Sometime in between bedtime and baseball-adjusted bedtime last Monday, Roman Anthony hit the go-ahead home run for the United States against the Dominican Republic in the World Baseball Classic, and my sixth grader went wild.
She launched herself at me, and I mean she leapt into my arms. Truth? It’s hard to prepare for that moment; you just catch your kid and hold on, because for three seconds the world has boiled itself down to one hug and one baseball flying into the Miami night. And even though the USA would lose in the final to Venezuela, well, we’ll always have Monday.
And, of course, I caught her. In truth, I nearly matched her excitement.
With Passover coming, I keep thinking about this moment.
Not the baseball, but my children; their needs, their timing, their intensity, and the way they show up as different versions of themselves, usually (always?) wanting something different from you, often without warning.
Because we don’t just have a crazy Sox fan. There’s also the eighth grader who played four soccer games in two days last weekend and just needed a Gatorade. Then there’s my 22‑year‑old law student in New York, whose laptop died and who needed a new one…immediately. Yay, Amazon. Then there’s my 11th grader needing a ride to babysitting at the exact moment I thought I might relax for the first time all day, and also the 20‑year‑old who urgently required emergency Chipotle at Brandeis on a random Monday for reasons unknown and unquestioned.
(They’ve come a long way since 2016, no?)
None of them is the same child.
And all of them are.
And this is exactly where Passover comes in.
Not because of the home run, but because of the kids. The Haggadah pretends to talk about four different children, but any parent knows the truth that these four children are the same kid on four different days, or four different moods, or four different moments. After all, there’s a healthy amount of unpredictability embedded in this whole parenting thing.
Especially when you have five, and not just four.
The seder teaches the spiritual version of what we learn the hard way, that as parents, you don’t give one answer. You give the right answer for the child who’s in front of you right now.
And there’s your bridge between the Haggadah and 21st-century parenting, between leaving Egypt and muting the family group chat, and between the text we read and the lives we’re actually living. Parenting, if you reduce it all the way down, is the art of responding to the child you have right now, over and over again, even when you’re exhausted, or late, or holding a kid who just jumped into your arms because a long fly ball cleared the fences at the World Baseball Classic.
And once you realize that, the whole seder becomes an instruction manual in disguise; this is really the ancient wisdom. We are meant to see each child, adjust our tone, make room for joy, leave space for questions, and above all, not to panic when someone needs something unexpectedly.
But what about us? What do we get?
On top of the pride and joy we all experience from these little flashes of feeling needed and appreciated, we know (WE KNOW) that parenting is hard, and holy, work. So to give us a little permission structure within the seder to take a break from the relentless absurdity of raising children, we get four cups of wine, which is basically the Talmudic way of saying to parents, “We see you.”
And while at my age, one cup is generally enough, it’s always a sweet one.
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