Third Place: Skin in the Game

Ce qu’il y a de plus profond dans l’homme, c’est sa peau.

The deepest part of a human being is her/his skin.

-Paul Valéry

Tobias, my firstborn, is eight days old, and his circumcision, or brit milah—the covenant of circumcision—welcomes him into our Jewish community and the entire Jewish tribe. The ceremony and celebration are held in the orthodox synagogue where my husband Brian and I belong. Friends, family and all our extended family fill the sanctuary. There are close to one hundred guests. My very non-Jewish mother—now a newly minted grandmother— arrived from Norway where I grew up, eight days ago, on the actual day I gave birth. She and I stand in the women’s section, two rows away from the stage where our rabbi performs the circumcision (our rabbi is also a mohel, a Jew trained in the practice of ritual circumcision). My father-in-law, also on the stage, sits on a tall, carved wooden chair with regal, red velvet upholstery, his firstborn grandchild nestled on a pillow on his lap, a white, silken prayer shawl draped over the patriarch’s shoulders and his yarmulke perched on his bald, shiny head. Brian, my husband, stands tall next to his dad, and he sways slowly from side to side, clutching a prayer book, a siddur, to his chest. I can tell he is in a deep place, part anxious, part exhilarated. Our rabbi talks briefly to the gathering about how each baby is born with great potential, that we are about to honor the covenant between Abraham and God, which has defined the Jewish people for millennia. Despite the rabbi’s beaming face and gentle voice, I worry that my mom thinks it all sounds crazy, and I look over at her and meet her eyes with a smile, as if to soothe the strangeness she might feel.

Just that morning while getting ready for the big, emotional day, I tried to console my mother’s visible discomfort with the idea of anyone hurting her innocent and perfectly created grandchild. It’s not customary to circumcise baby boys in Norwegian culture and when I underwent an orthodox conversion to Judaism before marrying Brian—thus embracing a traditional Jewish life—it had been a lot for my parents to come to terms with.

When the rabbi turns and bends over Tobias, the room falls silent. All our friends’ young children seated on the floor in front of the stage stop fidgeting, their full attention to the ritual taking place in front of them. The baby is quiet as well, content and dozing because I have just fed him. But that quickly changes when his romper is unbuttoned and his diaper removed, and the rabbi deftly prepares and snips my son’s foreskin. He yelps and begins to whimper, and my doting mother-in-law, who stands on my other side, takes my hand in hers and squeezes it. She beams through tears of joy, a Jewish grandson! The baby’s crying stops within seconds as the rabbi touches a gauze pad, soaked in the iconic sweet and kosher Manischewitz wine, to my newborn’s lips. An age-old custom: let the baby suck enough on the doused, deep purple cloth until he settles and falls back asleep.

My mother is ashen as the rabbi chants blessings in Hebrew amidst “Amens!” and “Mazel tovs!” from those gathered to witness and celebrate the new member of the tribe. Then he loudly announces the name of the new little community member: Tuvia Yaakov Meir ben Chune Moshe. My son has a Hebrew name, which will be used in religious contexts, and an English one which honors both his American and Norwegian heritage: Tobias Thor Lichtenstein. My little Viking Jewish hero.

I look at Brian who stands in front of the ark that holds the Torah scrolls, while our son’s chosen godparent carries my baby toward me. But I am cold sweating because I can sense how incredibly foreign and difficult this event is for my mom, while at the same time, I am proud and feel an intense sense of belonging to my new Jewish community. Such mixed emotions: I am dizzy, the moment surreal. My mother grips the back of the seat in front of her while fighting back tears, and I think I hear her mumble, “Barbarians.”

*

“When we are sad, and angry, and lost, and lonely, our skin bubbles, and itches, and weeps,” notes Christina Patterson, one of the contributing authors in Beneath the Skin: Great Writers on the Body. My skin, as it turns out, is no exception. At some point during these early child-rearing years (I had three sons in four years; three circumcisions), the skin on my heels was so cracked that I was barely been able to walk. For a period, my scalp was so irritated I developed crusty scabs from all the scratching. I didn’t think about my skin in connection with my emotional life, back then. I was often uncomfortable with how it felt, how it itched and cracked, but I never connected the dots.

