
This essay was first published in River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative, in slightly different form. It was recently awarded a Pushcart Prize and will appear in the forthcoming The Pushcart Prize XLVII: The Best of the Small Presses 2023 anthology.
In his first grade classroom at Hebrew school, my son and I are drawing what we plan to do to repair the world. My four-year-old daughter, tagging along for the morning, is also completing this assignment, and though she’s slightly young for it, she gets the basic idea. She scribbles blotches of flowers on her paper while I add a woman—me?—beside a compost bin, depositing food scraps. I’m feeling pretty good about myself for being down here on the rug, in the thick of things, while most parents sit in a semicircle of chairs, watching from afar. I am a very engaged mother, I think. I am modeling enthusiasm!
It’s been a trying weekend, with my husband out of town, just me and the three kids alone—a weekend of back seat feuds and bedtime brawls, upended cereal bowls upended and dishes piled up in the sink. I’ve been vexed by an irritability I don’t feel entitled to, that fills me with shame each time I think of the millions of single mothers who do this day in and day out, while three days alone have chafed my patience. But I’ve made it to Sunday morning. Sun streams through the classroom window and the air smells of cherry-scented markers, and before me stretch three hours that I don’t need to plan, in a space—our synagogue—that feels like a second home.
My son’s marker scritch-scratches away. He bites the soft flesh of his lower lip and shields his work with his arm, and I keep a respectful distance, knowing how he loves to craft surprises. After a while, he snaps on his marker cap and holds up his work. I see that it’s not a picture after all, but a row of words wobbling across the page. My son, who as a toddler had a speech delay, has been struggling at school to write words beyond his name, and I feel a surge of pride in this effort—a surge that lasts just long enough for me to discern what he has written. Could it be? No. But oh my god, yes. I LUV MI PENES.
This message clashes so profoundly with the spirit of this morning’s event that I can hardly register it. We are here for an annual tradition at my children’s Hebrew school, Tikkun Olam Day. The phrase tikkun olam means “repairing the world” and captures an idea at the heart of Judaism—that the universe is innately good but imperfect, and that our task as human beings is to help restore it to wholeness. Tikkun olam is often associated with social activism, but as Rabbi Zecher—who made history at our temple by becoming its first female senior rabbi three years ago—has reminded the students during today’s opening assembly, our world teems with small opportunities for repair work. Conserving water is tikkun olam. Giving to charity is tikkun olam. Opening the door for someone, expressing thanks, welcoming guests into one’s home—these, too, are tikkun olam. I’ve long admired Rabbi Zecher, who is not only extraordinarily wise and learned but also beautiful, her face warmly luminous beneath a halo of silver-white hair. And while this introductory talk was meant for the children, it moved me, as her words so often move me, to remember all the ways that I can do better.
Later in the morning, my son’s class will prepare trays of lasagna for Rosie’s Place, a local shelter for homeless women. Their teacher Morah Elena, who has crinkly eyes and a pixie haircut, has just finished reading them Tikkun Olam Ted, a fictional tale about a boy who loves improving the world. “Ted is small, but he spends his days doing very big things,” this picture book begins. On Sundays, Ted scrubs bottles for recycling. On Wednesdays, he walks dogs at the animal shelter. On Thursdays, he waters the garden. Ted has a sweet round face and pink circles on his cheeks. On Shabbat, the Jewish sabbath, he rests and dreams of tikkun olam. This book’s illustrations, so cheerful, bright and simple, had strangely carried me away, and I found myself imagining all the small ways our family could start helping our earth, and our neighbors, right away.
As the children continue drawing, Morah Elena tiptoes around the room in her leggings and fuzzy sweater, murmuring encouragement for their bright yellow suns, smiling stick figures, trees and kittens and doggies. My son grins at me, his eyes gleaming. Whatever he hopes to see on my face is not there. Who knows what is there, what arrangement of features could possibly represent this unholy rainbow of feelings: shock, bewilderment, a full-body disappointment that won’t stop growing. Where did he learn to write this? What does he mean by it? And why has he chosen this moment to share it, exposing flagrantly and publicly my maternal failings? For these, it feels, are what this paper announces most spectacularly at this moment, in this room, where I’ve come expressly as an adult emissary of my family’s goodness.
