Last weekend, I had to become a bird mom. I was working in the yard when a baby hummingbird fell out of the nest. Using our friend AI, we learned that there is a hummingbird rescue in Los Angeles. We called and got instructions on how to take care of the baby.
We placed him in a box lined with white paper towels, and by monitoring his droppings, we knew his mom was still feeding him. By nighttime, he tried to fly away but fell back into the box. So we had to take him inside and feed him ourselves. That meant making a sugar solution, dipping a Q-tip into it, and letting the baby hummingbird lick the sugar water off the tip. It was a very funny sensation—the Q-tip would start to vibrate as soon as he stuck his tongue out of his beak and rapidly licked the sugar water.
The baby hummingbird spent the night in my house. The next morning, my brother captured an absolutely amazing video of the mama hummingbird feeding her baby. Shortly after being fed by his mother—not by any member of my family—he finally flew away. Surprisingly, he didn’t come back to say thank you. But it was quite an experience—unexpected and profound.
In the meantime, over the past couple of weeks, I have been completely absorbed in the books of Daniel Speck, and I finally finished them. They shook my world and had a profound impact on me. I realized how one-sided my perspective had been—on the State of Israel and on the relationships surrounding it—and how much more complex, layered, and nuanced the entire Middle Eastern situation truly is. Especially when you begin to think about individual people who have suffered, regardless of their religion or beliefs.
Listening to these audiobooks became a trigger for me—a push toward looking deeper inside myself. About human freedom and the ways we confine ourselves. About how difficult it is to make decisions. About what truly matters and what doesn’t. About how we spend our lives hiding, adjusting ourselves to rules that no one fully understands. I’ve always believed that happiness is a moment—a state that cannot last forever—and these books only reinforced how true that feels.
They also made me think about how complicated family relationships are. How much is built on misunderstandings. And how rarely anyone manages, despite all of this, to build a full and harmonious life.
I continue to struggle with what I see as my failed relationship with my children. My daughter has fully entered adolescence, and every day it hurts to realize how little I am needed beyond being a means of transportation and a financial institution. It feels as if she doesn’t need my love or my attention at all. She has no interest in my life, my feelings, or the things that matter to me. We don’t seem to share a single common interest anymore. Everything that worries me, excites me, or brings me joy feels completely irrelevant to her.
It is unbearably sad. And with each passing day, I feel the crack between us widening—turning into a canyon, with the two of us standing on opposite sides.
And on top of everything, I’ve also come to understand—or maybe more accurately, to feel—that my body is aging. Not because of the cancer I went through last year, but simply because I am getting older.
I went for a walk with my two dogs and, for just a moment, lost my vigilance. I didn’t notice dogs approaching us, and when one of mine suddenly pulled, I fell against a cement barrier. In that moment, I truly understood what it means when people say “sparks flew from my eyes.” I don’t think I broke any ribs—or maybe I did. At this point, I’m not even sure it matters. Every breath, every cough, every turn in bed brings sharp pain. And I find myself thinking: my body has become fragile.
These things didn’t used to bother me. Now, even something like falling while skiing and scraping the skin off my elbow takes so long to heal. And my bruised ribs keep aching day after day, every movement reminding me of them.
Despite all of this, I decided to hide it from my mother so as not to worry her. So I kept working in the garden—planting, digging beds, carrying heavy pots of soil. In a way, maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. Because if I hadn’t been carrying that pot of soil, I wouldn’t have noticed the tiny hummingbird that had fallen from its nest.