Sometimes, they weren’t just cold to me, they were downright disapproving. Once, I was sitting at the table in my in-laws’ house with Nochum, when his sister Chava — who was just a couple of years older than I was — turned to Nochum and said, “Eeew! Your yarmulke is so crinkled and disgusting! Doesn’t Faigy tell you to change it?”

When my first baby was several months old, Chava, who by then was an experienced mother of two, looked at the baby and said, “I don’t mean to sound like your mother-in-law, but don’t you think you should cut your son’s nails more often?”

“I don’t mean to sound like your mother-in-law…” So many times, Chava prefaced a critical comment or suggestion with those incredibly condescending words that made me feel like a worm. The irony was that my mother-in-law, Chava’s own mother, would never have dreamed of saying such things to me.

Fortunately for me, Nochum had inherited his mother’s warm, gentle personality, while his sisters had apparently inherited their father’s tougher nature. Each time I spent time around them, I came home feeling stripped of my self-esteem and questioning my own worth.

Knowing that the slightest imperfection could prompt a nasty comment from my sisters-in-law, each time I had to be in their proximity I’d worry about every aspect of my family’s appearance. Did my baby’s socks match his pajamas? Were Nochum’s shoes scuffed? Was every hair of my wig in place?

Several years after I joined the family, Ruti got engaged. Nochum and I found out about the impending engagement when his father called to invite us to a l’chayim. I was surprised that no one had told us that Ruti was dating seriously — and even more surprised when I found out, at the l’chayim, that Ruti had told all her sisters about the shidduch right from the beginning.

I made the mistake of mentioning to Yocheved, at the l’chayim, that I felt bad that I was the only one left in the dark about the shidduch.

“Oh, please,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Don’t be so supersensitive.”

For the Shabbos sheva brachos, I arranged for my family to stay at the home of my parents’ friends, the Landbergs, who lived next door to the hall where the sheva brachos were to be held, and whose teenage daughter was available to babysit for me during the meals.

Two days before Shabbos, Chava called to ask for a favor on Yocheved’s behalf.

“Yocheved’s not happy where she’s staying, she says it’s too far from the hall and her kids can’t walk,” Chava said. “She wants to know if she can switch places with you.”

“Actually,” I said, “I have a babysitter where I’m staying, and I’m planning to leave my kids there during the Friday night meal.”

“But Yocheved has four kids, and you have two, so she needs the babysitter more,” Chava replied.

“I hope she manages to find a babysitter,” I said, “but I don’t see how I can manage without one. And Yocheved’s place is much too far for me. But why don’t you have Yocheved call me directly? Maybe we can work out something together.”

“Never mind,” she replied. “I’ll take care of it.”

A short while after Chava hung up, a thought occurred to me. Nah, she wouldn’t, I told myself. Yes, she would, myself answered back.

Just to be on the safe side, I called Mrs. Landberg. “I just wanted to confirm with you that I’m going to be staying at your house for Shabbos,” I said.

“So funny you should call just now,” she said. “A couple of minutes ago your sister-in-law Chava called to tell me that the arrangements were changed, and your sister-in-law Yocheved is going to be staying here instead of you.”

I was flabbergasted. Even if I wasn’t altogether surprised.

“There was a misunderstanding,” I said. “I’m the one staying at your house, not Yocheved.”

Then, I called Chava back to let her know that I, not Yocheved, would be staying at the Landbergs.

“I think it was unfair of you to go ahead and tell Mrs. Landberg that Yocheved and her family are going to be her guests,” I added. “I’m the one who made those arrangements in the first place.”

“You’re yelling at me!” she exclaimed. “How dare you call me to yell?”

“I’m sorry,” I stammered. “I didn’t mean to—”

“Well, then, watch what you say so that you don’t have to apologize!” she retorted.

I cried myself to sleep that night, wondering how I had turned from the victim into the aggressor. And all Shabbos, I felt invisible poison darts emanating from Yocheved and Chava. By the time we left Motzaei Shabbos, I had a massive headache.

Still, when I found out that Chava was hosting a sheva brachos for the new couple, I called her and offered to help with the decor and setup. “I have to speak to the powers that be,” she said. “I’ll get back to you.”

She never did get back to me, and in the end, Hindy took care of the setup.

The following Succos found my mother-in-law suffering from a flare-up and out of commission, so Yocheved took it upon herself to make Yom Tov for her parents. “I want to help out,” I told her. “What can I cook? Do you want me to decorate the succah? What else can I do to help?”

