At the time, I didn’t realize exactly what it was doing to my own relationship with Shlomo. But there were moments, if I had just been watching out for them. There was the time that I nearly tripped over our five-year-old while making dinner and ordered her out of the room, and Shlomo reproved me for being so harsh with her. When I tried to cut out carbs to drop some of the baby weight, Shlomo laughed at me. “You’re becoming my mother,” he said, rolling his eyes, and he didn’t get it when I explained that this was different.

But the moment of clarity came much later, after the birth of our fourth. I was finally ready to go back to work, which was a complicated calculation of after-school childcare and school dismissal times. It took days of negotiating and conversation before almost every kid was accounted for. The only remaining factor was the baby, whose babysitter only went until four, just 20 minutes before I could make it back there.

And then it hit me. Ma finished work at four, and she was right around the corner from the babysitter. We could have her take the baby and I could pick him up from her house. I jumped up, exhilarated by the rush of relief, and ran to tell Shlomo.

Shlomo just stared at me. “Ma? You want to send our baby there every day?” I still remember how he laughed derisively, the way that it had felt like he was mocking me, too. “So she can be traumatized by Ta? And Ma isn’t exactly the most maternal person… what about when the baby starts moving around? She’ll flip out if he gets near anything breakable. No way.”

He said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world, like he hadn’t been raised by Ma and turned out fine. And I guess that’s when it hit me. Bit by bit, I had been chipping away at his perception of his parents with every criticism — had turned them into their worst selves, only the negatives.

And at the same time, bit by bit, it had chipped away at how he saw me, too, why he had become so caustic and mocking. It all came back to my kallah classes.

Because if he had no respect for his mother anymore, then how could he respect me?

I had done this. I had destroyed my husband without ever saying a word against him.

And if I ever wanted to fix him, I would have to make a change.

I made an appointment with our rav. It was the first time I’d ever spoken to him without Shlomo, but the words just spilled out of me, the confusion and the shame and the sense that I’d dug a hole that we’d never be able to claw our way out of. Had I killed my husband’s relationship with his parents, my children’s relationship with their grandparents? Was my husband ever going to respect me again? Were we doomed?

“You aren’t doomed,” the rav said. “In a case like this, what was done can be undone if you put in twice the work.” He advised me to praise my mother-in-law, to build up my own positive relationship with my in-laws. But not only that. “You’ve taught your husband that his childhood was damaging, and now he thinks of himself as damaged, too. How can you build him up, too?”

I hadn’t considered it from that perspective. To me, the issue was that Shlomo looked down on me. But it was more nuanced.

I learned to praise Shlomo more, to put aside his disdain, even when it hurt me. I worked on our relationship as hard as I worked on my relationship with my in-laws. We did send the baby to Ma, and I was firm that it was the best choice. “She really loves him, and she isn’t always snapping at the kids. It’s really just once in a while.”

It did happen. The baby broke some tchotchkes, and Ma still complained and criticized. Ta was still too pushy and loud. I hadn’t actually changed my in-laws, and it wasn’t always easy to see the best in them. They weren’t easy people!

But they loved my kids. They loved my husband. They were usually happy and easy to chat with, and Ma was quick to help out, even if she had her own ideas about how to do it. Inherently, they weren’t abusive or intentionally harmful; they were just flawed, complex people, and I was grateful that they were in my life.

As time passed, Shlomo started to thaw to them, too. After Shabbos with them, when I would ask him how it went, he would answer with a quick, “Baruch Hashem,” instead of the litany of issues. The entire climate of our home was calmer, more serene, less riddled with unhappiness. The mutual respect was back between us, slow and tentative.

“You know,” Shlomo told me recently, after we had left our kids with Ma and Ta for a two-day vacation, “it’s weird, but I feel like my parents have really mellowed out as they’ve aged.”

I looked out the car window. I still can’t quite believe that I’ve made it this far, that Hashem had granted me this strength to reclaim my family. Baruch Hashem. Baruch Hashem.

Noncommittally, I said, “Yeah, maybe.”

The most pervasive sicknesses in the world are rarely the ones that manifest in swift and deadly symptoms; those are quickly curtailed. But the ones that seem benign at first, that leave people functional with mild illnesses — they’re the ones that spread to pandemic.

When it comes to sicknesses of the soul, it is the ones that move slowly and destructively that entrap us. We don’t always mean to hurt. There are a thousand ways to justify our actions. But we descend, deeper and deeper, into a pit of our own making. We have no way to pull ourselves free.

There is no one else who can pull us out from the depths of the ground. Instead, we need to dig a way up, carving step after step in the dirt, no matter how filthy we might get in the process.

Teshuvah isn’t just restraint. It’s constructive repair. To do that, we must turn our flaw into strength. As Shlomo Hamelech reminds us, there are some who speak like a stabbing sword, but the tongue of the wise brings healing. (Mishlei 12:18) Our words can bring us low; they can also build and rebuild, higher and higher.

