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oing into shidduchim, my main stipulation was that my future husband be able to put food on the table.

I was a fresh-faced, temimusdig Bais Yaakov graduate who deeply valued learning, but I came from a poor family with serious dysfunction, and I knew it was unrealistic for me to look for a serious ben Torah. Instead, I decided to settle for someone who would keep me fed.

Where I came from, food was scarce. My mother passed away when I was seven, after a protracted illness, and when I was 11 my father remarried. My stepmother was extremely weight-conscious and always on a diet, and between the lack of money and the calorie-counting, we had almost no food in the house, and certainly nothing containing sugar or salt. My stepmother thought dairy products were bad, so we never had milk or cheese around. Feeling indebted to his second wife for caring for his four children, my father habitually took her side and never stood up to her, even if it meant that his kids went hungry.

When I get married, I would fantasize, I’m going to be able to buy food.

Until the day I got married, at the age of 20, I handed over every penny I earned to my father to help pay the bills. Even after I graduated and started working as a school secretary, I could never buy myself food or clothing, since my parents needed the money more than I did.

When I was redt to my husband, Gershon, we were told that he was very capable and would be a great provider. That was tremendously comforting to me, even though Gershon didn’t have a job at the time.

On our wedding night, we received a grand total of $1,225 in gifts. Of that money, $775 went to our first rent payment, and the remainder we used to pay our grocery and utility bills. A month after our wedding, we were already in debt. We had gotten married in the summer, when school was out and I was not earning a salary, and neither of us had a penny in savings. I borrowed money from a friend to pay our expenses that summer and paid her back over the course of the next school year.

In the fall, Gershon found a job in sales, which supported us nicely for about half a year. During that time, I invited my younger siblings for supper every night and sent them home loaded with snacks for the next day. As it happened, Gershon was an awesome cook, and he loved puttering in the kitchen and preparing gourmet meals. Any time I wasn’t feeling well or was too busy to cook, he would happily roll up his sleeves and whip up a special dinner, complete with fancy tableware and special lighting effects. Having no memories of being fed properly by a mother, I lapped up the love and caring that he invested into these meals, and he relished the ability to nurture me in this unique way I so craved. For the first time I could remember, I felt truly nourished and cared for.

 A year after our wedding, I had a baby. While I was on maternity leave, Gershon decided to leave his job and begin working as an independent salesman. Going out on his own wasn’t so simple, however, and once again, we found ourselves with no money to live on. We fell behind in our rent, and the shutoff notices from utility companies began piling up.

Rather than go back to my low-paying secretarial job, I decided to start selling cakes and confections for simchahs. My startup costs were minimal; all I had to do was offer to sell my cakes at cost price for several neighbors and friends, and suddenly, I was in business. At the beginning, people came to me for my unbeatable prices, and as more customers came to me, I slowly raised my prices until I was able to establish myself and take out a financing plan to buy professional equipment, at which point I raised my rates to the industry standard.

Within a year, I hired a worker, and several months later a second. Gershon also found a job in the meantime, working in construction. By the time our third child was born, we were earning enough to live comfortably.

After our fifth child was born, we rented a house. The rent was cheap, but the house itself was in disrepair. We figured it was worth taking a five-year lease on this house even if we had to do some minor renovations, rather than move to a nicer house and pay higher rent, especially since Gershon was working in construction and was good with his hands.

To pay for the construction, Gershon opened several credit cards and borrowed money from family members. He underestimated the construction costs, however, and by the time we finished fixing up the apartment, we owed approximately $35,000.

At that point, our life was chaotic. Gershon was working all day and overseeing our construction in his spare time, while I was living in a construction zone and trying to care for five kids. Not having a normal kitchen meant that I couldn’t prepare my cakes and petit-fours, because I had no kitchen to work in. When customers would call with orders, I would tell them I wasn’t able to work for the next few weeks, but those few weeks dragged into months. When the kitchen was finally finished and I was ready to get back into the business, I discovered that my equipment hadn’t been stored properly and had suffered irreparable damage during the construction. Now, on top of our construction debt, we owed $48,000 for the financing of the equipment. With all the debt we had racked up, taking another loan to rebuild my business was out of the question. Besides, with five young children, restarting my business from scratch wasn’t practical. My kids needed a mother.

But how were we going to pay back the $83,000 we owed? To me, knowing we had no way of repaying our debts was far worse than having nothing to eat.

Around this time, Gershon started staying out late at night, instead of coming home for supper after work. Panicky, I would call him repeatedly and ask him where he was and when he was coming home, but the answers he gave were vague and dubious. Every night he had a different excuse.

“I went to Schwartz’s bar mitzvah and fell asleep in the car outside the hall,” he told me one night, when he tiptoed into the house at 3 a.m. Another night, he claimed he had been out late in Home Depot buying supplies for a construction project he was working on.

I desperately wanted to believe him, even though I sensed he was hiding something from me.

On our next credit card statement, I noticed a few late-night charges of a few hundred dollars each from an unfamiliar vendor. In Atlantic City.

Gershon was gambling!

When I confronted him, he didn’t deny it. Instead, he apologized and started crying, explaining that the stress of the construction and the kids was overwhelming for him.

