She loved her kids, but no one had ever nominated her as the mother of the year

Shaindy and Chaim make the move from Brooklyn to a new Lakewood development “with a very youthful vibe.”

New neighbors. Even the words made Nechama Stagler queasy, as if there were expectations she would go flying out with fresh apple pie and come back with a new best friend. As a child, she had been the perpetual new neighbor, moving three times before her bas mitzvah, her mother prodding her all along, “Look, they have a daughter, see the red bike?”

She got it. Her father had been a hospital chaplain, devoted to what he did, and each larger hospital was an opportunity to help more Jews. It was service, not unlike the military, he often told them, and in theory, she understood. Unasked, and not even articulated in the children’s own minds, was the question of what about service to them — his family — who wouldn’t have minded a little boring familiarity in a school, or hometown, for that matter.

One of Nechama’s kids had once called Reuven a boring father, and she had wanted to explain to them what a joy it was, how, as a child, she would have given anything for a settled, predictable pattern to life, but she’d been too exhausted to try.

A few years after that, when she had discovered therapy and been intrigued by all the gloating women in the magazines whose “lives had changed,” and “worked on themselves,” she thought maybe she should talk to someone.

But then Daddy was gone and she spent the week of shivah listening to people who had been touched by him. They described this malach of rachamim with incredible compassion, dignity, rock-solid emunah, and she felt small, suddenly, having these negative thoughts when really, she’d had the good fortune of being his daughter, part of his team.

So she read the emails that came in, passed the tear-stained printouts back to her sisters and sniffled along about the incredible zechusim and resolved never to complain again. It was okay.

But after shivah, she went back to Queens, to her house that looked precisely like ten other houses on either side of it, and reveled in the dullness, which suited her just fine.