Eye of the Storm

I

never really thought of myself as an angry person. I was a little high-intensity, that was all. A little too quick to react badly to stress. But it wasn’t like I had anger issues. I was a happy, normal person. I loved my family, I had good friends, I had a nursing job where I was always patient and understanding with the seniors at the home.

I was fine.

So my life wasn’t perfect. So my kids were so kvetchy and chutzpadig at times that it was unbelievable. I would have never said no to my parents. My mother was a warm, loving parent who seemed so fragile sometimes that we were afraid to upset her, and my father… now, he was an angry person. No one wanted to upset him.

My kids were strong-willed and there were some personality clashes, but the thing that really got to me was how much they’d kvetch. And the fighting! They’d tear into each other, needling at insecurities and battling over toys and books. It was enough to make me lose my mind sometimes.

And then I’d scream. Then I’d get so sharp and harsh that my husband, Gershon, once commented that he heard me from down the block. “Well, you try to manage six kids who just don’t listen,” I shot back, and his mouth snapped shut. He worked in the city until late most days, leaving me juggling the kids after school. It wasn’t ideal, but we made it work, and I didn’t appreciate the critique on my methods.

Then.

They say that your oldest kid is the experiment, the one where you’re making it up as you go along. That was Liba, who was a precious baby and perfect little princess when she was little. She got more headstrong, more irritable as the years went on and more children flooded the house, and by the time we hit Number Four, right after she turned seven, she was fully fed up. “Send him back,” she ordered. “We don’t need more.”

And I was so proud of Liba, who was at the top of her class and a skilled artist, too. She was funny and adorable and a born performer, and she shone in school even if she didn’t have many friends. Did we get along? Not always. Liba felt, as the official Third Parent, that she could evaluate my competence as mother on any occasion. Maaaa… you can’t let Rivky go to school in that, it’s socially off. Maaaa… Shaindy says that white bread is really bad for you, I can’t eat this. Maaaa… can you, like, not yell when my friends are here? It’s sooo embarrassing.

Somewhere around 14, she disappeared into her room with a phone to her ear and never really emerged except to criticize. And she got under my skin, so I would snap at her, and she would snap back, and I’d blow up.

But I still didn’t see myself as an angry person. So Liba was a little tough. I still loved her with all my heart and soul. It was just that, because I loved her, I was more emotional with her than I would be with a patient. It was the same with all my kids.

When Liba left for seminary, I thought that things would get better. Without Liba there, the house would be calmer. Gentler. But if anything, it felt like the kids got even worse, filling the gap that Liba left behind with more bickering, more pointless kvetching, more chutzpah. I lashed out at them, shouted with all the impotence of someone yelling at the sea, trying to get the waves to stop hitting the shore.

And my stress level shot up even more when Liba returned, with all her demands and stubbornness, and started dating. If she hadn’t gotten engaged so quickly, I think I would have totally lost it. It was like having a third adult in the house, more confident and aggressive than ever before, and the wedding prep was exhausting.

But finally, Liba was married. She was independent, had her own space to thrive, and returned only for Shabbos. It should have been fine. It should have been great.

And then, that first Shabbos after sheva brachos, we got into an argument about something standard. The usual. I had asked Liba to take her ten-year-old sister to a friend’s house, Liba had refused because she wasn’t her mother, and it had all imploded from there.

And her chassan had watched in horror from the living room, looking more and more uncomfortable with every passing minute. I didn’t even register him at the time. My entire focus was on Liba, on the girl snapping in front of me, not the siblings making themselves scarce or the unwilling audience.

I only knew this because Liba told me after, had stormed out of the house and sobbed on the porch until I emerged, still furious with her. “He thinks we’re dysfunctional,” she told me. “He says this wasn’t a healthy environment to grow up in—”

I disliked her chassan more with each passing moment, blamed him for just not understanding us, until Liba finally turned to look at me, her eyes anguished. “Why are you so angry all the time?” she said pleadingly.

I wasn’t. I was stressed, I was tired, I was dealing with kids who were all so angry. I wasn’t….

Was I?

Sometimes, you go to the right therapist and everything slots into place. Sometimes, you speak to a rav and get guidance and you’re able to see things clearly.

It wasn’t like that for me. I didn’t do soul-searching or revisiting my childhood trauma. I didn’t have the time, busy with work and my family. But Liba’s words never really left me. The wary eyes of her chassan, this new visitor to our family who wasn’t accustomed to my fury, lingered in my mind. And I started to think of myself as someone else.

Not a happy person. An angry one.

Why was I so angry? Why was my reaction to stress always these explosive moments? And were my kids going to grow up exactly like me if I didn’t change?

