Sunday morning a friend calls.

“I know this sounds crazy — but you know what I did after I heard they were calling up my son to the front line? I went to the hardware store like I had time for almost nothing else and I bought three baskets. For 25 years my laundry’s been in piles on the floors in the hallways. I felt like I’m living in one big laundry room.

“So this Erev Shabbos I ran out to the hardware store as the doors were closing pushed my way in ran to the back of the store and took three matching beige baskets.

I was like a driven person — I thought about these baskets all Erev Shabbos until finally at the last minute when I knew the store was just about to close I ran over there.

“My son’s on the front line in Gaza sirens are going off and I’m obsessed with buying three baskets. Isn’t this pure meshugas?” she asks. “The minute Shabbos was over I got to work — whites with whites darks and colors towels and socks.”

She goes on to tell me her story though I’ve heard it before but now she’s applying it to how or why baskets were so important to her in the middle of a war.

She tells me again about the first time she ever went to learn how the first blessing she learned was “Thank You Hashem for helping me to differentiate between day and night.” Which the rabbi explained was a reference to good and evil.

“The lights and darks” she jokes to me bringing it back to laundry and baskets.

“This is what keeps us holy makes peace — orderliness” she says “establishing the separations borders and boundaries.”

After we hang up I start to think about how there are some things in life that try as I might to teach my children it seems I can’t get the message across. Then I say — kind of throw up my hands — and say “G-d will have to teach them this one.”

It happened the other day. A particular child is late for his ride quite often and the ride has to wait a few minutes. Try as I might to impress the idea that making others wait for us is really inconsiderate — he doesn’t get it.

Then yesterday the person who’d had to wait the day before came 20 minutes late on purpose the next day.

Today that child tried to get ready on time but habits are habits and he fell into the same pattern thought he didn’t want to. So what do you do?

As parents we prefer that the world doesn’t have to teach our children that they’ll get the lessons straight from us because hopefully we’ll do it in a kinder manner. But sometimes that doesn’t work out.

Sometimes we have to battle out things that weren’t sorted for us in the first place. Like what are the real boundaries for respect in relationships. Or the real boundaries for peace.

Another friend who’s been divorced for 15 years and whose third daughter just got married calls. She goes on and on about how different her daughter’s life and approach to marriage is from hers. “I feel like my children have a completely different reality than I did.” The pitfalls and the mess of her marriage. The fights the anger.

I hear from her words that she’s actually judging herself for “her failure” in her own marriage.

I’ve heard her say it out loud so I could hear it under the radar.

This reminds me of my conversation with the woman with three baskets and I tell her the story.

“Your daughter is starting out her life with these three baskets already in place. You didn’t have those you didn’t know. You established that for her you battled your whole life so she won’t have to live in that mess.”

I see this applies to all levels in life in countries for wars and for peace.

It wasn’t so crazy that before Shabbos while her son is on the front line she had to have everything in its place — the whites with the whites the darks with the darks.

She was just trying to make peace with three baskets.