You're just a baby!

One of the things I dislike the most about being a convert is being thrust back to little kid status.

I'm the youngest in my family. The youngest by far. AND the only girl in a very traditional family. My childhod was dominated by, "You can't do X ... you're just a baby!" kind of admonitions. I couldn't wait to grow up. I couldn't wait for people to respect my opinions, acknowledge what I knew, see my experience, give me space. In my family, that never really happened, but that's another story.

As I convert, despite all of my professional achievements, life experiences, accumulated wisdom etc., etc., I am suddenly the youngest child again. Mostly I take it in stride. But this week someone a decade younger than I took it upon themselves to write me a long admonishing e-mail regarding a comment I had made in a certain forum. Apparently I am wrong. And apparently it is because I just don't know better because I haven't been around enough. I don't dispute the basic points -- that my knowledge of Hebrew isn't strong enough to understand the "meat" of the question, and that once my Hebrew improves I may view the question differently. That being said, I can have my own opinions, thoughts and feelings, no? Whoa, that e-mail got to me.

Do any other converts feel like this?

With Conscious Eyes

I made two shiva calls this week to a young man whom I do not know well. I sat with him for hours. When I heard of the manner of his loss, I was compelled to go: I could only imagine the kind of pain he was in and every part of me wanted to get to him to comfort him. He had had an uneasy relationship with the deceased, and throughout our visits he spoke very candidly and openly about that. On the first day his rabbi came by, and our mourner absolutely sank into his arms, overwhelmed by his grief and his pain. I've never really seen anything like that kind of surrender to both sadness and to comfort and I began crying. Then I was worried that I shouldn't cry, so I tried keeping it in and gave myself a viscious headache from the effort. I had to leave because my head was pounding and my heart was hearting and I was confused by the many, many emotions I was feeling. I was also upset that I couldn't hug the mourner -- I wanted to hold him so, to rock him like a baby, to help him through. But such is negiah.


On the second day, my rebbetzin came to visit. She began speaking of the wisdom of chazal, of how the halachot of mourning are meant to guide us through the experience with conscious eyes. She told of how shiva makes us look directly at what we are going through but surrounds us with people to comfort us in our pain. Then on the seventh day we are compelled to get up and re-enter our lives.

I had to leave the room briefly at the point, and for the rest of the afternoon I couldn't stop the tears from leaking out. Why didn't my family have chazal when my brother was killed? Here is what happened to us. My brother was violently killed two days after I turned 12. My parents -- understandably -- fell apart. But they never looked at what happened, never faced it. My dad has fared better than my mom. He can tell stories about my brother, laugh about him, cry about him now. My mother is still in shock. She has been in shock for 27 years.

The problem is I was a kid, and the truth is that when he died, my parents abandoned me. I know they didn't mean to do this, but they did. I wandered around his funeral by myself. I wandered around the house by myself. No one spoke to me about how I was feeling or what I was going through. No one checked in on me or was concerned with me to the degree they should have been.

I was very close to my brother, although for various reasons he hadn't lived at home for many years already (he was much older than me). He was killed at night. We had just come home from dinner in a restauran and the phone was ringing. It was a telephone call from a state trooper many states away. They had airlifted my brother to a large city hospital with a neurology unit and he was on life support. My parents told me to go to my room. They decided to take him off life support in the middle of the night after the doctors assured them there would be no hope of him recovering from his vegetative state. My brother was breathing on his own but brain dead. My father wouldn't let my mother come tell me until morning, but I knew -- I'd been awake all night listening.

I didn't mourn my brother because I didn't know how. There was no one to guide me through it. Some aunts and other family members tried to comfort me at the funeral, but that isn't so much when I needed it. I really needed my mother, and she just couldn't be there for me. I realize now that about a year after that my first very, very serious depression began. It last until I was 21, the first time I went to therapy and took Prozac.

Two and a half years ago I started going to therapy. I started going because I was deeply, frightenly depressed. I was scared for my life actually. I was falling apart. I had been raped and desperately needed to talk about it, although it took me almost a year to get a round to the topic (that's how scared I was of it). I'm doing better with that, although I still feel much panic and fear and shame, which is so, so sad. Anyways, somewhere in the middle of talking about all this with my therapist, the topic of my brother pops up. I insist I've gotten over it, I tell the story very forthrightly, let's move on please. Then a few weeks later, it pops up again. Same routine. Then again, then again. Then I break down about it. Then my friend's father dies.

I know that my rebbetzin's words were for my friend, the avel, but I felt like I was meant to be there to hear them, too.