It was humiliating, working on myself in my forties. It was a joke. No one can change in adulthood. We’re pretty much the people we’re going to become by the time we leave high school. I couldn’t admit it even to Gershon, just kept it locked up deep inside me. At first, I shrugged it off as my kids’ fault. My patients never saw my angry side, after all. I rarely shouted at my husband.

But did it really matter? I heard a line in a speech soon after that Shabbos, a simple statement that felt like the most obvious reminder in the world: The only person you can really control is yourself. But that time, it stuck, clawing its way into me. I couldn’t control my kids. I couldn’t stop Mordy from being so messy or Rivky from picking fights with her sisters. I couldn’t change them. But I could change my reaction to them.

At first, I gave myself a quota: two explosions a day. You can eyeroll or laugh the rest of the stressors away. It sounds ridiculous, but it really worked for me. Like when you’re on a diet but only let yourself have two chocolates a day, so you save them until nighttime, when you really need them. I would save my worst reactions, swallowing them in case someone did something worse later. And sometimes, they would still erupt, going way over quota. It didn’t count as two explosions if it was one long one over a whole day, right?

I got better at laughing things off. The furious fights still came, but less often. And I noticed… Liba was happier now, the anger and stubbornness that I had always seen apparently only a reaction to being on edge around me. The other kids still fought, but without the same desperation, the same cruelty that I had witnessed before. Even Gershon seemed more at ease.

And all those nonstop stressors hanging over me felt a little more distant, a little less urgent. I was happier. I still got angry, and it was still impossible for me to calm myself when I reached the point of no return. But it wasn’t a daily occurrence anymore. It was rare. It was something I could live with, that my family could live with.

It’s been eight years since then. Liba has three children, all of them adorable and brilliant and happy. I’ve married off two more children, and my youngest is in seminary now. I can’t say that I’m a happy person now, but I’m… mellow. I’m able to shrug things off and let them flow past me. I’ve never once raised my voice at a grandchild.

When I’m totally honest with myself, I don’t think that I really would have been able to change so drastically when my kids were younger. I was buckling under the stress of a full-time job and six needy, assertive little ones. I felt like nothing went as planned, like nothing was in my control, and I did my best to yell it all into submission. It was easier to do it as my kids got older and moved out. It’s easier to do as a bubby.

But I do desperately wish that I had done the work much earlier.

Who are we? Do we really know? Are we prepared to find out?

Mesillas Yesharim cites the first step in perfecting ourselves as zehirus, watchfulness. In order to perceive who we are, we need to survey our own actions. What is it that lingers in the dark corners of our souls? Why are we so afraid of it?

Teshuvah begins with truth, with recognition, with the charatah that makes us regret and acknowledge the damage that we’ve done. With saying, this is not who I want to be.

It isn’t easy. It feels next to impossible to acknowledge those flaws, let alone change them. It won’t work. It never works. What’s the point? Like a swimmer trapped in a rip current, arcing his arms frantically toward the shore, our goal seems to grow more and more distant with every stroke.

But the first step to escaping a rip current isn’t swimming against it. It’s swimming sideways, parallel to the shore, until you’ve broken free. It’s about waiting until you’ve fled the worst of it and then moving toward the shore.

We want quick fixes. We want simple solutions. But the road map to teshuvah doesn’t allow for rapid redemption without self-examination. Only when we name our flaws honestly can we hope to break the cycle.

Tethered

I

’ve never been a screens person. Growing up, we had one ancient computer with Windows 95 and maybe three games. (Anyone remember Midnight Rescue?) My family didn’t need Internet in the house — my father was an old-school doctor, my mother a teacher, and if we needed to do research, we would go to the library and stumble through the Dewey Decimal system until we found the right books.

Hashkafically, my parents didn’t think that screens were a good idea, and when early smartphones came out, sometime right after I got married, I didn’t think I’d ever get one.

I didn’t expect that they’d become so widespread, though. My husband was the first in the family to get one — he needed it for work, and his old Blackberry wasn’t cutting it. I stuck with my old-fashioned phone, with just some texting and GroupMe for the community chat.

About eight years ago, though, I made the change. It’s funny now, looking back, but it was really about the camera. My phone camera took terrible, grainy pictures of my kids, and I would enviously look at the gorgeous iPhone pictures that my friends had. I wanted to be able to pull out my phone at the park or simchahs and snap cute pictures, and I figured that a smartphone would do the job. Plus, there was GPS, and I could finally get on WhatsApp with the rest of the world. No one used our GroupMe anymore.

I had it filtered immediately. I knew that I couldn’t have open Internet around my kids. I really just used it for WhatsApp and the camera. At first, I would forget it places, leave it behind like I used to do with my flip phone. But… I don’t know. WhatsApp was so busy. There were so many chats to join, so many conversations I wanted to add to. When I got home from work, I would scroll through everything I’d missed, chiming in and making new friends and getting answers on school-related questions.

