Had she broken her daughters’ spirits? Shprintza was filled with remorse for all the ways she had erred before learning that parenting was a Thing

Mindy hadn’t always been a disembodied editor, hovering invisibly in the atmosphere and admonishing the cosmos about semicolon usage. Once, before the debacle with Bubbe Shprintza, she’d had an actual office with a desk, coffee stains, and a computer with bookmarks for AliPicks and Imamother.

You know the platitudes about not being able to change the past, only the future? Turns out, motivational posters lie a lot. Though you probably knew that already.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, which, as we’ve seen, can lead to disaster. So let’s start in the middle, and explain how a successful, corporeal professional managed to unravel the very fabric of her family’s past.

It all started with the magazine that accidentally slipped through a wormhole connecting 1863 to 2021. (To understand how that works, please see the most recent magazine profile of a world-renowned astrophysicist who also happens to be frum; apparently, there are loads of them, patiently littering the halls of MIT waiting to be discovered.)

Etty Glustein, the new hire, was a sweet young thing in duty-length knit sets and velvet smoking loafers. Just right for the front desk of Sichah Beteilah, the premier women’s magazine. She was not, however, possessed of particularly incisive intellect. Specifically, she didn’t realize that in Shprintza Weiss’s subscription form, 1863 was not the street address but the year.

When the once-fresh copy of Sichah Beteilah arrived on Shprintza Weiss’s doorstep that afternoon in early spring, the color had all faded to sepia, allowing you, dear reader, to suspend disbelief enough to follow the ensuing action.

Much to the good fortune of this writer, as the daughter of the Wise Rav of her shtetl, Shprintza providentially knew how to read, or this story would have been a nonstarter. She was surprised to see the shrink-wrapped package, since mail normally arrived in their village only twice a year, and also because shrink-wrap wasn’t invented until the 1950s. But she had enough life experience to know that tales of life in the heim are generally not bound by constraints of historical accuracy, so she just went with it.

The first pages, the ones with pictures of the mountains outside her window and the ones of impractical baby clothes, didn’t speak to her. Who thought of dressing a baby in tights but no pants in the dead of winter? (Someone who could afford an unlimited supply of firewood, that’s who.)

But the article on page 17 positively alarmed her. “14 Ways You May Have Ruined Your Child’s Future Before Breakfast,” announced the title; just below, in slightly less obnoxious print, it offered conciliatorily, “And What to Do about It on the off Chance It’s Not Too Late.”

“Speaking sharply to a child is damaging to his ethereal, delicate souls,” warned the author, clearly a Noted Expert. “If you’ve done it once, there may be a slight chance you can still be rehabilitated if you take immediate action. Find a 12-step program in your area at the earliest opportunity.”

Had she broken her daughters’ spirits? Shprintza was filled with remorse for all the ways she had erred before learning that parenting was a Thing.