My mother-in-law is tall and big boned, with broad shoulders. Looking at her, I’ve always thought that if I threw a rope or two around this green-and-blue globe we live on and hung it over her arms, she’d take one heave and pull it right along after her, without even letting go of her pocketbook.

I’m not like that. It’s not just that I’m petite and slim and my shoulders look like they belong to a 12-year-old. It’s that I wasn’t made for pulling weights. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I had leukemia as a young teen; extended chemotherapy left its mark on my system. Maybe that’s just who I am — I tire easily, my stamina is short lived. And it doesn’t bother me; I’m happy to quietly make my way through life without heroics or dramatics.

I certainly didn’t want to use my precious energy agonizing over my lack of ambition: I try to simply accept it as a piece of myself, and live accordingly. When I was in shidduchim, I knew I didn’t have the physical strength to do the work-plus-run-house thing that comes along with marrying a learner, so I looked for a solid ben Torah who was in the working world. It took a few years — at 21 or 22, most solid boys are still intent on learning. By the time they reach 24, it’s easier to find a good boy who has left yeshivah. I also had to find someone willing to overlook the fear engendered by my medical file, and instead accept the clean bill of health my doctors now gave me.

Baruch Hashem, I found Levi, the youngest of six. He had just become a CPA and we settled down happily. Although my parents don’t have money, they offered to pay for cleaning help twice a week. “I’m paying to save your energy,” my mother told me, and we accepted their offer.

Married life suited me perfectly. I’m on a special toxin-free diet and I put a lot of effort into cooking tasty, healthful meals. I rested each afternoon so that I was alert and with-it when Levi came home in the evening. I spent my mornings puttering around the house, decorating the drab walls of our small rental with needlepoints, sewing curtains, visiting my elderly aunts.

“Nechama’s learning how to run a home,” my mother-in-law said of me, and for the first six months of our marriage she left me alone. But then, one Shabbos, as I deposited a tray of pickled herring in the kitchen, she cornered me.

“Nisht Shabbos geredt, but there’s a career fair on Sunday.”

I nodded. I’d heard of it; it was mainly geared for seminary returnees.

As if she’d read my thoughts, my mother-in-law said, “Many married women go too.”

I rinsed the fish forks off in the sink. “Mmm.”

She turned, so that I was pinned between the sink and her ample girth. I’m claustrophobic, and for a moment my breath was stuck in my windpipe — it just refused to exit and I was left with a bubble of air and tension inside. After two seconds, three, I stepped sideways. Out. Breathless, I scuttled to the entrance of the kitchen.

Did my panic antagonize her? When I look back, I’m still trying to find the places where I went wrong, where I could have done things differently.

“I think you should go.”

I think I should breathe.

I shook my head. “Why do I need to go train? Become some therapist or other? My life is full.”

She began slicing up kugel and laying huge slabs on a glass plate. “It’s no good. A girl has to have outside interests. A job. Some way of filling all those hours. It’s not healthy…”

I felt the heat rise through my body and settle just under my cheekbones. While she slapped kugel and muttered into the steam, I slipped out of the kitchen.

The encounter got me thinking. What’s the line between laziness and leisure? When does slow paced become morally repugnant? My mother-in-law seems to battle her way through her day, her week, pushing herself harder and faster and more efficient. And me? Do I float? Am I meant to? My mother always taught me that included in women’s binah yeseirah is an innate knowledge of what we can and can’t do, how much we should or should not be pushing ourselves to accomplish. Could I rely on my inner voice?

That Sunday evening, my mother-in-law showed up at our door with a fistful of brochures and leaflets. She had so kindly taken the time out of her schedule to help me, the hapless daughter-in-law who couldn’t, wouldn’t, didn’t even take a couple of hours from a Sunday afternoon to better her life’s prospects.

I thanked her, walked her to her car, went back inside, and crushed the mass of glossy paper into the garbage. Of course, when Levi came in, he saw it. “What’s this?”

I told him.

“Yeah,” he said, reaching into the fridge and pouring himself a glass of the fruit smoothie I had prepared that afternoon. “My mother’s very into this.”

I swallowed my anger and frustration. “And you?”

