April 7, 2025

Sweetheart, have you eaten enough?

Are you sure you need another bowl? 

My mother asked me both of these questions five years apart, both after I had eaten my first round of matzoh ball soup at the Seder table.

My quarterback cousin Jonathan routinely ate an entire tray of brisket each year, rating it inexplicably better than the last every time, bragging in baritone about his newest shiksa girlfriend. We would all go around the table praising my grandmother’s cooking skills, always acknowledging her mother, and her mother’s mother, and her mother’s mother’s mother from whom the recipes came from. We had to tell her how the food was because she would never eat it, not that anyone else noticed. 

Who tried the salmon? She asked, to which my mom would respond in flattery and falsities as she fantasized about the counteractive workout she had to look forward to the next morning. She could have allotted some buttery, onion-filled, ancestral food into her diet too if she just ignored the four glass rule.

In Judaism, wine represents joy, it represents celebration, a divine connection between each other, a bounty of love and faith. The Haggadah– the book we read at Passover that tells the story of the holiday– commands those at the seder to drink four glasses of wine. According to Wikipedia, they represent the “four expressions of deliverance promised by God:” I will bring out, I will deliver, I will redeem, I will take. The truth is, I never cared enough to know why my grandparents and parents and aunts and uncles and one by one my cousins abided by these drinking rules, I just knew I didn’t like it. I couldn’t stand being out of control by being the only one in control. I hated hearing my mom slur her words, or my aunt spill her third glass of red across the table, only to refill it and blame her poor motor skills. In her defense, she does have a history of clumsiness that I’m sure are only amplified, not caused, by inebriation. Or, maybe– just maybe– I didn’t like it because I was jealous of being left out. Hypocritically and inevitably, as soon as I was old enough to “but when Jonathan was my age…” my way into my first glass, I didn’t stop until I, too, fulfilled my Seder commitments. 

Growing up, I also hated being the youngest in the family. Not in my immediate, as my sister Jamie is two years younger and a whole lot smarter than me, but on both sides of my extended family, the two of us are the babies. The four questions are read by the youngest person at the seder table, so the duty fell on Jamie every year. The questions are meant to be an impetus to tell the story of the Jewish Exodus from Egypt. It is a search for an explanation as to why this night is different from hgfevery other night, something that gave me pause and panic in and of itself: Were all other nights simply the same? For a number of years I would reluctantly sing along with Jamie, martyring myself with the sacrifice of momental humiliation. Finally I became a woman, and silently judged everything everyone else did from the comfort of my reclined chair and blue iPhone 5c. By “became a woman,” I am naturally referring to getting bat mitzvahed. This coming of age ceremony is supposed to occur at the ripe age of thirteen. For some reason, reform synagogues allow girls to do it at twelve instead. Probably because we “mature” faster than boys, likely because it meant old men could have sex with children with legality back in the day, and definitely because of sexism. Ironically, I got my period for the first time exactly one month and one day before my own bat mitzvah was scheduled. I wore a pad that day “just in case.” I felt more like a woman on May 7, 2016 than I have in the decade since. 

I put up an awkward fight when my mom and I went dress shopping. I was forced to wear a business casual lavender number for the temple, with sleeves to cover my shoulders so that God didn’t sexualize me, or something like that. I got a giant, poofy, ugly, perfect deep purple ball gown for the party after– which was awesome, by the way, you should have been there. I hated wearing dresses, but I would always concede reluctantly for high holidays and important events. My mom suggested I wear a skirt to Passover one year– Jonathan’s latest girlfriend would be there, as would my grandfather’s 95 year old family friend, so I was meant to dress to impress. My sister put her outfit on quickly and quietly. She would gain the favor of everyone at the seder. As much as I didn’t want to let her win in this imagined competition, I didn’t want to wear the skirt even more. I threw a fit and cried and ended up showing up wearing skinny jeans and puffy eyes. 

I don’t know what it was about this little piece of cloth that bothered me so much. This fabric that we wrap around our feminine figures, these half-dresses that incessantly remind the wearer that their hips were evolved for child-bearing. We, as women, are expected to wear them. Some, like the Hasidic woman with seven kids (probably more now) whose husband ran my Jewish day camp, have to wear them. Whether people wore them for conformity or comfort, I wasn’t and still am not sure, but it confused me as to why I couldn’t be one of them. Why did I have to throw a temper tantrum whenever one was brought near me? 

I didn’t own my own skirt until last month.

I still haven’t worn it yet. 

It’s sitting in my closet, testing me. Taunting me, and tempting me. I think there’s something about my newfound confidence in myself that drew me towards it, a comfortability with the self that stemmed from discarding part of my gender identity for another. I’m still a woman, don’t get me wrong, I have the period-stained G-strings and rusty dermaplaner to prove it. But I’ve included “they” after “she” in my Instagram bio, and I’ve re-earned my own femininity by embracing the fact that that might not be all there is. 

The skirt I bought pressed into my stomach in the fitting room. It showed the curve of my hips and the slight bulge at the base of my torso. I was bloated, or felt bloated, and I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the evidence of lunch the skirt revealed. I looked in the mirror and saw my mother. Full bellies might as well be an official tenet of Judaism; every holiday has to do with food, and every Jew has something to say about it. I ate and ate and ate feelings and friends and fear until the button of my seder jeans popped open. 

My sister stopped eating when she was twelve, months before her womanhood was achieved. I would have noticed, I would have done something– anything– but I was in my first year of high school, and the biggest issue on my mind was blending into the privileged white walls of my public high school and fitting into my second-hand softball pants. Years later, she allowed her belly to be full again right when I began to empty mine. Fingers once used for pleasure became euphoric in a different sense altogether. I tried to shrink myself invisible, to abide by the societal drive for women to neither be heard nor seen. It suddenly became so unacceptable to be full that I started looking forward to Yom Kippur, and once considered not even breaking the fast. It was devastating to me at the time, but the universal, sensual, religious sensation of food prevented me from ever fully succeeding in my self-sabotaging goals. One night when I was particularly self-deprecating, having just failed a test, gone through a particularly messy breakup, and dealt with the mundane drama that seems inevitable to the underdeveloped brain of a 19 year old, I wrote in my journal: “I’m not even good at starving myself.”

Yet another thing my sister was better than me at. 

There hasn’t been a single holiday where my body has not been commented on to some extent, almost always by a fellow female family member. You’d think that these intelligent, accomplished women who pride themselves on their performative liberalism and call themselves feminists would have tried to protect me. I would have thought that they would have at least tried not to be the very perpetrators of my injurious self-image. 

I’m better now, I force myself to be. Maybe that’s why I bought the skirt. Maybe somewhere deep, deep, deep down I don’t hate my body. It is what allows me to be, after all.