When I did homework with my kids, I had half an eye on my phone as they puzzled over math problems, snatching it up when a notification popped up. When I woke up in the morning, I would pick up my phone as I said Modeh Ani. At night, I figured out how to put books on my phone, and I would read before bed like I always did, but with those constant notifications popping up.

But it always felt like I was physically torn between my kids and my phone. Like, there was this pull emanating from it, tugging at me whenever I would leave my phone on a table and walk away to spend time with a kid. When my oldest was confiding in me about school drama, I would turn the phone over, but it still held a little spot in my attention, nagging at me like a constant throbbing. Turn it over. It’s buzzing. What is it saying?

Then it all shifted, and because of the most minor issue. Our supermarket was redoing their parking lot, and they’d stripped the concrete for the time being. They were still letting us use the lot, so I parked the car on a rocky segment, stepped out of the car while typing out a brisket recipe to a neighbor, and my phone slipped out of my hand.

The screen shattered. It was impossible to see what was going on, to press anything, and when I tried bringing it to the local store, they told me that the problem was worse than I’d thought. It wasn’t just the screen; I would need a new phone.

But money was tight at that time, and I was still paying off this phone. “I can transfer the sim back to an old phone,” the tech suggested.

What choice did I have? I went back to my flip phone.

And for almost a year, that umbilical cord between my phone and me was forcibly severed. It just wasn’t easy anymore. I texted friends, but predictive texting was a pain. We were back to grainy pictures and no neighborhood groups to follow.

I remember sitting there, that first evening without my smartphone, watching my kids do their own thing, and wondering, what did I do with this time before? But it returned to me, slowly but surely. There was less time spent on the couch, eyes on my phone, while my kids did their own thing. I was able to give them my full attention, my phone only a lingering background thought.

It was hard at first — like walking into a bright room after a comfortably dim one — but I found that after a few months, I was a better mother. A better wife. I had more time, and even when I did ask friends about the chats, the responses were usually kind of bland. “Just about the traffic on the highway. Someone was wondering why there are never babysitters available.” It felt so banal, so easily missed.

I would watch people absorbed in their smartphones and feel so smug. I had broken the habit. I knew how healthy it was to step away from the screens. How could people stay glued to those little rectangles while their whole lives drifted away out of their corners of their eyes?

Our financial situation improved, and we were slotted to go to Eretz Yisrael for a family simchah the next winter. I made the decision to get another smartphone, determined to have quality pictures and also be able to keep in touch with the whole family without long-distance texts. I thought I’d kicked the habit. “I know what it’s like to be glued to your phone. I know how freeing it is to break out of that. I’m not going to be one of those people again,” I announced, and took pride in how often I’d forget my phone in the car.

It didn’t last.

It took a few months, after some small crises in the neighborhood and with my family that captured my attention, but the habit crept back into my life. I needed it. My mother was sick, and I had to keep my phone on me for her sake. The kids had an unreliable bus and I had to keep an eye on reports from other bus stops. It was a social outlet. It was just like having a friend over, except not as distracting.

There are a thousand excuses, but it comes down to this: There’s something so addictive about the phone, about the constant, buzzing connection, about the way that there’s always something new. I owe it to my kids to leave my phone behind, but they aren’t suffering while it’s out! They aren’t pleading with me for attention, and I’m happy to do homework with them or listen to their problems. It’s fine. We’re fine.

But I still think about it wistfully, that time two years ago when I felt free, so smug in my certainty that I’d broken the habit. I hadn’t broken anything, really. I hadn’t put in the work. I’d just been in stasis for ten months, ready to backslide in an instant.

A few months ago, I made an active decision to put my phone in my bedroom once the last kid was home from school each day, and I don’t take it out again until after my two youngest kids are in bed. And it’s not quite freedom — it doesn’t break the habit, and I do find myself running upstairs to check on my notifications more than I’d like — but it’s a start. It’s a real, planned attempt to change, and I’m keeping at it.

One step at a time, right?

Sheva yipol tzaddik v’kam. Seven times, the righteous person falls, then gets up again. When we speak of righteousness, we aren’t speaking about people who have never been challenged, have never had anything to overcome. We speak of the people who rise regardless.

There is no bravery without fear. There is no patience without frustration. And there is no change without the struggle, as endless and impossible as it might feel.

Rav Dessler speaks about the moments when we are tested. He likens them to a battle, in which each victory takes us a little further into the yetzer hara’s territory. We might not be able to conquer the entire territory, but we can weaken the yetzer hara, can seize more and more land for growth.

Most of adulthood isn’t about big moments or gestures. It’s the everyday, continuing on, without the expectation of dramatic, immediate results. It’s knowing that every moment is another stitch in a rich tapestry of your life.

You can change. Stitch by stitch, it’s always possible.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 961)