On Monday, Ted makes inappropriate jokes. On Tuesday, he mocks the endeavors of well-meaning people.
Fumbling, I pull my son’s paper from his hands and slip it into my bag. Did any of the other parents see? I scan the room. It appears not, but this brings little relief. It turns out it isn’t fear of outside judgment that has seized me, but my own self-judgment, more caustic and piercing than another person’s eyes could ever be. I know there are child development experts who believe in the power of nature over nurture, who would tell me my son is his own person, and that I’m no more responsible for his lapses than I am for his triumphs. But I’ve yet to meet a parent who can untangle their children from themselves this cleanly. In real time, on this real Sunday, my logic works more like this: because I am a mother, I am the moral epicenter of my family’s universe; my son’s fissures must therefore ripple out from some primal fracture in me.
I glare at my son in a way that’s meant to sink deep. My jaw is a hard dam, stanching what threatens to pour out. We’ll talk about this later, I hiss. Later. In private. Far away from this cramped amphitheater of good men and women and their very good children, seeking to better the earth. A few feet away, a girl in a silver headband sketches herself raking leaves. Beautiful, big-hearted, orange leaves that burst across the page like rising flames.
It’s not too late, I think, to put this behind us. Probably, I’m taking this too seriously. Probably this is something he picked up from a first grade classmate, one with several sweaty older brothers and no limits, whom he’s now imitating. He is only six. I pass him a fresh piece of paper and a handful of markers. His eyes narrow and his shoulders curl in like the edges of a shrinky-dink, but he grabs the paper from my hand, sullenly compliant, and then turns his hunched back to me and gets to work.
On my other side, my daughter has drawn purple dashes above her garden. “What are those?” I ask hopefully, and she tells me they’re a bird family. While the birds soar, thoughts descend on me like flies. I think about how we can never fully know our children’s minds. I think about Freud and try to remember what I can about the phallic stage. But mostly, I think about how mothering my son so often feels like trying to steer a bike with a wobbly wheel: no matter how determined I am to aim the handlebars, we go crashing together off the curb, again and again.
My son is finished with his new drawing. I ask to see it, but he demurs, covering it with the floppy arms of his sweatshirt, and I keep a respectful, and now wary, distance. Soon, the activity wraps up and the room begins to bustle. One of my son’s friends comes over, and they start talking and giggling, and then they’ve turned their markers into knights’ swords. The paper slips free from under my son’s elbow.
A sea of white, two bobbing words at the center.
FEK MOMMY.
This message clashes so profoundly with the spirit of this morning’s event that I can hardly register it. We are here for an annual tradition at my children’s Hebrew school, Tikkun Olam Day. The phrase tikkun olam means “repairing the world” and captures an idea at the heart of Judaism—that the universe is innately good but imperfect, and that our task as human beings is to help restore it to wholeness.
When I recount this incident to friends later, I turn it into a funny story, with all the character and color of a work of fiction. There we were, in the middle of repairing the world day, and he’s dropping F bombs on me! I get laughs every time. With three kids and ten years of experience as a mother, I’m practiced at the parental art of turning suffering to comedy. There’s the time my younger daughter had the flu and threw up all over me on the prescription pickup line at CVS—ha ha! And the time when, dizzy from lack of sleep, I took my colicky firstborn daughter out in the stroller, and it flipped over when the wheel hit a crack in the sidewalk. There she was, hanging upside down like a cured ham—he he! “Humor is just another defense against the universe,” the comedian Mel Brooks once said. When it comes to parenting, it’s felt like the most powerful defense I have against the orbit of crisis and rapture that is raising children.
But on the floor of my son’s Hebrew school classroom, my insides crumple in a way that isn’t funny at all. They crumple deep in my center, in the vast, quiet place where he spun into being, where his heart first quivered to life and his somersaults sent ripples across the flesh of my stomach so that I no longer knew where he ended and I began. I crumple because he’s spun out into the world, turning and turning and turning—and because I can’t seem to stop him from turning on me.
