SILENT STORM

I

’m an introvert. I’ve known this about myself since I was a teenager, flipping through personality quizzes in magazines and listening to other girls talking at shabbatons. I was overwhelmed in big groups, avoided social outings whenever I could, and was happier with a good book than a friend.

But I always had friends. When I was in elementary school, the friendships formed naturally, casual conversations that became playdates and then sleepovers. The same girls went with me to high school and camp, and one even joined me in seminary. I didn’t need people, but I was comfortable knowing that I had them.

I was the first of my friends to get married, and that came with a move — not across town, or even an hour away from my family, but to Ramat Eshkol, to a tiny apartment in a building identical to every other on the block. The first time I went out alone, I walked into the wrong building and tried to use my key on someone else’s door.

But I adjusted. My Hebrew was enough to get by, and most of my neighbors spoke English anyway. I spent most of my time in my apartment, reading away Shabbos afternoons and learning to cook like a pro. I worked virtually for a company in America, so I was busy during the day, and soon I was expecting and preoccupied with doctor appointments and a lingering morning sickness.

It never really occurred to me that I didn’t have friends. My old friends from school had drifted away with the time difference, and my sisters were great for a quick WhatsApp when I needed advice. My husband was very amiable in yeshivah but wasn’t the type of guy to have close friends, so I never got to know the wives. But it was fine, honestly. I was an introvert, and I didn’t need other people to get by.

I had a baby boy, then a baby girl a year later. And that’s when things got complicated. The babies, more than anything else, needed to go out. At first, that meant daily walks and toys on the mirpeset. But as little Yossi began to walk and run, I reluctantly began to take him to the park down the block.

There were so many women there, all of them with children running around. All of them chatting together in clusters, and I stood to the side, my eyes trained on Yossi and Yocheved. It was fine, I told myself. I was too busy with my children to make conversation. I didn’t stand out. I didn’t look strange.

But as the kids got older and more independent, they didn’t really need their mother following them around. A few other women would drift over sometimes and make conversation, but my words were stilted, and I found myself running over comments in my head after the fact, wincing at how stupid I must have sounded. Why had I laughed like that? What had the other mother meant when she’d made an offhanded comment? I found myself waiting for specific women at the park, only to be disappointed when they were distracted by someone else.

Soon enough, Yossi was in school. I had picked the cheder by blurting out a question (awkward, awkward! I reproved myself later that day) to one of the women at the park. At school events, I stayed close to Yossi and kept my eyes on my phone, as though I was just too busy texting to talk to any of the other women.

The doubts came fast and furious as the years passed. Why was it so much harder to make friends as an adult than as a child? Had I lost all of my sparse social skills during the years alone in the apartment? My children were painfully shy; had I done that to them? Yocheved needs more playdates, one morah told me, so I dutifully called the recommended mothers and scheduled them in. But return invites didn’t come, and I felt foolish and uncomfortable, inviting children to my house who didn’t want to spend time with my children.

I had no idea how to sustain conversations with their mothers without feeling forced. When I tried to share anecdotes, they came out loud and went on too long, and I would fall silent, mentally chastising myself for being too self-absorbed. I came to dread every school event, every Purim get-together, every moment where I would have to be around other people.

I wonder sometimes if I had always felt this crippling anxiety around other people. Have I always been this awkward, and self-awareness had only come with adulthood? From my porch, I see other women in the neighborhood sitting together on Shabbos afternoon, lawn chairs out in the middle of the street, and I wonder what it must be like to effortlessly belong.

From behind my book, I watch them and long to join them. But I know that I never will.

A SEAT AT THE TABLE

I

know that people mean well, and I’m genuinely grateful for all the help that I’ve gotten. There’s no shortage of chesed organizations that specifically help single women. But ultimately, my burden is one that feels so private, so intimate, that I just wish I’d be able to talk to someone.

My marriage had never been good. I still remember the explosive incident during sheva brachos when Nosson hadn’t been ready to leave on time. I had made a comment that had seemed innocuous, and he had blown up at me, his face twisted into a mask of fury that I had never imagined from my pleasant, affable husband.

Raising six children had made things even more tense, and Nosson’s verbal attacks escalated until they became physical at times. I kept it to myself for years. Nosson was well-liked in the neighborhood, had an entire cadre of friends. I was friends with all of Nosson’s friends’ wives, and it would have been too uncomfortable to bring it up, to share the truth with anyone. To the community, Nosson was a model father, a loving husband, and an entertaining friend.

When I did finally break free of him, it was acrimonious and painful, and Nosson pursued custody with the same stubbornness that had made him so terrifying when angry. The older kids were sharp enough to push back, and Nosson accused me of parental alienation. The younger kids loved their father and were bewildered and struggling at the idea of two homes, two separate lives.

Nosson moved to an apartment only six blocks away, and I began a new life as a single mother.

I had heard about programs that would help me, about groups designed to support women like me. What I hadn’t known was how overwhelming it would be to apply for them. I worked as a dental assistant all day, and by the time I made it home at the end of the day, my children were around. I called organizations in the evenings and left voicemails, then received voicemails in return from them during the next workday. I reached out to rabbanim who promised to help, but they, too, were inundated with other requests, and there was no one who would prioritize me.