I've gained ten pounds in the past six weeks. That's how I deal with feelings I can't handle: I numb myself by eating. My dead brother has been present with me everyday for the last month. I have no mechanism for facing this sadness. Scratch that: I have no mechanism for feeling this sadness, because I realize I've been trying to NOT feel it for almost thirty years. Since Tuesday, my rebbetzin's words have been in my ears, echoing: conscious eyes, conscious eyes. As painful as this is, I just have to feel it. I just have to feel it. He's dead, he died, it's terrible, terrible, and I am so, so sad. Can I have a shiva now? How do I get through this? How do you open conscious eyes? Because I need to, I need to mourn.

In other news

In other news, do you know how much it costs to have a kosher hamburger and fries and a coke delivered to your apartment round these parts? Almost $30, that's how much. Sheesh. This had better be good!

Maybe baby

I read about a non-profit today that provides services to women in Israel who are seeking abortions. This service seeks to prevent abortion by providing economic assistance in order to stimulate an "inner aliyah." Their point is not that abortion is wrong--(I happen to believe it is)--but that there is in Israel a demographic crisis and that preventing abortions is one way to solve it. According to their site, Muslims will be a majority population in Israel by 2020 simply due to higher birth rates. We need to have Jewish babies -- lots of them -- in order to prevent this.

I've never really felt my biological clock ticking. This doesn't surprise me because I -- like a lot of rape victims I think -- have felt so estranged from my body for so long that it is hard to know what it wants. I either overeat or undereat. I oversleep or undersleep. I'm not in touch with my physical self. But I do want a family. And I have about 12 months to have one if I am going to give birth at all. I do find abortion morally repugnant, although I am adamant that it remain legal and safe (and because of my personal experience, I can't believe people who would outlaw it for both rape and incests ... those a**holes MAKE ME SO MAD. They have no idea what they are talking about). The moral distance this organization took from the issue struck me as odd, even untrustworthy. But it also struck me in another way: it made me want to have a baby.

I held my friend's new born for hours and hours last Shabbat. This dear friend has been blessed with two of the calmest, most centered children I've ever met. Her newborn futzed a bit, but mostly just slept a deep, gentle sleep in my arms while I gently rubbed his tummy and his little feet. I love children and they tend to like me, but I haven't ever felt a strong pull to be a mother. What struck me today was that I should have children: I should give birth to more Jews. When I decided to convert, I never considered for even a second doing anything other than an Orthodox conversion. Part of my reasoning what that I wanted my children to be fully, halachically Jewish. Then my conversion ended up taking four years, and during that whole time I was a good gerus candidate and I didn't date. I went through a lot of other things though: I also gained a lot of weight. I never expected the conversion to take so long. I never expected, frankly, to go four years without sex! (I never also thought that I would only want to have sex with my husband; I used to live a very different life). Now I am a Jew. I am 40. I am not married. I don't feel good about how I look so I don't let my personality come through when I have the opportunity. Children could be out of the question, no matter what my motivation for them.

Do I have an obligation to have children because I am a Jew? Halachically of course I don't -- as a woman, it is not incumbant on me. But do I have a moral obligation to add the population? I am starting to feel that I do.

Issues of child birth aside, I've decided I am going to get back in the game. I'm tired of being alone -- tired of hurting for someone to touch me, to cuddle with me, to comfort me. I'm not sure how to square the old me with Ruth. Ruth doesn't know how to flirt (the old me didn't know when to stop). Ruth is scared because the language of Orthodox dating is so very, very different than the easy dance she used to do. How do I bridge these two places and find a middle ground?

I pray to Hashem to bring me my bashert, and, please G-d, to bless us with children. I know that I add this plea to the caucophany of Jewish voices all over the world who are pleading for the same thing. But please G-d, please.

Letter to a long gone brother

Dear M,

It's been years since we've spoken. I don't think about you very often -- I don't even remember much about you. When I close my eyes and think about you, I have a hard time remembering what you look like. I do remember your walk -- you had a great, loping gate. And I remember the sudden bursts of energy you had -- the way you could spring up from being seated on the ground, like a jack in the box, with an amazing surge of enthusiasm for a funny joke, a touchdown scored, or just an urgent need for a Coke. I also remember that you liked me to rub your feet with a spoon -- that's a strange thing, but you said it felt good, and I adored you so I was more than happy to do it.

You died 27 years ago. I was a kid then. Even before you died, you were already gone -- long gone. I don't know what the hell was going on--everybody hid everything from me--but it was something bad that caused closed door fights between Mom and Dad and led you to leave the house often in a huff. But even when you were gone, you were there. For every morning of my first twelve years, I could wake up and say, "This is my family. I have a mother and a father and two brothers." This is what we look like, this is who we are and how we are. I liked having you there. Then one morning I woke up and you weren't there. I could say, "This is my family now. I have a mother, a father, and brother" but it wasn't right. It has never felt right, because it is not.