I called and texted her multiple times with general and specific offers of help, but each time, she turned me down.

“It’s okay,” she demurred. “We’re doing fine.”

When I spoke to my father-in-law a couple of days before Yom Tov, I told him that I really wanted to help, but that Yocheved wasn’t giving me anything to do.

On Yom Tov, my father-in-law came over to me and said, “I asked Yocheved why she didn’t give you anything to do. She said you never offered, and now you’re blaming her for not giving you anything to do when she could really have used your help.”

“That’s not true!” I protested.

But my father-in-law wasn’t listening. He had already started talking to someone else.

Hot tears sprang to my eyes, and I had to flee to a side room to regain my composure.

After that Yom Tov, my in-laws, who are somewhat affluent, began taking the entire family to a hotel for Pesach, since it was too hard for my mother-in-law to make Yom Tov.

Each year, when my friends heard that my in-laws were taking us away to a hotel, they practically oozed envy. “You’re so lucky, Faigy!” they would squeal. “No cleaning, no cooking, no squishing into a crowded basement!”

Little did they know how miserable the hotel experience was for me. When I entered the dining room, none of my sisters-in-law would make room for me at the table. If I wanted to join them, I would have to literally elbow my way into their conversation and make place for myself. How I wished I could have stayed home and made my own Yom Tov, or squished in with a bunch of my siblings in my parents’ crowded basement.

As the years went on and our families grew, the hotel experience became increasingly difficult for me. My father-in-law, who had always been the dominant parent and became ever more dominant as his wife’s condition deteriorated, was the one who arranged the rooms, and he did so in a way that clearly showed who had favored status in the family and who didn’t.

One year, Yocheved, who had six kids at the time, got a suite, as did Chava, with four kids. Nochum and I had four kids, too, but we got one room.

When I found out about the rooming arrangements, I politely asked my father-in-law why Chava had two rooms and we had one, if we both had four kids.

“You can put your kids in Chava’s second room,” was his response.

“That’s not going to work,” I said.

In the end, he gave us a second room. But the next Pesach, we found ourselves in a resort where the dining room was in the main building and the sleeping areas were in several smaller buildings surrounding it. My father-in-law put all the sisters in one building and arranged babysitters for them, while I was in a different building — with no babysitter. That meant that if I wanted to put my kids to sleep before or during the seudah, or put my baby in for a nap, Nochum and I had to take turns staying with them. We couldn’t leave them in a different building with no supervision.

I spent most of the meals that Yom Tov upstairs with my kids. The worst part, for me, was knowing that no one in Nochum’s family even cared that I wasn’t there.

My mother-in-law loved to buy her grandchildren matching outfits, and even after she was confined to a wheelchair, she would send someone to buy matching clothing for the kids each season. In the hotel, the sisters would march out the children in their matching clothing. My kids would be the only ones not matching, because we hadn’t been notified of the wardrobe plans.

After this happened several times, I decided to initiate the wardrobe planning myself. “How about we dress the kids tomorrow in the matching blue outfits Mommy bought?” I suggested to them the first day of Yom Tov.

“Nah,” one of them said. “It’s not going to work.”

The others nodded with equal disapproval.

Sure enough, the next morning my kids were wearing the blue outfits, while all the other grandchildren were dressed matching — in black and white.

“You have to say something to them,” I told Nochum. “Why can’t they just give Mommy the nachas of having everyone dressed alike? Why do they always have to leave me out?”

“It’s not going to help,” he said. “I’ll be wasting my breath.”

“Please, just say something to them,” I begged.

Later that day, he went over to his sister Ruti and told her that it bothered me when everyone else’s kids are matching and mine are left out. “Why don’t you tell Faigy when you make up how you’re going to dress the kids?” he asked.

“Why does she have to be so supersensitive?” Ruti demanded. “She thinks we did it behind her back? Matching the kids was a totally random thing!”

Random, indeed — their kids just happened to match every time they were together.

You’d think that after being left out time and again, year after year, I would have stopped caring and given up on being part of the clan. But to me, it was unthinkable not to be close to immediate family, whether my own or my husband’s. I would have done anything for my own siblings, so why were Nochum’s siblings any different?

What made things even more complicated was that my sisters-in-law were highly successful and admired in the community. “Your sister-in-law Yocheved is soooo special,” people would croon to me. “Such a baalas chesed.” And she was. So why couldn’t I get along with her? Was there something wrong with me?