He took a gulp of his drink, and looked up. His lips were tinted green from the kiwi. “Nechama, I just want you to be happy.”

“Fine. Well, I am.” I flounced out of the room, leaving him to put his own glass in the sink, and tried to cool off by splashing water on my face.

Slowly, my mother-in-law’s desire to see me “doing something with my life” became an obsession. The comments became increasingly intrusive and offensive: “So what do you do all day?” She would volunteer me for family errands: “Nechama can do it. She’s the only one who has time….”

I like to think of myself as a peacemaker, though maybe I’m conveniently reframing weakness to cast myself in a good light. Whatever the motive, I never responded to my mother-in-law’s barbs. Gradually, though, I withdrew from our relationship, cutting it down to the occasional Shabbos meal, Chanukah parties, and great-grandma’s birthday celebration.

Meanwhile, in her eyes, it became much more than a crusade to fill my day productively. She built up the whole issue until it became: Nechama is worthless. She lies around all day, does nothing to help with the finances, gives nothing to the community (pure assumption, as I did plenty for the community — none of it, however, had to be subjected to her scrutiny). Eventually it reached the stage where, instead of rejoicing in the gentle, sweet soul her Levi had married, it was what waste of space Levi has for a wife.

It got better when our daughter Rivka was born, three and a half years after our wedding. Better, because even glass-ceiling-cracking career women are allowed to take maternity leave. Better, because I felt more justified in staying home when I could be a full-time mommy. Better, because I saw so clearly that I had no strength to do more than I had been given.

I breathed a sigh of relief, and occasionally joined Levi on his Thursday evening visits to his parents, where he sat at the kitchen table and shmoozed his way through his mother’s greasy potato kugel and chocolate cake.

But by the time Rivkale was two and a half, the pressure was back. If I wasn’t going to send her out, then why did I not at least run a playgroup in the house? It would be good for Rivkale, stimulating, it would give her friends, surely it was time that she was no longer cooped up in the four walls of our home?

I blame myself, now, with the blessed clarity of hindsight, for not defending myself. For not realizing that, though my mother-in-law criticized me endlessly for my lifestyle, she was careful not to interfere in our marriage, our finances, or the chinuch system we had chosen. When the opposition is an ogre, there’s no one to talk to, but my mother-in-law is far from an ogre. Objectively, I could agree that she’s a kind, concerned, powerful woman who simply happened to bully me — or what felt like bullying at any rate.

So why didn’t I talk to her? Why didn’t I say, “Actually, Rivkale sees far more than our four walls. True, she doesn’t go to nursery school and color in pictures that teach her big and small, in and out. But in the store, she sure knows that a watermelon is big and an apricot is small. She loves squeezing the rind of the melons and making sure that they’re firm. She’s learned to count as I place one, two, three, four, five yogurts in my cart. She comes with me to the park, to my Pilates class, where she lies down beside me and kicks her feet into the air. She comes along to the nursing homes where I visit my relatives, and she charms the nurses and the old ladies who wait for her vivacious smile. So, no, I don’t think that she has a narrow existence at all.”

But by then, I had clammed up completely. Not passive aggression; I had simply silently and quietly cut her out of my emotional life. And there were ramifications. Levi adores his mother, always viewed her as a paragon of strength. Shutting her out had caused tension between us. Tension that tended to eat away at me as I spent my days at home, made me think: Well, if I were working, I’d simply turn my focus to the demands of the job.

On Rivkale’s third birthday, we planned a small party in the evening, so I was surprised when my mother-in-law came by earlier to drop off a gift. She didn’t often come by unannounced, and seeing her broad frame in the doorway brushed me with annoyance. It was also inconvenient; I was in the middle of a bunch of phone calls trying to figure out how to support the family of a woman in the throes of severe depression. Her husband wanted her hospitalized — I think he imagined that ten days in a pysch ward would somehow cure everything, that if he made that sacrifice he’d be rewarded with a good-as-new wife. In the meantime, we were organizing meals and mentors so that the kids had someone to help them with their homework and give them one-on-one time each day.