But the late-night homecomings didn’t stop. Now that I knew what Gershon was up to, he stopped lying about his whereabouts and readily admitted that he was frequenting casinos and blowing away our money — money that should have been going to pay our bills and repay our debt.

In desperation, I offered to accompany him about once a month to a casino and make it a date. This way, I reasoned, I’d be able to control the amount of money he’d gamble. It would cost us a couple of hundred dollars, and for that we’d have a night out, which we desperately needed. 

In hindsight, this was a terrible mistake. Gambling is not a legitimate form of recreation, nor does it provide effective stress relief or recreation. And the biggest danger of gambling is the occasional windfall, which happened to Gershon several times — and only served to make him head right back to the casino and blow his newfound earnings, as gamblers invariably do. My accompanying him on occasion didn’t stop him from going on his own whenever he felt the urge.

In the meantime, our creditors were hounding us. When I told them on the phone that I didn’t have money to repay them yet, they started coming to our door and demanding payment. Having no money for them and no answers, I didn’t open the door. Eventually, they got smart and started standing outside my door in the morning, just before I had to take the kids out to the bus stop, and they would pounce on me the moment I emerged. It was a nightmare.

At this point, Hashem sent three angels to rescue me. One was an older neighbor of mine, who decided to sponsor the cost of a cleaning lady every week so that my life could have some semblance of order. The second angel was my grandfather, the father of my mother a”h, who told me he would pay my kids’ tuitions until we got out of debt. The third angel my father’s sister, with whom I had always been close. When I confided to her how badly I was struggling, she told me she would sponsor therapy for me for a full year.

With the support and encouragement of my therapist, I was able to take a step back, evaluate our situation objectively, and begin building an exit strategy. I sat down with a pen and paper and drew up a repayment plan that would allow us to repay our debt fully in a little over three years, by paying off $2,500 a month.

“I’m going to make sure that every penny of our debt gets paid,” I told Gershon. “But you have to let me be in charge of all the money until that happens.”

“Fine,” he said quickly.

The next thing I did was cut up all our credit cards. I also took a job working as an office manager.

From then on, every week, Gershon would hand over to me his paycheck from the construction company. I would cash the check and give him back $20 in cash as spending money for the week.

Other than paying our rent and utilities, I spent almost nothing the next three years, and instead used most of our income to repay debt. I approached a local yeshivah and asked if I could pick up their leftover food every day, and they agreed. I budgeted only $120 a week for groceries and other necessities, and I clung tenaciously to that budget. I bought hardly any clothing for myself or the kids, and instead took used clothing from neighbors and friends. I took almost no babysitting help. Often, I went hungry.

I didn’t feel stifled, though. I felt liberated. To me, being in debt was exceptionally painful, far worse than hunger or deprivation, and getting the creditors away from my door was a huge accomplishment.

Three years after I took over managing the money, we were finally in a stable financial place. We had paid off all our debt and were earning enough to support ourselves and even put away money, which we hoped to use to buy a house.

And then, the construction company Gershon worked for closed down. Once again, he was out of a job.

A friend of his who worked as a chef told him that the restaurant he worked in was looking for a manager. I didn’t think that would be a good job for Gershon, who liked working with his hands and wasn’t great with administration, but we needed to pay the bills.

The job turned out to be a disaster. Not only didn’t it play to Gershon’s strengths, it also required him to be on a late-late schedule. In his construction job, he had been up at five in the morning and home by five in the evening. At this job, he had to leave to work around midday, and his workday ended at midnight, after which he needed to unwind.

He began waking up later and later, at first missing Shacharis with a minyan and eventually skipping Shacharis completely. He also became depressed and withdrawn, wandering about the house aimlessly until noon, when he finally drove off to work.

When Gershon started talking about opening his own construction company, I was all for it. Since administration wasn’t his strong point, I gave up my job and took a course in business management so I could help him with the company’s business aspects. We agreed to postpone our plans for buying a house and instead invest our savings into opening our own company. In the meantime, we had reestablished our credit rating, and were approved again for a credit card.

Our company’s first project was an ambitious one: Gershon’s friend Benny had bought an old apartment complex and wanted Gershon to renovate the complex. Gershon, who had plenty of contacts in the construction industry, arranged for every aspect of the project to be subcontracted, with him overseeing the project. We hired lawyers and professional business consultants to guide us through every contract, to make sure everything was done on the up-and-up.

After our lawyers and consultants assured us that our business plan was practically airtight, we invested $150,000 into our company’s first project, using up every penny of our savings and borrowing the rest. We expected to make back our investment with the completion of the project.

Everything went according to plan — until one day the fire department showed up and posted demolition notices on the new apartment complex that was going up. Apparently, the original apartment buildings had been constructed illegally, a fact that hadn’t been noticed by anyone until the renovation was well underway.

Benny lost all his money, and so did we.

The shock of the aborted construction drove Gershon straight into depression. Again, he started sleeping late and wandering about the house aimlessly.

“Let’s move on,” I kept urging him. “We’ve had setbacks before, and we managed to overcome them. We’ll get past this too, you’ll see.”