I love my son as I love all my children—which is to say, staggeringly, with an intensity that sometimes takes my breath away. When he emerged from my body and revealed that he was a boy, I was elated. We had our older daughter then, and while I would have welcomed another healthy baby girl with joy and gratitude, I secretly thanked the universe for giving us this opportunity to parent a boy as well. I felt thankful in a very particular way for my husband, who lost his own father when he was seven, and who now had the chance to honor his dad’s memory in perhaps the most cellular way possible—by being for his growing son all that his father had been for him. And I felt thankful that I could now experience what was by all accounts—or at least the accounts of my friends with male children—the uniquely tender bond that develops between a woman and her son. “There’s just something between a boy and his mama,” I remembered my friend Rebecca saying. Here was my chance to learn what this something was.
But from the very start, there’s been nothing easeful or simple about the interplay between my son and me. I ought not—I know, I know—to compare my children, but the fact is there’s an inevitable controlled experiment dynamic to parenting multiple kids, each one moving through the same stages of growth in more or less the same petri dish, announcing their differences whether we want them to or not. As infants, both of my daughters nursed calmly like painted cherubs, their tiny bodies nestled in the crook of my arm. Breastfeeding my son was more like a wrestling match, with him suddenly writhing and wailing at my breast until I lifted him away, and then writhing and wailing more furiously until I pulled him close again. Back and forth we’d go, his face growing redder, each round leaving me sweatier and more despairing than the last. If my husband were close by, I’d snap at him, enraged by his bodily freedom, and he would snap back, injured by my anger. If I could stay calm enough to remain pitiable, he would sometimes relieve me, gathering up our son and bouncing away with him to another room, shushing and shushing. It wasn’t that my husband could always subdue him—but he could, somehow, weather his cries in a way that didn’t feel to him intensely personal.
As he’s grown from baby to toddler to little boy, my son and I have continued to wrestle. My daughters, too, have their moments of upset, of supermarket aisle meltdowns and late-day tantrums and pre-adolescent stomps across the kitchen floor. But with them, I can usually find some way to help restore equilibrium, whether through hugs or soothing words, distraction or minor bribery. My daughters have received and absorbed whatever comfort or perspective I offer as a mother, unfolded and burgeoned in response, whereas my son seems slightly suspicious of it. The tools in my maternal storehouse so often bounce right off him, leaving me powerless to mother him. I’m reminded of the time his Lego helicopter fell and broke, and he collapsed on the floor in a seething heap. I knew enough not to downplay this mishap, which would make him feel belittled; or to assure him we could rebuild the helicopter, which would enrage him. So, on a whim, I kneeled down and shared with him something I often do when seized by strong emotions, which is to take three slow, deep breaths. “Do you want to try this with me?” I asked.
He covered his ears with his hands. “Stop talking to me about that yoga stuff!” he yelled.
Later that evening, as my husband and I cleaned up from dinner, I told him about this moment. “It’s like he’s impervious to strategy,” I said. My husband listened, scrubbing away at a pan. Then he shrugged a little, laid the pan on a towel to dry. “He is who he is,” he said, a response that in its understated mercy pretty much sums up why I married him.
It’s time for my son’s class to make the lasagna. Everyone shuffles with coats and bags toward the social hall, where the meal assembly will take place. My children and I make it as far as the classroom doorway, where I hold them back. I thrust my son’s paper under his nose with too much feeling. It’s the feeling not of a parent, controlled and centered, but of a person—a person who has been wronged and is now proffering proof of her injuries. ”Does this say what I think it says?” I demand, my voice strained and tight, and then I say nothing. I don’t scold or lecture or make him say “I’m sorry” because all of these require critical distance, which I don’t have. At night, I’ve been reading Peaceful Parent, Happy Kids, a parenting manual about the importance of steadiness and calm. I’m supposed to be mindful, to make myself a tranquil sea where my son’s pain can dissolve so he doesn’t become a damaged and derelict adult. But at this moment, I don’t care to feel peaceful, and it’s not my son’s happiness I’m after. What I’m feeling is wretched. What I want is to make him prove to me his goodness. Something in me will not rest until I’ve seen it displayed, until he’s fulfilled this day’s task. Because while there are all sorts of things I’m okay with my kids’ not being—star athletes or chess whizzes, budding maestros or spelling bee champions—I cannot abide their not being good.
