I met her for the first time on a sweltering June day. I was alone except for my backpack and three suitcases stuffed to the seams with everything I thought mattered. She waited for me with a crossed-arms, foot-tapping impatience that made me feel apologetic for any extra moment I took to get my bearings. At the curb outside the airport, she pushed me into a cab smelling suspiciously and excessively pleasant; the first of many affronts to the senses. The cab - whose air-conditioning was conveniently broken - raced and crawled and lurched and pushed its way through thick evening traffic, leaving my stomach trying desperately to hold on. She sneered.
3 Comments
It was nearly midnight and I was on the couch. J, meanwhile, was fast asleep in bed. It was nothing he'd asked of me, but I felt I did not deserve to share that space with him after what I'd said. It hadn't been intentional, I told myself, and I felt sorry the moment I said it, but there was no denying the harm it had caused. My negative feelings, warranted as they might have been, were no reason for taking them out on him. Since opening that letter on Match Day 2013, there was a word that occasionally popped into my mind unbidden, unwanted, but undeniable. The word brought with it a feeling that made me afraid of who I was and where our life would take us, and I pushed against it every time it surfaced. I refused to voice it to anyone for fear of giving it life, convinced it would tear us apart if it were allowed to exist.
Resentment. Throughout high school and college, there was this boy who had a crush on me. And he wasn't just any boy -- he was my rabbi's son. That in itself wasn't actually so alarming or awkward. I quite liked my rabbi and loved his family overall. But it just so happened that this particular son was on a path toward a more religious way of life. His family, like my own, was somewhere in the middle of the road of religious Judaism. "Conservadox," I liked to call it. For example, we kept the dietary laws in our homes but ate vegetarian food at non-Kosher restaurants, and we observed Shabbat and all the holidays but drove our cars instead of walking. But he was "becoming more frum," as we say when someone discards the leniencies of their childhood in pursuit of something more, whether it be more strict, more austere, more connected, more traditional, whatever that might be. This can be a noble pursuit, and in truth I was going through my own similar transformation, albeit in much smaller increments and with an end goal not so far from where I started. In his case, it meant ultimately wanting all the trappings of an ultra-orthodox lifestyle with its uniform of beard and black hat for himself, along with a wife who lived according to the same religious standards. This was where the trouble began, because no matter how kind he was, no matter how much I thought maybe I liked him back, no matter how sincere he seemed, I could never be that wife.
You can imagine his surprise, then, when a few years after a disastrous attempt at dating he found out where I was living. "Borough Park," I said with a smile. It was a bastion of ultra-orthodox Judaism in Brooklyn. For him it would have been a magnificent place to live! For me, it was anything but. About a month after we moved when I was still refusing to be anything but sullen and pessimistic about our new home, J forced me to listen to the hard truth I needed to hear: "You need to find a way to make this work otherwise it's going to be a very long residency." He was right, of course, and that was a turning point in my approach toward this new journey of ours.
|
AuthorNashira is a music teacher and proud Small-Town Jew who, after surthriving six years in Brooklyn for her husband's surgical residency, is finally back in Wisconsin where she belongs! At least until the end of the two-year surgical fellowship, that is. It's a wild ride, and she's ready to tell you all about it! Archives
September 2019
Categories
All
|