*

Around four years after Tobi’s circumcision, the familiarity of my mom’s voice from across the Atlantic Ocean reminds me how homesick I am. On this day, I hold the phone between my shoulder and ear, hands busy changing my youngest son Benya’s diaper. Suddenly I am a daughter, a child even, more than a mother. Tears well up from somewhere deep inside while the baby participates in the conversation in his own way, with blabbers and coos. His dimpled hands clutch a small plastic mirror framed in primary colors; his plump four-month-old body propped on a foamy changing pad strapped to the top of the washer in a corner of our messy kitchen.

Home videos from these early years of my boys’ lives reveal a clutter all around the house that today strikes me as strange and unfamiliar. Toppling piles of books, toys, and clothing strewn on counters, chairs, and tables, Legos are scattered on the floor, bulletin-boards stuffed with layers of drawings, kindergarten certificates and school pictures. The images resuscitate visceral memories of how full this time in my life really was, and how tapped out I was.

I’ve called my mom because I am exhausted and wish she were with me in America to help with my three little active boys, our cavernous, impractical old house, and our two dogs always underfoot, eternally seeking the pre-children lovin’ in which they basked only four years earlier. The dirty diaper I’ve folded and set aside slides off the surface and lands on the floor with a thump, heavy from Benya’s pee and poop. The passing whiff hits my nostrils. I quickly put my foot between the diaper and one of the dogs running toward it, attracted by the same odor.

“No, Shooggie, no!” I call out and the pooch slides to a halt, her snout crashing into my calf. She withdraws with a sulk, turning once to double-check that the interesting smelling object remains off limits.

“I wish you were here, Mamma,” I say, swallowing the lump in my throat.

“I do, too, my flower” she answers, and then quickly reminds me of the many international conferences she has to attend in the next few months. My mom started as a secretary and then was head-hunted and trained to become a market analyst for one of Norway’s largest maritime shipping companies. Now she holds this advanced position as the only woman among male industry leaders. She is proud of her accomplishments, and normally I am proud of her as well, but today I just want a doting, selfless mom.

“I also have a golf-trip planned to Mauritius with the ladies from my golf club next month, and then a tournament at the most scenic golf-course in Norway!”

I imagine her tanned and smiling, winning trophies, hitting birdies, and enjoying her gin and tonic at the 19th hole, surrounded by men who admire the gusto their wives don’t have.

“I’m sooo tired,” I say, “and Brian works pretty much seven days a week and comes home late at night most of the time.” My voice cracks and I sniffle into the receiver.

Holding the baby’s tummy with one hand I bend to pick up the dirty diaper from the floor; my fingers accidentally slip into the now cold and wet poop. Benya begins to squirm, I begin to sweat again, and I hear his brothers squabble in the den, accompanied by Big Bird and Cookie Monster singing their fucking happy song on TV. The dogs bark at something outside—their acute hearing their biggest (pain-in-the-ass) asset. Waves of nausea provoked by the stench of my own unbathed pits and shit-covered fingers roll through me, at the same time as a deep longing for my family in Norway overwhelms me. The now morose me slumps to the floor, holding the happy gurgling chubster-baby close. I begin to sob. With my back against the cold, metal washer, Benya immediately roots for his mid-morning snack, and I oblige, lifting my breast-milk-stained jersey to let him have his fill, again. His warmth normally comforts me, but in this moment all I notice is my loneliness.

“Well, my gold nugget,” Mom begins, one of her usual monikers for me making me even more emotional since it reminds me that I too am somebody’s child, “nobody said it was going to be easy to have three little ones so close.”

I yearned for my mom’s voice to soothe me, to tell me that these early years with starting a family are always the most difficult. I wanted her to comfort me by assuring me that energy, order, and manageability will return in my life soon enough; that she is proud of me. I wished she could have said, “Take a deep breath, my flower, and let me treat you to a massage or a mani-pedi and let me see if I can take some time off from work soon, to come to America and help you.”

