Jewish Mom Overboard!

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It’s important to have a somewhat orderly home, serve yummy food, and live a healthy lifestyle, because these are all important ingredients in achieving every Jewish mom’s ultimate goal– healthy, happy, passionately-Jewish children.

But have you ever found yourself going overboard with the cleaning, the cooking, the health-ing?

When this happens, your JewishMOM sirens should start roaring, and your personal Homeland Security should go on Orange Alert.

For example, the mom who wants to keep her home so hotel-room-sterilized-toilet-level clean that her kids are tense and stressed because the kids want a home where they can be kids without getting screamed at, and their mom wants a museum. The mother is headed for Better Homes and Gardens, but definitely not for healthy, happy, passionately-Jewish children.

For example, the mother who works herself to exhaustion preparing 4 different kinds of chicken, 7 cakes, and 25 variations of eggplant salad for Shabbat. By the time Shabbat comes in, the food is out of this world, but the mother sitting opposite her children at Friday night dinner is out of her mind- a JewishMOM monster. This mother is headed for Gourmet magazine, but definitely not for healthy, happy, passionately-Jewish children.

For example, the mother who keeps her son home from school when his 7th grade classmates celebrate their birthday parties lest he should ingest any sugar or white flour. This miserable teenager goes from door to door to panhandle his friends for a forbidden pretzel, an illegal cracker, or, if he is feeling especially daring, a felonous cookie—desperate for anything other than the millet and broccoli which is his mother’s current craze. This mother might be headed for Vegan Mother of the Mother, but definitely not for healthy, happy, passionately-Jewish children.

In summary:

It’s great to have an orderly home.

It’s great to serve good food.

It’s great to live a healthy lifestyle.

But when we pursue these goals to the point that our kids wish they could move in with the neighbors, then we’ve gotten way off-course and are about to plunge head-first overboard into the choppy and stormy waters.

Believe me, my family and I have been down there in that freezing water from time to time, and it ain’t fun for anybody.

JewishMOM—beware!

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