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| Family Tempo |

Northern Lights

Protecting my child’s health meant abandoning everything we’d built

Here — right here on the bright, soft area rug in the middle of a small room plastered with cheerful posters — might just be my favorite place in the world.

I take the hands of the toddlers on either side of me and motion for their third and final classmate to close the circle.

“Let’s sing it together now,” I say. “Alef-beis-veis…

Alef-beis-veis,” the children chorus after me.

Gimmel-daled-he-ey,” I sing.

“Gimmel-daled-heeeeey….”

There’s a knock at the door to the preschool — really just a converted garage on one side of the Chabad House.

“Come iiiiiiiiin,” I call, frowning slightly. Who’s interrupting my precious morning in the preschool? I get few enough of them these days, and Moishy really seemed okay this morning, Shternie promised to watch him—

A girl — young woman, really, with a long, chestnut-brown wig and oversized glasses — steps inside.

“Rebbetzin Chana! Hiiiiii! I’m Esther.”

Esther, of course, is Esther Schein, but was I supposed to have known she’d be arriving today?

I’m not one of those women with immaculate kitchens and ironed linen sets because if I was, there is no way I’d have managed on shlichus in the heart of Greenland for the past 15 years. And yet there’s not immaculate and there’s far from immaculate and then it crosses a line to embarrassingly disorganized or even semi-dysfunctional. Today is a semi-dysfunctional day — Moishy had been running a fever yesterday, we spent the night in the hospital, and I’d arrived home an hour before I had to show up for my preschool students.

Shternie would’ve taken over, or Hadassa — they love running the preschool — but I need my self-care time, too, and here, in my little primary-colored kingdom, here’s where it happens for me.

Tension releasing, muscles easing, the fog in my brain receding as the world shifts back into the simplest, most basic, most precious things of all: the letters of the alef-beis.

Now Yaella, on my left side, tugs at my hand, and instead of taking charge of the situation, I’m gawping at the girl-woman in the doorway as my brain freezes over.

Esther’s not in the doorway anymore, I register belatedly; she’s pulled out a kiddie chair and is delicately perched upon it, knees riding almost up to her chin.

“Don’t mind me, I’ll watch,” she says, with a tinkly laugh that sounds strangely like nails on a chalkboard. “It’s good for me to see it in action, anyway. I’ve never taught in a preschool before.”

And she giggles again — giggles — as the final walls of my haven crumble to the ground.

I turn back to the children, start with “Vav-zayin-ches-tes…” but my voice sounds flat and lifeless. Something like the remains of our dreams.

Excerpted from Mishpacha Magazine. To view full version, SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE or LOG IN.

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