This year, I decide, for Shavuos night, we’re going to have a meal centered around Torah

MY

mother tells me I hold up the world. She also says I’m brilliant and beautiful, so I do take what she says with a grain of salt, but when I’m squinting at a screen late at night, trying to get all the numbers to align, I try to remember her words. I don’t know about me, but Yaakov is definitely holding up the world. Learning isn’t easy for him, and he works so hard, I’m in awe.

I always say kollel life isn’t a decision you make before you get married; it’s a choice you make every single day. Be the family breadwinner, make do with less, have different standards than others, and then do it all over again tomorrow and the next day and the next. If you so choose.

I’m ten years in and loving every minute of it. The focus on something so much bigger, being a part of something so much larger than you and your ecosystem. The weeks fly by in blurs of work, kids, bedtimes, park dates, diapers, and teething. Shabbos is when we slow it all down, take it in, and really make our money back.

I call it “cashing in on my nachas,” because honestly, without Shabbos, I’d never see Yaakov.

Oh, there’s snatched conversations in between morning, afternoon, and night seder, jokes about, “Don’t I know you?” and, “Hey, stranger” as he runs out to Maariv, as the things you’ve promised yourself would never happen in your home, things like sinks of dirty dishes and kids in mismatched pajamas, occur before your eyes because you are just. Too. Tired.

But not on Shabbos. On Shabbos, Yaakov and I sit at the seudah for hours. It doesn’t matter if we have guests or not, we sit and schmooze and nosh and laugh until the candles have burned down, while kids fall asleep on various bits of furniture around us. And because of this, our meals have become legendary, if I do say so myself. The yeshivos and seminaries have us in those infamous little black books underlined three times as “chavayah!!!!!”

And we enjoy having them. Mostly. Except for the times when I want to erase our names from the books with the same conviction of a third grader who got a math problem wrong.  Because here’s the other thing about Yaakov: he attracts Lost Boys like he’s Peter Pan.

He’ll come home from Kabbalas Shabbos, two or three boys looking defiantly over his shoulder, no jackets or hat, some with streaked hair, some looking like yeshivah boys but with a look in their eye that says, “You have one chance to prove to me that all people are not garbage.”

They don’t scare me anymore, these boys. Call it old age, but I just see them as lost. And little. And I’m happy our home can be a safe haven, because they always come back.

But I do pay a price. At those meals, instead of the table conversation being schnitzel day in yeshivah, parshah, and gedolim stories, we discuss Fauci, Biden, and real estate prices in Lakewood. Which is fine, because everyone feels comfortable, and that’s really the goal. Also, Yaakov does always ensure there’s at least one beautiful devar Torah.

This year, I decide, for Shavuos night, we’re going to have a meal centered around Torah.

It’s only when the calls start coming in, and I hear the first cheerful, “Gotta check with the boss,” that I realize how much it means to me not to have these guys.