Please ask me for my siblings’ names to daven for them, but that’s all. Don’t ask me questions

I have a few siblings in shidduchim — a brother and two sisters. For anyone who’s had one sibling in shidduchim, you know it can take up 100 percent of your parents’ attention. That means that in our house, it’s 300 percent! If my mother gets a shidduch call, it doesn’t matter what else is going on, she’ll drop everything and take the call. It can happen when we’re on vacation, in the middle of a family party, shopping for uniforms, or even when my father was sitting shivah for his father. Everything stops when there’s a shidduch call!

It bothers me when people say things like, “Oh, boys get 100 names, they get redt to 30 girls a day!” It’s so not true. Not every boy — even amazing, super boys like my brother — get redt a thousand shidduchim. But even so, having a brother in shidduchim and having a sister in shidduchim is very different. Some girls get anxious about shidduchim because there seem to be so many older girls. Boys don’t usually feel so anxious, even if they don’t get married “right away”  — it’s more like a frustration.

Sometimes I feel like because shidduchim are so important, nothing else in our house is important, and that can be hard. If something happened in school or with a friend, or I need to buy something new, sometimes I feel like I shouldn’t bother anyone about it.

Please ask me for my siblings’ names to daven for them, but that’s all. Don’t ask me questions. Girls (and adults!) often make the most socially inappropriate comments, like, “Oh, your sister is okay with your brother skipping her?” Or, “What? Your parents would let your other sister get married even though she has an older sister?” It is absolutely no one’s business why my parents made the decisions they did. Maybe I think your parents are crazy for making siblings wait for each other, but I don’t say anything to you about it, right?

I daven every single day that all three of my siblings should get engaged very soon, and in the right order, so no one is hurt. But if Hashem decides that a younger sibling has to “skip” the older one, which already happened once in my family (my oldest sister is not married and the one under her is), please don’t say “Oy!” when you find out. It’s a simchah, and it’s hard enough without feeling people’s pity. May everyone find their bashert soon!

Thanks to SR for this idea and to HG for her contribution.

(Originally featured in Teen Pages, Issue 931)