“You’re so cool,” she said.

I jerked my head back in rebuff. “Who me?” I scoffed. “You’re the cool one in our crowd.”

Now it was her turn. “Me? Why me?”

“Whaddya mean, why me? Look at you.”

“Look at me? Look at you!”

Old friends, we could’ve circled for hours.

I supplied evidence: “You wrote a children’s book, you make and sell cool clay figurines, it don’t get cooler than that.”

“You’re living your dream, you teach 12^th grade English, you teach a college course, you’re on panels, you’ve been published,” she countered.

Neither of us conceded the point. She is cool, and I am not. She is admirable and accomplished, and I am … trying. She thinks the same things about me and herself, in reverse.

But I really know — cool, accomplished: it’s just not me.

It wasn’t me to attend a shidduch meeting in my neighborhood. My sister-in-law encouraged me to attend. “It’s just a small get-together, throwing around names and ideas.” I raised an eyebrow. I don’t do these things; they’re for other people, people like my landlord. She’s a people person. She’s assertive. She’s charming and engaging and she’s guaranteed her slot in the World to Come many times over via the matchmaker route. Not me. I’m not the persuasive type, more the “whatever you want” sort of gal. I couldn’t sell water in a desert.

But I looked around a few weeks later, and the couple I set up was going out for their sixth time. And the girl already met the boy’s parents, and it might be happening. I did that, though it doesn’t really count, ’cause you know, it’s my sister’s friend, to my best friend’s brother; it wasn’t official-official shadchanus.

So it’s still not me.

And then there was the time when my friend, veiling her desperation, asked me to watch her kids.

“Sure,” I answered, before I remembered that I don’t do kids. Well, not other people’s kids anyway. I’m more comfortable when they’re angst-filled teens. Babies cry when I hold them, toddlers cling to their mommy’s skirts when I put out my arms —  they just don’t like me. She’s one of my closest friends though. I could traumatize myself for a few hours to help her.

But it was fine, more than fine — it was fun. We danced and sang and ate and laughed, and cried a few times too.

“You’re a doll,” she tells me later. “I was so desperate, and he had a great time; he keeps trying to sing Ya’lili.”

A doll? Me? Dolls are sweet and nice and giving, and they smile a lot. I think I’m a good person, but I don’t think those are my shining qualities. But she called me a doll. Might I be? I did qualify. In this case, maybe.

And he had fun. A little boy, other than my own, liked me. He liked me. He didn’t cry when I smiled at him. He let me comfort him when he fell and held my hand when we danced. Maybe I could be a little-people person.

Maybe that could be me.

Then there was the time when my husband told me the guest list: “It’s gonna be Abba, Ima, Zeidy, Binyomin, Usher, Yehudis, and Chasya. Oh, and us.”

“What?” I said. “I can’t cook for so many people. Cook for your mother, Mrs. Patchke? I can’t really cook at all. I’m the girl who burned the fish in water — twice.”

He laughed at me. “You were single then; you’re an amazing cook now. I like your chicken soup better than Ima’s!” I shook my head, felt my chest contract and stomach roil; I couldn’t feed all these people, not to the standard they were used to.

And when the Shabbos meal had been and gone, when I had no leftovers and too many compliments, I said they were being nice or maybe they were starving from traveling. But this scene has happened many times over. Maybe the girl who didn’t smell burning fish can cook after all.

Maybe.

It’s not me, I say. But it is. It takes time to see it, but slowly I’m becoming the person I already am.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 344)