You are a ghost limb. I feel you accutely but I can't feel you at all. I know you are not here, I accept you are not here, I have learned to live without you here. I have learned to tell the story of your death with a brave face, even the part about how Mom and Dad took you off of life support. I can put a gentle spin on it, acknowledging that there was a certain beauty that came into my life that would not have entered if you hadn't left so dramatically.

When you left, you didn't shut the door. Maybe the door is off it's hinge: maybe it can't be shut. But my life since you died has been like living in an old drafty house. The front door is flung wide open, the Alberta Clipper is blowing cold air in, snow snakes are blowing across the foyer, and no one can get up and close the house up. The house had been cozy --it wasn't a happy house, but it was a whole house. Then you left, and now I live in a house with a hole in it.

I don't want to be angry that you died, but I am. It's not you fault: I'm sure you'd prefer to be alive. Maybe not, who knows? But I am really, really pissed off at the way you left. That just wasn't fair. It just wasn't fair. It's not fair, and it won't ever be fair. There is nothing you can do to make it right. And now I am even angrier at you that you can't fix what you did. My house can't be repaired.

Do you have any idea what happened when you went away? Do you? Let me tell you. A bone chilling wind settled in. It blew in great gusts, rattling door and window frames. I could hear it at night, singing in a long lonely wail -- that is why I had to fall asleep with the light on. The sound it made, the creaks it caused scared me too much: I thought they were ghosts. Heavy, silencing snow fell, muffling every sound except for that wind. One March night that wind gathered all of its force and blew the front door off of the house. The wind was so cold it burned as it blew across our skin; its icy fingers grated across our flesh and the tears froze in our eyes. Mom went to her room, out of its draft. Dad went to his room, out of its draft. G left the house to find himself another one. And I was alone.

I've been lonely almost every day of my life since that night. I know you loved me when I was small. Do you love me still? You watched over me sometimes; more than once you rescued me. Have you been watching me since? If you have, you've seen it all -- you know everything, there is really no need for me to explain. None of it is really your fault. But I feel like it is. Because you were the one security I had. You were the one I loved, and you were the one I knew loved me. I need you to love me now. Do you?

Ruth

Bei mir bist du shayn

(Trans.: To me, you are beautiful)

I don't have much family: just a father (with whom I am very close), a mother (whom I love, but like all mother-daughter relationships, well ...) and a brother, from whom I estranged. Estrangement is a family tradition in a way: my father is extremely distant from his family, my mother distant from hers. I don't remember my father's dad so well; I was seven when he died, but I remember him being quiet and sweet. My father's mother was another story -- bossy and controlling and hyper-critical, and because my dad didn't get along with her, we didn't either. I was fond of my mother's parents, but they lived very, very far away from us and I saw them only once per year.

I'd like to take a poll of Jewish converts and see how often the idea of "family" comes up in their reasons for converting. I was pulled to Judaism for other, stronger reasons, but once I was involved in the community, I couldn't help but be struck by the value Jews traditionally place on family. It provoked--and continues to provoke--a mixed ranged of reactions in me. I was jealous of it because I didn't have it and won't ever have it with my natural family. I am sad because I didn't grow up like that. I am amazed by it because it was so foreign to my own experience. I am inspired by it, and see the life I wish to build for myself. I am happy to know that this exists in the world.

It's been a tough few years fo me. Really hard. Twice, I was driven to my knees. The details aren't really necessary. When my world fell apart, everything I had been trying to hold in came to the surface and I've been working very, very hard to overcome my past, to wash it off. My eperiences of the past few years have wreaked havoc on my physical appearance and health. I know that I am an attractive woman, but I used to be a size six hottie with about the best possible wardrobe (not tznius, however) and I struggle with my desired to hide, to stay inside by myself until I am back to the way I used to be (whatever that means).

If I had had a different family, my life would have been very different. Duh, that seems like a common sense thing to say, but what I mean is this: if I had a family who could have noticed, who could have sensed, who could have seen, I would not be in this spot today. OK, as Tolstoy notes, every family is flawed in it's own way. But there are some families that are tender and loving and keep vigilant eyes on their children and keep them protected, yes?

Have you ever had an amazing, ground breaking, pivotal experience just from reading a few words? Not a book or a poem, but a single line? When I read the subhead for this blog -- "don't pee on me and tell me it's raining -- it actually shook my world. It was as if the Bubbie I never had -- the woman I needed (woa, need) in my life --put down the spoon with which she was stirring a pot of soup, wiped her hands on her apron, walked to the kitchen door, stared me straight in the eyes and said the very most wise thing I needed to here.

Tonight, she put one soft, worny boney hand on each of my cheeks, looked at me tenderly and said, "Bei mir bist du shayn."

When I chose the subheading for this blog, "

L'Chaim!

Awesome! This is totally what my wedding (G-d willing) is going to be like (kol isha, mixed dancing, Waspy relatives and all):



(Hat tip: Dear Dov Bear)