But to Gershon, the blow was too difficult to bear. He couldn’t bring himself to look for another job or do anything productive with his time.

With no income and no savings, only a mountain of debt to repay, we had to go onto welfare just to survive.

After several months of doing nothing, Gershon went back to working as a commission-based salesman. But each time he made a sale, he took the money directly to Atlantic City and gambled it all away. Some nights, he told me, he won thousands of dollars at the casinos, but he never left with any winnings in his pocket.

Once again, we had no food to eat. Once again, the creditors were calling our house non-stop. Once again, Gershon was gambling away every penny he earned — except that this time, his losses weren’t in the hundreds, but in the thousands, even tens of thousands.

Not only were we drowning in debt, to the tune of some $250,000 and growing, Gershon and I found ourselves bickering all the time. My therapist, who had been a lifesaver for me back when I first confronted Gershon’s gambling issue, made herself persona non grata by urging me to have compassion for him. “You need to be more understanding,” she said. “He’s gambling out of desperation. The alternative, for him, might be jumping off a bridge.”

By this time, I knew enough about gambling to realize that you can’t have compassion for a gambler. My job wasn’t to be kind to Gershon. I needed to protect myself and my children.

Several of my friends and some other people in the community encouraged me to leave Gershon and file for divorce. “His debts aren’t your problem,” they told me.

When I consulted with a leading rav in my community, however, he felt differently. “It’s true that your husband’s debts are not your problem,” he said. “But your husband is a good man. Don’t leave him.”

While most of my friends were promising to support me through a divorce, one friend, Simi, had a different suggestion. “You should wash and bentsh every day,” she told me.

Having always had erratic eating habits, going back to my childhood, I rarely sat down to a proper meal complete with netilas yadayim and Bircas Hamazon. Thinking that Simi’s advice couldn’t hurt, I resolved to begin eating bread every day.

Each time I bentshed, the words “lo lidei matnas basar vadam v’lo lidei halvaasam” jumped out at me. How desperately I wanted to be self-sufficient and not be beholden to others! Yet with Gershon, financial stability seemed to be an impossible dream. He was a capable fellow with plenty of earning power, but he threw away every penny he earned, and then some.

One day, I asked myself a question: If I had a bank account with unlimited money, and I wasn’t financially dependent on Gershon, would I divorce him?

The answer was a resounding no. Gershon, for all his financial failings, was a kind, caring, nurturing person — the first person in my life who had really taken care of me. I wasn’t ready to be a single parent to five children, nor did I harbor any illusions that remarriage would give me a better life.

As I recited the words “HaRachaman Hu yefarneseinu b’chavod,” I spoke to Hashem directly. Hashem, I said, my husband is not my provider. You are. You can provide for me through my husband, or, if You choose, you can provide for me a different way.

From the moment of that epiphany, I began viewing Gershon’s role purely as that of a husband and father, not as that of a provider.

That didn’t mean I had to tolerate his gambling. “I will only stay with you if you agree to two conditions,” I told him. “One, that you allow me to take over managing the money again — but this time, it’s going to be permanent. And two, that you join Gamblers Anonymous.”

Gershon was happy to cooperate. He accompanied me to the bank, where we transferred all of our joint accounts to my name. His name remained on one account, with the agreement that all his earnings would be deposited directly into my account, and I would transfer to his account the money he needed for himself. He would never again touch a credit card or even know the number.

I started going with him once a week to Gamblers Anonymous (GA) meetings. He attended the meetings for gamblers, while I attended the Gam-Anon meetings for codependents of gamblers held at the same time, in a different room of the building. Interestingly, while the GA meetings were full to capacity, I was one of only five attendees at the Gam-Anon meeting, two of whom had been attending for decades. I discovered that of all the “anon” codependent groups, such as Al-Anon for loved ones of alcoholics and Nar-Anon for loved ones of drug addicts, the Gam-Anon meeting actually has the fewest participants — apparently because very few people actually stay married to gamblers.

Gam-Anon gave me the strength to tell Gershon that he needed a real job. “Forget your dreams of making it big on your own,” I told him. “You need a boss to answer to and a clock to punch, to make sure you get up and out in the morning and come home at a normal time.”

Soon afterward, Gershon took a job working in a carpentry business. Right when he was hired, he told his boss that he had a gambling problem and that all payment arrangements had to be handled through me. Once his salary was worked out, I took out a pen and paper and showed him that if we continued living on a shoestring budget, in five years we could be out of debt completely and start saving up for a down payment on a house.

That was seven years ago. Today, we are debt-free, and we recently bought our own home. After completing my business course several years ago, I went on to earn an MBA, and today I’m actually working as a business consultant. My specialty is helping people balance their business and personal finances to ensure that the decisions they make in one realm don’t compromise the other. But my real dream is to one day work with women who are going through financial difficulties and help them take responsibility for themselves and their family finances. Ideally, of course, this role would be filled by a husband, but many women either don’t have a husband, or don’t have a husband who can provide for them reliably.

I married Gershon because I thought he’d guarantee that I’d always have what to eat. I had to learn, the hard way, that there is only one True Provider — and that if I rely on Him, everything will fall into place.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 704)