"I Had a Bad Dream"

There are moments when as a parent, you realize that your calling was to be a Mom or a Dad.

It's that moment where you look at your child's face, or see what they have made, or how they hug you or how they smell, when it all comes together in this cosmic moment.

This morning, my youngest had a nightmare.

Oddly, it was right after another kid had climbed into bed with us, and I was really hoping for a sleep-in.

I went to the youngest's room and assured him that everything was OK, wiped away the tears, and crawled into his bed with my arms around him, looking at his beautiful face as his breathing slowly became rythmic again and he fell asleep.

The only thing you feel at those moments are pure love and what seems sometimes to be an unhuman amount of protective instinct-is it more animal? Or is that what being human is all about?

I thought about the overwhelming feeling of my own self being diminished in comparison with the lives of my children.

That is to say that I would give my own life, or my own organs to save my children.

Last night, I watched television show that chronicled the first three or so months of couples with newborn babies.

There was a gay couple. They were having trouble finding a banquet hall that would be hopsitable to them to hold a Brit Milah (circumsicion) ceremony.

Eventually they found one, in between b-roll of them moaning about how their families don't accept this and that.

They had purchased an egg from an Indian woman in India, and she was also their surrogate. They used a sperm from one of the men.

The child was therefore not halachically Jewish-but that mattered not to them.

When they were signing the contract for the ceremony at the hall, there was a place in the contract that was usually for "the mother" and "the father".

They laughed and said it should say "the father" and "the father" here.

The manager of the hall said-oh that's OK that's just where the mother usually signs.

The more petulent of the two men said "who needs a mother"?

More laughs all around.

Ironically, at the ceremony-the two men thanked their mothers most profusely for their support.

"Who needs a mother?"

Apparently they do, but their "son" does not. It was so disgusting.

My kids need their mother and their father.

This selfish couple created a life with a woman but stripped a child of the natural order of having a mother. The mother was disposable for the baby, but not for them. Hypocrites.

Selfish hypocrites.