Tradition!

Let’s just get this over with, shall we?

Photo by Matthew Angus on Unsplash

I’m at the Miss Havisham stage of the pandemic. Life has been on hold for so long I’ve stopped noticing. But rather than an old wedding dress, I’ve shaken that Dickensian image with a muumuu to disguise the absence of a bra, and instead of manipulating my teen children, I ignore them by binge-listening true crime podcasts while we pass each other in the kitchen like ghosts. That’s because we, unlike a lot of the world, are still fastidiously trying to avoid COVID.

My husband’s cousin and his wife on the east coast are also hunkered down, but they were recently forced to embrace life’s persistent forward momentum. After several rescheduling attempts, they accepted reality and gently convinced their 13-year-old daughter that it was time have her bat mitzvah virtually. When they shared the news with guests, we finally cancelled the hotel and flight reservations we’d optimistically rescheduled a couple of times since March.

“So what’s the plan then?” I asked my husband. As someone who is charitably only vaguely Jewish, I am accustomed to taking my marching orders on issues related to ritual and family gatherings from him.

“Zoom,” was all he said as he blocked out a two-hour window on the family google calendar, as if that was all I needed to know. Which it was.