And so I continued to try to reach out to Nochum’s sisters and find my place in the family. But every time I reached out, I was hurt yet again by their obvious efforts to exclude me. And no matter how many times Nochum urged me not to take it personally, I invariably cried myself to sleep after every encounter with his sisters.

One morning in the summer, Ruti texted me that she, Yocheved, and Chava were thinking of taking a trip that day with their kids. “Wanna join us?” she wrote.

An invitation! What a nice surprise! “Count me in,” I wrote back. “Where are you going?”

Three hours later, I finally got a text back from her. “We’re all here in the park,” she wrote. “We’re having a great time.”

The park they were in was a two-hour drive away. It was too late for me to head over there with my kids, who were anxiously waiting to leave, since I had told them that we were going on a family trip with their cousins.

The next day, I had to drop something off at my in-laws’ house, and I met Ruti there. “I really felt bad that you didn’t tell me where you were going until it was too late for me to come,” I said.

“We always have to walk on eggshells around you!” she exclaimed. “Why do you have to be like that?”

By then, I had been in the family long enough that I should have known, right when I got invited, that I wasn’t really welcome, and that Ruti’s text was just a formality so she could later say, “We invited Faigy but she didn’t want to come, and then she made a big fuss about it.” Which is what she told her parents later.

That particular incident was hardly the most painful interaction I’d had with my sisters-in-law, but it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I had cried innumerable tears over the way my sisters-in-law treated me, but this time, I couldn’t hold the tears back until I’d be in the privacy of my own home. I began to sob right in front of Ruti.

Seeing me crying had no effect on her whatsoever. “You have to stop being so supersensitive,” was all she could say.

Never, in all the years, had any of my sisters-in-law been willing to acknowledge my point of view. Any time I had spoken up about the way I was feeling, the issue was thrown back at me, and the conversation closed with the assertion that I was just supersensitive.

Was I supersensitive? No one else, besides Nochum’s sisters, had ever accused me of being overly sensitive. I was an easygoing person who generally saw others in a favorable light and was usually able to overlook minor slights.

After that incident, in which I had been reduced to tears in front of my sister-in-law, I decided to go for therapy. It was there that I was introduced to the concepts of enmeshment and narcissism. In an enmeshed family system, the therapist explained, people don’t have room to differentiate from each other and develop their own autonomous identities, so they remain in unhealthy relationships with poorly defined boundaries. “On the outside, your sisters-in-law may appear to be close, but really they’re just huddling together for security,” she said.

Narcissism, I learned, was when people see only themselves and no one else. “Narcissists may seem like the nicest people,” the therapist told me. “It’s only when you have to be in a close relationship with them that the trouble starts — and then you start to question your own sanity. They’ll never admit to doing anything wrong, they’ll just keep insisting that you’re the one with the problem.”

The therapist explained that calling me “supersensitive” was simply a way of diverting the blame. “It never helps to tell a person not to be so sensitive or not to feel what they’re feeling,” she noted. “It just obfuscates the issue.”

Achieving clarity about what was actually going on between my sisters-in-law and me helped me to get past the conflicted feelings that had been mounting all the years: my desire to have a good relationship with them, on one hand, and my feeling consistently hurt and ignored by them, on the other hand.

I can’t force them to like me or want to have a relationship with me, I finally realized. If they don’t want to include me, it’s their loss.

Once the problem had a name — and it wasn’t Faigy — we were able to devise a strategy for dealing with it. That strategy was keeping things pareve, and it involved maintaining a courteous relationship with Nochum’s sisters without trying to get too close, and having no expectations of them whatsoever.

It meant that we still went with Nochum’s family to a hotel for Yom Tov, but once at the hotel, I found other people to talk to, people who were actually interested in what I had to say. It meant that whenever we were at a family meal or get-together, the people I paid attention to were my own husband and children. It meant that when any of the sisters made a party or a simchah, we came fashionably late and left early because we “had to put the kids to bed.”

Keeping things pareve was still a huge challenge, since I had to subject myself to their put-downs and cold shoulders time after time, knowing that things were unlikely to ever improve.

Being a naturally warm, outgoing person, I had a hard time adopting the pareve style of interaction at first. It actually seemed easier to not participate in family get-togethers — something I was often tempted to do, but would never have done because I believed it was wrong. Instead, I kept telling myself that Hashem didn’t put me into this family arbitrarily. If He gave me these relatives, my job was to make the relationship work as best as possible, even if as best as possible was just pareve.

(Originally Featured in Mishpacha Issue 681)