On Wednesday, Ted ignores his teacher. On Thursday, he curses his mother.
“You hurt my feelings,” I snap. “Look at me—.”
I grab his chin. I do, I grab his chin.
“Look at me. You’ve hurt my feelings.”
My daughter stands perfectly still. She turns to me, then to her brother, then back to me, her face smooth and satisfied in its innocence.
But my son won’t look at me. I’ve never grabbed onto him like this before. He squeezes his eyes tight and claps his hands over his ears and pushes his body hard into the wall. His cheeks twist like wrung out cloths and he turns his face to the ceiling and silently howls. And then he howls for real: a gush of anger and misery that seems intended to drown out its own noise. Some stragglers in the hallway turn and look, and I see that I’ve exposed something that doesn’t belong here, that I must cover at once. I force my heart into a zone of peace. I open my arms and pull my son close with the strength of my deepest will. He squirms and pushes at me, and I lift him up and pull him to me tighter. The zipper of his sweatshirt pushes against my neck, toothed and cold. Slowly, his muscles ever-so-slightly ease, but not completely.
“Shhhh,” I say, stroking the back of his head. “Shhhh.” We end up, somehow, in a chair that’s out in the hallway. I’ve subdued my own agitated self and have become again a mother, soft flesh and bosom, gold-haloed and serene. My daughter trots over and clambers onto the other side of my lap, getting in on the goodness. There is too much weight on me, too much heat and skin, but this is the choice I’ve made. I lean my head back and allow myself to be covered.
I love my son as I love all my children—which is to say, staggeringly, with an intensity that sometimes takes my breath away.
The concept of tikkun olam originates not in the Torah, the Hebrew bible, but in a creation myth envisioned by the sixteenth century rabbi Isaac Luria, the father of the Jewish mystical tradition known as Kabbalah. I did not know this on Tikkun Olam Day, but learned it a few weeks later in a women’s study group run by Rabbi Zecher. Six of my closest friends and I sat, as we do once a month, around a coffee table in her book-lined office. On this morning, we read Genesis, and she explained how Judaism actually contains several creation stories, all of them complementing one another. We all knew the version where God created the world in six days, and then rested on the seventh. And the version where God forms Adam out of clay, and Eve from Adam’s rib. None of us knew Isaac Luria’s version, which Rabbi Zecher described to us.
In everyday life, creating something—a building, a meal, a sculpture—is generally thought of as an act of external production. Here is the architect, the chef, the sculptor, and there, before her, is the thing she’s made. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, the world’s creation tends to be understood this way, too: on the one side there is God, and on the other there is the world God brings into being and then gazes upon, satisfied. Think of Michelangelo’s “Creation of Adam” on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Soaring and diaphanous, God reaches his finger towards Adam’s naked, muscled form, as if he has sculpted this figure and is now, with divine power, animating it. Adam is of God, but Adam is not God.
But Luria, Rabbi Zecher explained, questioned this model of divine creation. If God is everywhere, he wondered, how can there be any space beyond God for creation to emerge? He envisioned an alternative origin story in which the world arises not through an act of production, but through tsintsum, or an act of contraction. In the beginning, God’s presence fills the universe. But then God takes a breath and withdraws deeper into itself, creating a space for earth and life to come into being, making yesh (something) from ayin (nothing). In this version of the world’s beginning, God does not so much impose or demand, but pull back and allow. The word tsimtsum, so mysterious and peculiar, felt familiar. Finally, I remembered that this was the name, in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, of the Japanese freighter that sinks on its passage across the Pacific, leaving the adolescent Pi stranded with a tiger on a lifeboat. I’d taught this book many times to my high school students, never quite seeing, as I did now, the connection between this swallowed ship and Pi’s spiritual growth as he rises, orphaned, to the demands of nine solitary months on a boundless ocean.
