Mommy writes: I've found that having small kids and being a mother is pretty much the same routine whether you live in West LA or Boston or London or Israel. You get 'em up, dress 'em, bring them to school. In the late afternoon you pick 'em up, bring them to friends' houses and afterschool stuff like swimming lessons and gymnastics classes, come home, do homework, feed them, put them to bed. You spend the weekends entertaining them.
Your geographical location matters little -- frankly, what matters most is your income and therefore how many activities you can afford for the kids, and how much you have to do yourself, how much hired help you can get to support you and clean up after you and watch the kids sometimes so you can have some form of adult existence once in a while -- and, in our Jewish sphere, whether or not you do Shabbat -- do you spend your weekends eating and praying or at the pool and the beach?
The difference is, obviously, what you do during the time they are in school. I spend it primarily on the computer and the telephone, with the occasional coffee or lunch with a friend, usually an ex-American -- so again, does it matter that I'm in Israel?
I'm really, really glad that I spent my first four years in Israel working and not having kids, so I have a clues as to what real Israeli life is. I used to poo-poo the town I now live in. I used to say, "If I wanted to live in New Jersey, I'd go for the real thing."
But I gave up. It's too exhausting to try to be hip and cool and urban and happening AND raise kids. The suburbs are the place to do it, for now. I'm accepting it as a finite period of my life and am trying not to let too many brain cells die in the process, so hopefully when my kids get older I'll still have a life and a personality. I figure that talking to people like you help this process along. It's like the mental equivalent of the maintenance on their bodies that the Hollywood moms do.
