She held back her thoughts. I don’t want you to go learn. I want you to spend the mornings with me, like all the other avreichim in the family. I want you to go out touring with me, and take this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to enjoy a trip abroad together. And I want us to enjoy the children together, as a family. That’s what I want. I want you to stop looking for chavrusas under every rock. But I can’t tell you any of this, because that would be terrible. And when I even think these thoughts, all the computer programmers’ wives come rising out of the lake, castigating me, calling me an ingrate. If only their husbands learned, they would dance for joy. I should just stop kvetching and be happy!

So I stop kvetching. I shut my mouth and simmer in silence.

“They tell me I don’t appreciate what I have,” she blurts out. Her voice is choked. She’s ashamed of her tears.

“Who?”

“It doesn’t matter. Someone I know, whose husband hasn’t learned since they got married. But she still dreams of it. And she — she was really annoyed with me. Last week, at the playground back home. She said I was talking like a silly little girl.”

“Why?” He was shocked.

“Because I’m not dancing for joy every night while I put the kids to bed by myself….” Now the tears are streaming, whether she likes it or not. “She said if I appreciated what a zechus I have, I would never talk that way about the long hours you’re out of the house.”

He looked crushed, bewildered. “If it ever gets really, really hard for you, you know I would come home,” he said.

“It is really, really hard for me, and I don’t want you to come home. That’s my sacrifice for Torah. Is there something wrong with that?”

“The question is, at what price?” Shua asked, then stopped to ponder that. Someone’s lost red scarf lay on the path ahead of them. Years later, she still remembers it, how they sat on the bench looking at the water, and the red scarf. And how he said, “If a woman reaches a point where she’s about to collapse, she’s not doing her family any favors by pushing herself any further.”

“And what if she’s not about to collapse?” Nechami countered. She tried to talk in a sweet singsong, like her brother Yoeli, to soften the effect. “She’s okay, she’s not falling apart. But still, it’s a hard, lonely life. So should she hold her husband back, keep him at home, until one day things might start getting easier?”

“I think this is too complicated for me,” he said. Women. Their thoughts get so entangled. “But this I’ll say: What you’ve given for my Torah, our Torah, no one can ever take away.”

After their jaunt in the park, he asked their hosts’ permission and opened a Tanach to show her a pasuk in Yeshayahu. She was familiar with the pasuk in perek lamed beis about the complacent women. But she didn’t know the passage that follows. The vintage that failed, the harvest that doesn’t come… the palace abandoned. She didn’t know that it can take time until a spirit from on high comes and transforms the wilderness to a fruitful field.

• ••

Now, things are different.

These days, the older children get dressed without her help, Sari combs Yossi’s hair, and Yehudit knows how to put her tights on.

“Ima,” Beri asks, “can we go and wait downstairs? Do you want us to take Yossi and Yehudit with us, so you can get ready?”

“Yes, that would be wonderful,” she says, and closes the door behind their happy chatter.

The one flame in the menorah grows dim. She gazes at the sputtering wick. A wave of emotion washes over her. Chaya is getting engaged — tonight.

“Ima!” Yehudit and Sari burst in, shouting. “Ima, that lady… the one you said isn’t well…”

“She’s standing outside our storeroom, facing the wall and like, shuckeling!” Sari is barely breathing.

“I got scared,” says Yehudit, “so we came upstairs.”

Nechami runs the brush through her sheitel one last time, and then shepherds the girls downstairs. There she is in the front yard, Ruti the invader, with her face to the wall. As if she were at the Kosel.

“Is she davening?” Sari whispers.

“I don’t know,” Nechami answers truthfully. Davening is an act of will. Does this woman have any will?

She approaches her tentatively. “Hello, Ruti.”

“Hello. It’s hypothetical.” Ruti nods her head at her, as if they were old acquaintances, picking up where they left off.

“Yes,” Nechami replies. “You’re right.”

“So it’s the assigned probabilities? Not totally.”

Nechami takes the young woman’s hand. Her touch is warm, human. “Let’s go to your parents’ house, okay? I don’t know if it’s a good idea for you to be out in the street alone like this. We’ll ask them.”

“Relatively. I mean, if within a range of possible conditions. Why not? All the best.”

Nechami takes Ruti to her parents’ house and knocks on the door. She guides her in through the doorway. Safe. Now stay there. The mother thanks her.

There’s something warm and pleasant in this house, which allows Nechami to work up a little courage.

“Could I ask you something?” she ventures. She simply has to know. “Excuse me for asking, but it’s important for, uh… for another case I’m a bit involved in….”

Did Ruti’s husband continue learning after her breakdown? Did he still get up and go to kollel every morning, even with her… like that?

“You can ask,” says Ruti’s mother. “But keep in mind that our story isn’t typical. It’s a very rare case, and I doubt I can tell you anything you could apply to anyone else. Most likely you’re talking about a woman who’s a bit depressed, and with the right treatment, she’ll be back to normal. It’s very unusual for it to lead to psychosis.”

“Oh, no… I mean, never mind. It’s okay. Sorry,” she stammers, realizing a little too late how incredibly tactless it would be to ask the question that’s burning in her heart.

And anyway, who said the mysterious husband had been learning in kollel anyway? He might have been working… teaching little boys or stocking shelves in a supermarket, for all she knows.

Her question still suspended in the space around her, she turns and goes out to the street where her children are waiting. Full of excitement, they proceed to Chaya’s engagement party. And when she sees the stars in her sister’s eyes, she forgets all her troubles in an instant. They throw their arms around each other, and encircled in their embrace is a whirlwind of wishes, prayers, yearning, and joy.

• ••

“I think Savta brought the wrong size dress for Avital,” Shifra says innocently.

Nechami and Sari exchange glances, and quickly avert their eyes. They say nothing. Shifra calls her eldest daughter over, and Tovi arrives, flushed and full of energy.

“Yes, Ima?”

“Do me a favor,” Shifra says. “Be nice about it, but find out what size Avital’s dress is. I think it must be a size two, and it’s too small on her. I have an extra one here in a size three, it was too big on Chumi and I brought it here so Savta can return it.”

Nechami suppresses a smile. Shifra possesses enough innocence for ten people, with a bit left over.

Tovi is reluctant. “I’d feel really weird asking that,” she demurs. “And besides…” She lowers her voice to a whisper. “There’s no point asking. She had it hemmed, for sure. Look, it’s shorter than Chumi’s, and we know hers is a size two.”

The girls are playing, spinning in circles. Shifra looks at them. Tovi is right.

“Don’t worry about it.” Yaffa’le is suddenly behind them. They blush. Even the ones who didn’t say a word. “She’s two and a half. It’s fine, you can move on to the next subject.”

But Yaffa’le, you’re 23. What about your dress?

Nechami hopes her mother, walking on clouds in her dream come true, won’t notice the two little girls, the two-year-old and the 23-year-old, and how they’re dressed for the simchah. She prays that Ima’s hopes won’t be dashed. Maybe the new chassan, the masmid from the Mir, the young, personable talmid chacham, and the joy of marrying off her youngest, will help heal that open wound, help mend that broken heart.

to be continued…

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 868)