But I do not yet have Luria or Martel to think of as we stand at our lasagna-making station. I’m just determined to get the rest of this morning right. The air is sour with tomato sauce and around us spoons clink and bags of shredded cheese rip as the children follow their instructions. My daughter’s eyes brighten as I lift her onto the counter and help her pry open a tub of ricotta—she loves messy projects. But my son sits on the floor, rigid and brooding. Once again, he will not do what I want him to do.
The fact that my children’s tendencies align perfectly with gender stereotypes—my girls conscientious and people-pleasing, my boy willful and devil-may-care—isn’t lost on me. It only makes me strain more aggressively for things to be otherwise. Is this alignment just coincidence? In what unconscious, unspoken ways might my children’s community, their teachers, their schools—might my husband and I—have steered our children toward these gendered ways of being? At a time when “toxic masculinity” has become a household phrase, there’s widespread understanding for the first time of the consequences of raising girls to toe the line, and boys to flout it. I’ve long been a feminist and a champion of gender equality, but as a mother during this time in history, I feel this calling in a new and intimate way. The lessons of our era hover, always, in my mind, reminding me that my girls will become women—my boy, a man—and that what I impart to them in the interim in crucial. I want all my children, of course, to be empathic and kind, decent and honorable. But what I long for most pressingly—what it feels my work hinges on—is to raise a good son.
On Friday, Ted imposes his will. On Saturday, he acts on his urges.
In our aluminum tray, the lasagna grows. My daughter’s lips pucker with concentration as she scoops sauce from a jar and spreads it with the back of her spoon. On and on she goes, scooping and spreading, layering and admiring. Another parent engages me in small talk, and I follow the script as best I can. But everywhere I look, slabs of noodles are being slathered in sauce and sprinkled with fluffy handfuls of mozzarella—offerings of care and nourishment in which my boy will have no part.
Finally, we’re released. We pick up my older daughter from her fourth grade classroom, and then I pile the kids into the car and drive the half hour to my sister-in-law Jacqui’s house. My niece opens the door in a unicorn headdress, and the four cousins go thumping upstairs together to play.
I have come to Jacqui’s because she’s my go-to partner in commiseration, my favorite person to turn to in unhappy times. Whatever I tell her, I can count on her to be unshaken, or to outdo me with a worse tale of woe. I lie down on her couch and tell her about my morning while she clears lunch dishes and feeds the dog scraps. I don’t sugar coat or mine my experience for laughs. I don’t say, “This might sound funny on the surface, but….”
What I say on that dog-hair covered couch, on the sagging end of that tired mothering weekend, is that I have lost myself. I have lost myself in becoming a mother, and I feel I can’t project with any truth what I’m, of course, supposed to project, which is that the sacrifices have all been worth it. I’ve loved and given and toiled and grieved as a mother. I’ve run marathons that ended in new marathons, and then I’ve run these new marathons, collapsing exhausted. I’ve tapped into reserves of energy I never knew existed, and I’ve siphoned away these reserves, drilling down deeper for more. I know I should rise above the challenges that come my way, for this is what mothers—the world’s anointed absorbers of pain—must do. But I cannot rise above my son’s fuck you.
Jacqui finishes loading the dishwasher and then looks at me, toweling off her hands, her face unchanged.
“So he got angry at you for ruining his penis joke?” she says.
“Well, yeah,” I say.
“And to deal with that anger, he expressed his feelings on paper, in writing?” she says.
“I guess.”
“Even though he has a language delay, and gets Early Intervention, and writing is hard for him?” she says. “He didn’t yell or scream?”
I don’t say anything.
“That’s a fucking awesome parenting success story, if you ask me,” she says, and then she sits down on the couch next to me and reaches for the remote control. Outside the window, the barren March afternoon darkens to evening. Inside, the television blooms neon, illuminating Jacqui’s face in joyous flashes.
I’m beginning to see how I’ve gotten this day all wrong.
In Luria’s creation myth, something wild and bizarre happens after God contracts, something out of a science-fiction movie. Divine light enters the newly formed darkness, carried there in ten sacred vessels—like a fleet of rockets rising through a cinematic sky. But some of these vessels are too fragile to contain God’s light, and they burst and shatter, scattering divine sparks across the world. Luria proposes that if our world is imperfect—if there is evil and injustice and heartache and anguish—it’s because of this shevirah, this breaking of the vessels, the cosmic accident that thwarted God’s plan for us all.
