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t’s my wife,” said Shia. “She’s terribly anxious about the whole situation.”

“With good reason,” I responded. “This is absolutely a challenging place to be.”

And it was. Vivian had been on strict bed rest for a month already, and still had a good few months to go until her baby was ready for delivery. While she had three healthy kids at home, this pregnancy was certainly different than the others. Oligohydramnios — low amniotic fluid — had been diagnosed at around 14 weeks, and after a solid stay in the hospital, Vivian had been discharged to a strict bed-rest regimen at home.

And strict it was — she was limited to 1,000 steps per day. There were physical therapy exercises to prevent blood clots, regular visiting nurse appointments at home, weekly checkups with her high-risk obstetrician, and, of course, the mandatory ultrasounds.

But Vivian was a trooper. Even when her family begged them to return to Paris, she was dedicated to remaining in Israel.

“Sure I wish we had more help, and there’s nothing like Mama taking care of me,” she admitted. “But Shia has an amazing chavruta here and he has the zechut to learn in the Mir! What could be better than that? And our children have such tremendous chinuch here. How could we leave?”

Shia, the one who’d called me in to this home visit, interrupted. “Vivian… look, you can be honest here. The doctor needs to know about the crying and the panic attacks. He’s happy to help.”

I looked toward Vivian, who responded to her husband with a big smile. “Shia, I’m not the one panicking every day. Hashem has done such nissim for us and I know He will help us to have another beautiful baby. The merit of your study and our children’s learning will certainly bring us yeshuot!”

Shia shrugged when I looked back to him. True, I’d only known them for a brief period of time, but it didn’t look like Vivian was the anxious one. If anything, she was handling the whole thing like a champ.

I probed a bit deeper to look for signs and symptoms of illness, but all that I found in Vivian was a deep and inspiring sense of emunah. She had turned her test into a real opportunity for personal growth. “Every day I listen to a few hours of shiurim,” she said. “I’ve even gone back to study sefer Shoftim and have been going through Chovot Halevavot with Rav Avigdor Miller. I’ll be honest, Dr. Freedman, I’m actually grateful for this chance to put my faith in Hashem.”

As I listened to her with increasing admiration I failed to see the despair on the other side of the room. As I complimented Vivivan on her stellar response to the situation, Shia grew increasingly exasperated and blurted out, “But there’s no one to help us, we are mamash drowning!”

Surprised, we both turned to face poor Shia who had tears pouring down his reddened face. “Sure, we have help with dropping off the kids at school, but who’s taking achrayut for the home?! It’s all falling on me!”

It was clear that anxiety and panic were present in the room, but not in the patient who had been initially identified.

“I wake up at 4:30 a.m. to pack lunches! I daven at home! I do all of the dishes and all of the laundry! I get no support from anyone because it’s just the expectation!”

I began to open my mouth to comfort Shia but he continued, “I can’t do it! I’m falling asleep during my chavruta and I’m crying all night long! I have palpitations every day during the appointments and I’m just not cut out for this!”

I handed Shia a box of tissues and took his hand. “Shia, it’s okay. You’re doing amazing!”

“No I’m not, Dr. Freedman,” he blurted out. “All I’m doing is what my wife does every day and I’m doing a lousy job of it. I’m not even cooking dinner. She’s such an eishet chayil and I’m a total failure. The kids cry and want their mother! I want her back too! This is an impossible challenge!”

Vivian, ever the optimist, looked at her despondent husband and told him something in French that I couldn’t understand.

He began to laugh between sobs and told me, “She told me that’s why I say ‘Baruch Shelo Asani Ishah’ every day. Because it’s infinitely harder to be a wife. She does all this, never complains, and she makes supper too. All I do is microwave vegetarian schnitzel.”

I wanted to tell him the same thing that my rav, Rabbi Naftoly Bier of the Boston Kollel, had told me when my own wife was recovering from surgery a number of years ago. “Remember how amazing your wife is and how grateful you need to be every single day for all of her amazing work,” he told me. “You’re getting overwhelmed packing lunches and doing dishes and laundry.... She does the same thing every day while also cooking you an amazing dinner and going to work each day! When we see this stuff we need to be incredibly grateful for our wives and to make sure never to criticize them. How do you think we’d feel if they called us out on our lousy laundry-folding skills and underwhelming dinner menus?”

It wasn’t appropriate to bring my own experience into the room, but I felt it was necessary to say to Shia, “Your wife is an amazing person, baruch Hashem. But so are you, Reb Shia. That being said, we need to get you some help.”

“What do you mean?” asked Vivian. “My mother is coming in a few weeks to help until the baby is due.”

“Fantastic! But in the meantime, we need to get a Bais Yaakov girl over every day to help keep things in order and to take the load off of poor Shia before he cracks.”

Shia sighed, and it was clear that we’d taken a heavy yoke off of his shoulders. Still, he was going to need a bit more help than a few chesed hours to get through this.

“And Reb Shia, you’re going to come back to meet with me again tomorrow.”

“Whoa — I don’t need meds, Dr. Freedman... do I?”

“I don’t think so, Shia. But I do think you need a safe place to talk about all this stress and to unload a bit. And you need to learn some relaxation and mindfulness strategies to get you through the next few months.”

As we finished up, I was happy to have survived my first case of high-risk pregnancy-induced Munchausen-by-proxy — where the husband had initially projected his own anxiety onto his perfectly normal eishes chayil.

“Beshaah tovah!” I said as I let myself out. “Let’s hope you all get to the finish line happy and healthy.”

Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 719. Jacob L. Freedman is a psychiatrist and business consultant based in Israel. When he’s not busy with his patients, Dr. Freedman can be found learning Torah in The Old City or hiking the hills outside of Jerusalem.  Dr. Freedman can be reached most easily through his website www.drjacoblfreedman.com.