I showed my mother into the sitting room, where Rivkale was playing with her little ironing board, and excused myself to finish the call I’d put on hold. As I prepared coffee, I spoke through some of the family’s issues (no names, of course). “It’s tough for the children, because their mother is there and yet not there. Hard for them to figure out what’s going on, and scary when they do. That a person can be healthy in body, but not able to function.”

I should have known that my mother-in-law wouldn’t sit still. A couple of minutes later, when I put down the phone, I turned to see my mother-in-law lurking in the hallway. I was surprised; though I could imagine her listening in, I couldn’t see her admitting to the fact.

But she took no notice of my sharp look. “I had depression once,” she said.

The words lurched out of her, and I think she was only vaguely aware that it was me she was talking to. She reached into her pocketbook, took out a fifty-dollar bill, and gave it to me. “Use it to help the family,” she said.

I thanked her. Mentally, I was already debating whether or not to use it to provide the chicken others would be cooking the family for Shabbos, or whether we could manage to swing a really fun trip for the children.

She continued talking, following me into the sitting room, where Rivkale was still busy with her ironing. She sat down, grabbing the cords that dangled from the curtains and braiding them with fingers that, for once, were clumsy and uncertain.

“It was when Levi went to school. How old was he? Five. Six. And I’d spent the last 15 years at home with the children, had never done anything but devote myself to them, to having supper on the table on time — how I looked askance at those mothers who shrugged their shoulders and just gave their children scrambled eggs or bought fish sticks for supper. It was protein — meat or fish — every night, with starch, salad, and fruit. And then homework and baths and story time.”

I nodded. Levi had told me that his mother was home with them when they were little, a piece of knowledge that had only increased my feelings of distance, hurt, and resentment toward her. She could do it, but she won’t fargin me to stay home!

She gave a cough, looked down at Rivkale, and I could see her mentally correcting the way my little girl had positioned her dolly’s blouse on the ironing board. But maybe not. “Levi went to school and I didn’t know what to do with myself. I waved them goodbye in the morning and there I was, alone in the house. I went back to bed to rest and somehow I stayed there the whole day. Then I couldn’t sleep at night. So I got up, dusted a little, baked something, walked around. And then I was tired the next day, so I stayed in bed some more.”

Rivkale had stopped ironing by then, and she looked up at her grandmother. I pulled her onto my lap, unsure of where all this was going, unsure even of what to think. It was hard to feel any sympathy toward this woman who had become my enemy.

“It wasn’t only the aimlessness.”

I looked up. She had shrunk, suddenly, her shoulders bent over so that she looked surprisingly fragile.

“It was a feeling inside. Or maybe that there was no feeling inside. Just like a hollow drum, I was. It wasn’t even that I was sad. Just empty.”

She clasped her arms around herself and her eyes were far away, in a different time, a different place.

Then, all of a sudden, she straightened her shoulders, stood up, and brushed her skirt of invisible crumbs. I stood up too.

“What happened?” I asked.

She was back. The no-nonsense, broad-shouldered, wide-faced woman was back. “Oh, I don’t remember. I took some pills, probably. Then I started volunteering — you know at Yad Ezra. Then I did some fundraising...”

“And that’s where it all started?” She practically runs the place and her calendar is full to bursting with her tzedakah events, book drives, teas, sales, auctions, and fairs. This was where it all started.

“How long were you depressed for?”

She swung her pocketbook onto her arm. “Six months. No, eight. Maybe a year. It was the worst time in my life,” she said briskly. “I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

Understanding spread through me. “Is that why you’re so eager for me to have outside interests, training, a job?”

She looked so surprised. “Of course. Didn’t you know?!”

I had a thousand more questions to ask, but she didn’t give me the chance. She was off, running, before I could even formulate my thoughts into words.

The rest of the day — no, week — my thoughts were in a whirl. She was trying to help me. She was trying to prevent me from going through what she’d gone through. She was pushing because she cared, not because she felt I was worthless.

Today, a few years later, I wouldn’t say that things are easy between us; we’re too different, and she’s not a woman with enough emotional empathy to understand how and why I live my life the way I do. But we’ve reached a level of understanding and respect. She might pull this green-and-blue globe along with her strength, but she’s stopped trying to throw her rope over me.