In contemporary Judaism, this idea is at the root of tikkun olam. It’s through acts of restoration, or tikkun, that the world, our olam, can be brought closer to the divine wholeness God intended for it. Through tikkun olam big and small—from sidestepping an ant in your path to marching twenty miles to protest injustice—humans can become God’s co-creators, each of us doing our part to heal the world’s fractures.
I love the image of the vessels, so beautiful in their peculiar specificity. And I take comfort in the idea of tikkun olam because of its emphasis on action. As a Jew, I am not charged with regular repentance—though often, repenting is what I know I must do. Self-punishment isn’t my main task, either, although I reproach myself hourly. My main task is to enter each moment looking for the good choice to make, the generous action to take, gathering whatever scattered sparks I see.
My children’s sparks are everywhere—on the floor, the stairs, the rug. They accumulate in corners and under tables. They trail their bodies like crumbs. The more I train my eyes to see them, the harder it becomes to lose sight of their light. What more can I do but collect them in my hands, holding them up for my children to see? What more can I say but “Here, here is your goodness. Look how brightly it glows.”
I love the image of the vessels, so beautiful in their peculiar specificity. And I take comfort in the idea of tikkun olam because of its emphasis on action. As a Jew, I am not charged with regular repentance—though often, repenting is what I know I must do
We’re home. My husband has returned from his trip, and there’s balance again in the house, a lightening in my step at the sight of his bags flung down in the entryway. I want to unburden myself, to tell him everything, but this will have to wait until the kids are asleep. For now, it’s enough to have him here, his presence alone making my earlier angst feel dreamlike and alien. As we clean up the dinner mess and coax the children upstairs for baths and toothbrushing, I settle back comfortably into partnership. One of us will put the two girls to bed, and one of us, our son. I take my son.
His room waits for us—his bed with the checkered comforter, the dresser covered in Legos, the splashes of Pokémon cards on the rug, the overturned beanbag chair. After I read him two picture books, after I pull down his shades and fill his water cup and turn on the white noise of his sound machine, I gather the far-flung pieces of myself and climb into bed with him in the dark.
“This morning, at Hebrew school, you felt upset with me for taking your paper away,” I say.
He does not respond.
“I’m glad you love all the parts of yourself,” I say. “You should! All of you is beautiful and special. And in a way, that note was also kind of funny. I didn’t see the funniness earlier because I was too mad. I was mad you weren’t doing what you were told to.”
His face tilts in my direction. Light from the street slips through the crack in his shade, making diamond patterns on the wall.
“But I think there are better ways for people to show anger than I did, kinder ways than snatching things away, or using harsh and ugly words. Don’t you think?”
His comforter rustles as he turns onto his belly, and I know—because I am his mother—that he hears what I’m saying. I say it out loud anyway.
“I wish I had shown my anger better. I love you so much, baby boy. And I’m sorry.”
I feel for my son’s hand and squeeze it tight. He wriggles in closer, nudging his head into the space above my shoulder. The white noise whirs. I can feel his hair on my neck, as damp and matted as the day he was born—that April day six years ago, when I took a breath, contracted, and he came to life.
Now, again, I contract, holding back my power and my will, leaving room for him to rise into this moment in his own way, to make of this space his own creation.
Ted holds his mother’s cheeks between his hands. Ted kisses one side of her face, and then the other. Ted locks his body around her like a magnet, like a clasp.
There will be time, maybe tomorrow, to rake the leaves. There will be time for buying a compost bin and walking the dogs at the shelter and watering the plants. But tonight, we lie on the bed looking up at the ceiling. We watch the splinters of light rising up like stars, and we do our imperfect best to repair the world.
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Nicole Graev Lipson writes often about parenthood, motherhood, gender, and feminism. Her essays and journalism have appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Fourth Genre, River Teeth, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Hudson Review, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Marie Claire, and Nylon, among other publications. Lipson’s work has been awarded a 2023 Pushcart Prize, and three of her essays have been selected as a Notables in The Best American Essays. She lives with her husband and three children in Brookline, Massachusetts.