If Rina thought she’d have a couple of weeks of quiet after returning from camp, she realized very quickly how wrong she was. She needed to start planning the local scenes, which would be shot on the streets of a frum neighborhood and in someone’s house.

She considered using her own house — it was logistically so much easier, and her beautiful home was certainly movie-worthy. But she wasn’t sure how Heshy would feel about the invasion of his privacy.

Even though, considering the hours he kept, he probably wouldn’t even know about it.

That was the second thing on her plate: Heshy. Or rather, his mother. Once Rina had come home, she’d insisted that she would take over managing his mother’s medical care, so Heshy could return to work. The grateful look on his face — the admission, even if not in so many words, that he’d been longing for Rina’s help — had been worth every second of the precious time she was about to give up.

But it wasn’t easy being a good wife. A long-term invalid, her mother-in-law was cantankerous at the best of times. Recovering from a hospitalization made her mood ten times worse. Even though she had Bella, her full-time aide, her mother-in-law had high expectations of Rina, asking her to bring over daily homemade dinners, do her shopping, and take care of her bills and paperwork.

It wasn’t that Rina begrudged helping — this was her husband’s mother, after all — but she did resent the attitude. Never a word of thanks. Anything Rina did was merely what was expected of a daughter-in-law for her sickly mother-in-law. Heshy’s mother would take Rina’s carefully packed dinners and wordlessly hand them to Bella to put in the fridge.

Rina was a giver by nature, but couldn’t she get some appreciation for once?

She certainly wasn’t getting it from her kids, who kept complaining about the amount of time she was at Bubby’s house. After three weeks away at camp, she couldn’t blame them, but who came first? Her husband or her children? So, giving into the pangs of conscience, she tried taking the boys out as much as possible in the afternoons, while her mornings were spent working on the film and her evenings at her mother-in-law’s. Of course, this meant that, once again, Huvy was picking up the slack at home.

But Rina refused to feel guilty. Huvy seemed genuinely happy to help. Besides, it wasn’t like she was doing much else.

Driving home from her mother-in-law’s, Rina allowed herself to contemplate the enigma of her eldest daughter. It was so hard to know what she was thinking, what she was feeling behind those placid blue eyes. Did she wish she had friends, like Atara, or was she genuinely happy living in social isolation? How could she be? (Excerpted from Family First, Issue 618)