Kugel and kegels

I said what I said. CW: period.

I’m on the couch in my livingroom in my brick Baltimore rowhome working on the book manuscript. And, for the first time in several months, I’m having a period.

Many of you may already know that I had major surgery in early April to remove a 6.5cm balloon-shaped fibroid from my uterus. (It’s not cancer.) My boyfriend, with whom I just celebrated a year of living together, nursed me with chicken soup and pain meds for a week until he had to fly out of town to visit his kids. The pain in those first few weeks was fairly impressive; I thought the uterus might not hold together.

She had the right to complain: I’d had about eight solid weeks of daily bleeding and passing of clots from the fibroid and from an IUD that had slipped down and was literally sticking in my cervix. My blood counts weren’t at anemic levels yet, but they were tanking slowly, like a boat taking on water. (My gyn practitioner removed the IUD with a flick of her hand that made me gasp with eye-watering pain, but she also put me on 5mcg of progestin that day, and within 30 hours the bleeding had stopped entirely.) So, I haven’t had a period since that stopped.

I kind of thought that perimenopause might be done with me. After the surgeon declared me fit to lift up to 40 pounds, I congratulated myself silently for hoarding three months’ worth of estrogen patches. I eagerly broke one open after the appointment, and smacked it on the skin of one hip. Et voila, I thought. This will make menopause into a normal-feeling, even liberating, process instead of something that has dragged me through the dim swamps of night sweats and foggy migraines for seven miserable years. I started doing kegels on the couch and in the car again. I started going to yoga and tai chi classes. Soon, I thought, I shall be a crone, sailing into old age on a wave of estrogen to ease my creaking bones and cure my hot flashes. And I shall enter the yoga classroom and do a full headstand like the 75 year old lady in my intermediate class last year who also blithely cut me off in the line of cars to get to the parking garage for said yoga class. Respect.

Since then, my joint pain (and inability to afford the old gym membership) has demoted me from fancy Intermediate Yoga to Gentle Yoga at the YMCA with Yogi Bob. My expectations about menopause are similarly humbled. When I mentioned my excitement about finally having some more “pause in my menopause” my surgeon’s eyebrows went up, and she muttered something I couldn’t quite catch but that sounded like “there are things you might miss about this time in your life” but who cares. One thing I won’t miss is having to get up three times in one night to change an overnight-sized maxipad. But, once again, here we are.

So, while I work, please enjoy this mini-essay about noodle kugel that I wrote in 2021 when I was just starting the manuscript. I couldn’t really find a place for it in the book. I was still married to my ex-husband at the time I wrote it, and was getting excited by the possibilities of having a real Jewish community in my synagogue. (I’m now their executive director, so I guess that worked out better than my marriage, so far.)

My grandmother’s cooking, like so many traces of the self she left behind when she died alone in her New York apartment in 1977, is a cipher. We really only have one of her recipes, and my Dad doesn’t ever talk about her cooking except to say it wasn’t that good. The one recipe is noodle kugel, and somehow the person who is in possession of it is my 76 year old non-Jewish mother, who used to make it on Passover for us. I know Grammy Sylvia was raised Orthodox, one of four children in a Pittsburgh home with her immigrant parents, Dora and … I don’t know my great-grandfather’s name. They’d come from Rumania, or Belarus, or Russia, or Ukraine. Rumania was always what I was told but like many atheist red diaper baby Jews whose parents had ties to the Old Country, Dad was an unreliable source. UPDATE: My Dad fact checked me in an email after this went out — I hadn’t edited it with the information I’ve learned since originally writing it in 2021. My grandmother Sylvia was one of FIVE children, not four. Her father’s name was Adolph, her mother’s name was Chana. We do think they came from Romania, although cousins who tried to track down the family’s origins there came up empty.

Anyway, that kugel. It’s a sweet noodle casserole, baked for an hour at 350 degrees, with egg noodles and tons of sour cream and cottage cheese and eggs and butter, with a sweetener in addition to sugar. My mother always threw in crushed pineapple and raisins, and while I have no hard proof that she did so, I believe she also reduced the sugar. This made for a partly sweet, partly savory, weird ass casserole that no one relished. It was to be eaten dutifully. It was springy and texturally interesting, but not delicious. There were crispy burnt bits of noodle on the top, which were nice. It was filling AF.

Anyway, this year I am trying to “do” a version of Passover, and as you might expect when an atheist Jew married to a non-Jew takes on cooking a seder meal herself (gluten free no less) with little preparation and no help whatsoever, it’s kind of a failure. I’m embracing the failure of my seder plate having no charoset (because I hate charoset, always have, gonna put jam on that matzo like a grownup who is allowed to make her own food choices), no parsley (I thought we grew some at the community garden, I was wrong), no roasted beet or lamb shank bone (Who has time for that? Plus beets aren’t in season yet.) I do have fresh horseradish from the garden, and a boiled egg, an orange, some salt water, and I guess we can use carrot tops for the parsley? Who cares. I don’t even have a seder dish. I’ll have to improvise with a large plastic square plate that Scot stole from the last catering gig he ever worked.

Anyway, if Judaism is mostly about what we owe to the generations that came before us and what we want for the generations to come after us, let this Passover be an altar to the memory of seders that we went to in Oak Park when I was a kid, when my Dad was fully living into his atheism and maybe also dimly allowing himself to remember his own family members now gone, eating the bitter herbs and salt tears of his childhood spent living between the dreams his parents dreamed for the country and the dreams his grandparents dreamed for their families when they boarded those gigantic ships on the coast of Europe to come to a place they only knew from rumors as a land where Jews would be left in peace to hold their seders and say their blessings and eat and work and have their days of rest. Kugel is the sweet, savory, cottage cheese-filled casserole of a diaspora that no longer has a homeland.