I could have called my mother-in-law Joyce, a true yiddishe mame who lived an hour away and was both willing and able to help, since she was a homemaker who could not wait to get her hands on her grandchildren, my sons being her first precious three. She was always generous with her time. But she was not my mother. She understood and encouraged all things Jewish surrounding our family, however, while her selfless devotion was something I both benefited from and enjoyed (the food, the hugs, the availability!), it was also very different from anything with which I was familiar. I missed the way my mom smelled; I wanted to breathe in her Shalimar perfume and be comforted by her, not my mother-in-law.

Looking back, I see myself suspended—stretched even—between the ideals of my career-oriented, busy and, I imagined, fulfilled Scandinavian mom, and my family oriented Jewish-American mother-in-law who’d sacrificed her professional training as a physical therapist to be a homemaker. Each represented a certain version of what it meant to be a women, wife, mother, and daughter. I found myself conflicted by the two extreme role models that showed me ways to be, neither showing me my way. I had to forge my own path, of course, and it was emotionally lonely at times. My mother didn’t appreciate my mother-in-law’s choices, and vice versa.

Meanwhile, my life pulled me in a much more traditional direction than I ever imagined. I’ve wondered a whole lot what “pulled” or pushed me.

Brian and my home was built in 1917 with a third floor with five rooms and a bathroom to house a full staff, as it did back in the origin days. When we bought the house in 1998 (when the boys were almost 4, almost 2, and 4 months old), the realtor told us that, in the 1920s, the family who lived here had not only servants lodged on the 3rd floor, but a driver, a cook, and a gardener, too. When our friends came over to check out our new digs, we’d playfully push the servant buzzers located on walls throughout the formerly grand house, and we’d all laugh at how nobody showed up. When I brought out and served drinks, we’d joke that I was the staff, but to me, this was not a joke at all. My marriage and life had turned into an uber-traditional—or was it retrograde? —Jewish-American and gender-role segregated incubator, (think Mad Men) and it was all my own doing: I had played an active role in enabling that environment. A carefully crafted stage-set, I had been thirsty for a domestic setting different from the one in which I was raised. I had wanted a marriage not like that of my parents, where my mom was the one with a regular and dependable salary, and my dad, too generous for his own good, was the nurturer who often floundered financially through various unsuccessful, entrepreneurial business projects. When faced with the rules and practicalities of a responsible adult life, where he had to pay bills and respect tax-laws, he failed dismally. I never really made a conscious choice, but I had married a parsimonious tax accountant, after all.

It was my creation, this domesticity and spousal arrangement that overwhelmed me as much as I wanted it. In their own way, then, the pale blue-ish stretch marks on my belly, the uneven pattern of bars in their parallel organization, ensure that the story of my pregnancies and maternal exhaustion remains written on my body.

*

What are the life-marks on our skin if not what bears witness to our past—the white scar on a woman’s knee that reminds her of a childhood fall off her bike, the blue tattoo on a sailor’s arm that tells the tale of his ports of call, the faded numbers on the Holocaust survivors forearm that whisper, you will never forget…

When I told my dear childhood friend Anne I was writing about my stretch marks, she said, “I love and strut my huge scar from my C-section! I’m proud of it!” Thanks to her positive and body-positive attitude, the marks on our skin suddenly become medals of achievement, these scars from the ordinary life battles we have survived. Our bodies, our skin, our storybooks: wars and victories, sorrows and joys, all inscribed there and connecting us to our memories, to our stories, and to ourselves. And to our meaning.

-Nina Lichtenstein

Nina B. Lichtenstein is a native of Oslo, Norway who moved to the U.S. when she was 19. She holds a PhD in French literature from University of Connecticut and an MFA in creative nonfiction from University of Southern Maine. Her essays have appeared in The Washington Post, Lilith, Full Grown People, Tablet Magazine, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, and AARP's "The Ethel," among other places, as well as in two anthologies, Ink by Hippocampus Books (Spring 2022) and Stained, (forthcoming) represented by the Deborah Harris Agency in Israel. Nina's memoir "Body: My Life in Parts" is looking for a home, and she is at work on a new memoir about how she became "the Viking Jewess."