Some serious checking takes place during the shidduch process.

This week it happens that a shidduch came up where the mother is a giyoress.

We start by locating the rav from forty years ago who did the conversion in Louisiana.

I realize this ties in as every year I read the Book of Ruth before Shavuos and every year I try to go into that place — her place. How did Ruth do it? How did this mother do it?

This year I focus on Ruth’s greatness how she picked up the pieces that fell by “mistake” or how she continuously pulls out the patience inside herself. I wonder — is this the key to Malchus Shamayim heights that stem from lowliness?

I work all week to incorporate this new understanding into my own life by trying not to grab but waiting for living on pieces Hashem lets fall.

I especially apply this in the shidduch process. Every word that falls from someone’s mouth will be the right word to move the shidduch in its right direction.

I ask my friend “How does it make you feel — people checking into your kishkes?”

My friend in her regular purity answers “I see it happens to everyone.”

She tells me about a story of a woman who went to great lengths to check out a shidduch to make sure the girl never wore a short skirt in her life because she had heard of so many instances of girls getting married and lowering their tzniyus levels.

“Mamma Bears” we agree knowing we’re ones too.

I ask “How do you see yourself in relation to Ruth?”

“You leave everything you know to go in another direction” she begins. “Ruth was a princess and I don’t want to say I was exactly a princess but my parents were very well off.

“After I converted I met my husband and on our first date he told me he had very little money. When I chose him I didn’t feel the money was important. I never regret a second; better to be a servant in the house of the King than a princess in the palace of nothing.”

“My grandparents” she answers. “You see my father was Jewish and his parents were frum.

Never a dull moment.

“I had a picture the kind that was brown of my great-grandfather who learned Gemara while my great-grandmother would bring food to the neighbors in need. It fell apart but I could see how they looked.

“My grandmother had a sheitel and a high-necked blouse. I was told they were extremely wealthy in Russia. My grandparents came before the war retaining their wealth Yiddishkeit and feeding those who came to their door.

“It happened that one year my father went on a trip to Europe. It was there he met a non-Jewish woman — my mother — whom he married.

“Everyone told my grandmother to rip her shirt and say Kaddish for her son. She said no. Something inside of her the Mamma Bear refused. Instead she went to a rav who told her not to say Kaddish but to continue her close relationship with her son and his family.

“The rav gave her two Stars of David and told my grandmother to show these stars to me and my sister when we are little then to put them away and not to show us again unless we ask for them.

“When I turned eighteen I asked for my Star. My sister never asked for hers.”

Ruth and Orpah.

“My grandmother was so warm — she never spoke about being Jewish or becoming Jewish. She just gave her love.”

Naomi.

We come from a long line of Mamma Bears.

It seems there were plenty of Mamma Bears during the time of Ruth. A whole nation questioned her shidduch. In the Me’am Lo’ez it actually says that one of the reasons we read the Book of Ruth on Shavuos is because it is here when we receive the Written and Oral Torah at Sinai that we learn that Ruth is perfectly fit to be the mother of our dynasty..

The proof of our being heirs to that dynasty. Malchus kingship. The stamp that it’s a good shidduch. It’s not easy to satisfy a holy nation of “Mamma Bears.”