Chickens Should Wear Diapers
Sep 16, 2026
Tiny favor before we begin; think of one person who would love getting these emails every week. The stories, the questions, the laughs, the occasional existential crisis disguised as a kindergarten chicken incident.
Send this email to them and invite them to join the list here.
Onwards -
Deeds came home from school yesterday in his spare pair.
You know, the extra set of clothes you’re supposed to send in for your kindergartner just in case.
His Morahs have this adorable little note where they check off every possible reason your child may have needed a change of clothes.
Bathroom accident.
Paint spill.
Lunch mess.
Years of teaching kindergarten. Everything anticipated, labeled, organized, accounted for.
Except apparently this:
Deeds met a chicken.
And the chicken had an accident.
All over my kid’s brand-new shirt.
Deeds was delighted.
He came home telling me, with enormous pride, how the chicken pooped on him and how he and Morah laughed and laughed while she changed his shirt.
Morah’s note gave me one of the best laughs I’ve had in twenty years of parenting.
And, unexpectedly, a pretty great lesson.
Because what do you do when you’ve checked every box, packed the emergency outfit, prepared for every reasonable eventuality…
and then a chicken treats your kid like a toilet?
We tend to know who we are when the boxes are checked.
We know who we are when the plan works.
But who are we when it doesn’t?
Who do we become when life does what life has a funny habit of doing and shows up in a way we absolutely did not plan for?
This morning at the gym, Suri remarked that stories like this seem to only happen to me. That somehow this Morah had to know exactly whose backpack deserved that note.
I disagree.
I don’t think my life is especially weird.
Okay. Maybe it’s a little weird.
But I’ve also worked very hard to live awake enough to embrace all of it.
To notice the yellow cars that seem to follow me everywhere. To have the conversations with strangers on the subway. To honor the Divine timing. To cherish the tiny moments that could easily be nothing and somehow become something.
There’s a quote often attributed to Albert Einstein:
“There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
I love that.
Because life is so much bigger than my checkboxes.
It keeps taking everything I think I know, about myself, about people, about what today is supposed to look like, and turning it on its head.
Sometimes hilariously.
Sometimes heartbreakingly.
And sometimes both before dinner.
Because a few hours after one of the best laughs I’ve had in twenty years of parenting, I had one of the most devastating cries.
More parenting.
Something else I didn’t plan for.
Something I definitely wouldn’t have called a miracle.
But maybe the miracle wasn’t what happened.
Maybe the miracle was that I could stay regulated in spite of what happened.
I kept my cool. I took care of what needed taking care of. I put my little one to bed.
And three hours later, alone in my office, I had the cry I deserved.
Nothing I could solve. Nothing I could do to make it okay. And yet there was just enough room inside of me to be with the enormity of it all.
A belly laugh.
A heartbreaking cry.
A carefully made plan.
A chicken with digestive issues.
#Life.
And the life I live is not an accident.
For more than twenty-five years, I’ve been working on my capacity. My ability to hold more of my own life without needing to control it, fix it, explain it, numb it, or run away from it.
To feel deeply without drowning.
To be disappointed without disappearing.
To trust myself when I don’t have an answer yet.
To stay curious when an old story wants to take over.
To experience joy without bracing for the other shoe to drop.
To meet grief, love, motherhood, friendship, faith, change, desire, disappointment, possibility, all of it, and remain present enough to actually live my life while it’s happening.
It’s not the polished promise of a perfect life.
Thank G-d, because I have no idea how to teach that.
Vessel is an eight-week experience in becoming more able to hold the life you already have; to become more available for the life that is trying to emerge through you.
Vessel is where we learn to understand our patterns instead of being unconsciously run by them. To hear what’s happening in our bodies. To develop language for our inner worlds. To build self-trust. To become more emotionally spacious, more honest, more discerning, more connected to Hashem, and more capable of choosing how we want to meet our lives.
Not someday, when everything settles down.
Now.
In the relationship.
In the parenting.
In the grief.
In the joy.
In the ambition.
In the uncertainty.
In the hilarious school note I will save forever because apparently chickens need diapers.
I’ve decided to delay registration for Vessel’s eighth cohort until Isru Chag, October 5.
Because I don’t want to spend these days trying to fill a cohort.
I want to bake kugel. Build a sukkah. Exclaim appropriately over every single one of Deeds’s Yom Tov art projects. And probably cry a little when no one's watching at Tashlich.
But when registration opens, I want to welcome you in.
Vessel is for men and women, (and spouses join free!) who can feel that there is more available inside the very life they are already living.
More presence.
More choice.
More self-trust.
More joy.
More room for grief.
More intimacy with themselves, with the people they love, and with Hashem.
More capacity to meet what comes without abandoning themselves in the process.
If you keep waiting for life to calm down before you become the person you want to be, you may be waiting forever.
The invitation of Vessel is different:
Become the person who can meet the life that actually comes.
Because you can pack the spare shirt.
In fact, you should pack the spare shirt.
Because chickens don't wear diapers.
---
Thank you all for your warm feedback on the Yonah article in TYH magazine!
If you haven't read it, but would love to, you can find it here:
Join the Mailing List!
Life happens in little bits. Learn to love the little bytes.
