Iron Mom

Our friend Jacob Warrenfeltz, who also drew the cover for To the Rescue!, agreed to do the coolest thing ever: make a maternity shirt with a foetal “Eddie” from Iron Maiden. Sarah is wearing the shirt in the picture above, taken in a hotel lobby – we ended up having the shirt shipped here in advance of arriving, so we were nervous about whether it would make it)

We’re in Austin to see Iron Maiden with special guest Megadeth (because nothing says “repentance” between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur like awesome heavy metal). Actually, if they do “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, that’s all about repentance, but that’s another story…

One Year Later

Rosh Hashana just ended, and I was struck by something: Last year at this time, Sarah and I had just been through a miscarriage and were on fertility medicines which were not working, and I had a PICC line, because my Lyme disease just wasn’t getting better. I only saw blackness ahead; it felt like the sun would never come out. I didn’t say stuff like that out loud – it tends to freak people out – but I had felt really hopeless.

This Rosh Hashana was different. Sarah is 23 weeks pregnant, my Lyme is in remission, and while I’ve still got health problems, they’re not anything like what I was dealing with before. Now, I see the world through a different lens. The person who I was feels like a stranger.

But I know people who are suffering this year – who have problems every bit as crushing to them as mine were to me. Their year got worse at the same time mine got better. A few of them are open and public, and others are not.

I pray that God alleviates their suffering, and that next year, their suffering feels as distant to them as mine does to me now. Gam zu ya’avor – and this, too, shall pass.

And in the meantime, I’ll endeavor to do what I can for those whom I can help, and try to be compassionate as a principle, in the manner of “first, do no harm”.

God willing, it will be a good year for all of us.