Slowly, slowly, I got some financial support. But emotional support was more complex.

My friends, once so present in my life, now hung back with uncertain eyes. I couldn’t tell them everything. Not with Nosson still in the neighborhood, father to my children, vindictive when wronged. Not when my children would still need schools, friends, shidduchim one day. Not when my children loved their father and didn’t need to know the details of the divorce.

“I can’t be mekabel,” one friend said apologetically when I tried to confide in her. She hurried to add, “But I’m here for whatever you need!”

“Oh, just let me know whenever you need a Shabbos invite,” another friend said brightly, but I couldn’t call her every week, begging for a hostess, a burden to be resented.

And then there were the vultures, the women who had been friendly acquaintances before, who were eager to shake their heads with sympathy as they heard my tale of woe. I found myself drawn to them, relieved to have friends, but there was something about speaking to them that left me aching even more. It was as though they fed off of it, as though it was scandalous gossip instead of my life. They didn’t care, I realized in time. They just wanted another story to whisper about in the park.

But as the years passed, the interest faded. It was normal now, the single mother and the single father, living across town and passing their children back and forth. I wasn’t anyone’s first thought for a Shabbos meal anymore. I must be used to single motherhood by now, my friends had concluded. I must have adjusted.

“I never think of you as different than anyone else,” one friend told me once. “Your family is just a little unconventional, that’s all.”

But I am different. There are weekends and Yamim Tovim when I don’t get to see my children, where I’m alone in my home for 72 hours. I work long hours to support my family and then go home to care for six children alone. I want to collapse under the weight of my burdens, but there is no one there to hold me up.

I want to explain this to my friends, but I know that it’s uncomfortable for them, that they will feel as though they need to offer something other than the same tired sympathy. I want to complain sometimes, but I don’t want my friends to see me as a chore, as someone to listen to out of chesed. I want to be honest and raw about how I’ve suffered, but who can I confide in?

The hardest time is Friday nights. No one thinks to invite me for Friday nights. “I know it’s so hard to manage nighttime meals,” a friend said once. “You for sure want Shabbos day, right?”

But Friday night never quite feels like Shabbos anymore. It’s a chaotic, complicated juggle of children and bedtimes, of kids brimming with pent-up energy that grows into fights, of the exhausted cleanup in the silence that falls upon the house once everyone else finally succumbs to sleep.

When I’m done, I sit at the head of an empty table in the eerie silence and inhale in slow, ragged breaths.

SOCIAL BUTTERFLY

“The best way to make friends is just to put yourself out there,” I like to say. “What’s worse — having an awkward conversation, or having absolutely nobody?”

Sometime in childhood, I made the active decision to amass as many friends as I could. It didn’t matter who they were. I reached out to the quiet girls, the ones who sat to the side, the ones who already had their set groups. Everyone knew me, and everyone was comfortable around me.

Adulthood was no different for me. I married Shimon and immediately became active in the kollel N’shei. Long before I had children, I made it my business to attend every event, stay late after shul to schmooze, and visit neighbors on Shabbos afternoons.

When we would go out, Shimon would jokingly count how many people would greet me like a good friend. “We’ve never gone on a fifteen-minute walk that hasn’t taken an hour,” he told his mother once. He was sociable, too, and we had a wide array of friends to invite for Shabbos meals.

Children only widened my circles. There were weekly Shabbos parties to arrange, women’s leagues to join, and more volunteer opportunities. At school orientations, I would wait until the teacher’s spiel was over and obtain a class list so I could be the admin of the WhatsApp group. The role, I knew, was essential, and I was happy to do it. When Chanukah and Purim came, I rushed to host the class get-togethers. If a teacher had a simchah, I would take care of the class gift, because I knew exactly who made the classiest chocolate platters or best monogrammed blankets.

It was a good thing that Shimon’s side contracting job brought in good money, because being Bracha was a full-time job sometimes. But while others might have been blown away by the whirlwind of energy that it took to be in the middle of everything, I thrived. Nothing made me happier than taking the lead, being involved in the bustle and the come-and-go of a community.

Once, on a visit to a neighbor, I was recounting a story from a kiddush I’d attended. “So then, Sori Goldblatt — you know Sori—”

“I don’t,” my neighbor said, amused.

“Really?” It was baffling to me. “She lives just down the next block. Blonde sheitel? She goes to the Agudah?”

The neighbor shrugged. “I go to the shtibel.”

“Right. Anyway, you’d love her. She told me that Adina Korn was back in town! You know Adina.”

“Nope. Bracha, not everyone is as popular as you.”

I retreated to my fallback. “Well, you’ve just got to put yourself out there!” I said briskly. “That’s what I do.”

But there was one thing.

At first, when my oldest boy finally hit bar mitzvah age, I thought that I was imagining it. It didn’t make sense.

The school had a firm bar mitzvah rule — only family parties would be allowed during the week, but the boys could invite their class to a Shabbos meal. Over the years, the meal invitations fell into a standard format: boys, family, and a few family friends.

Naftali was the youngest in the class, so his bar mitzvah wouldn’t be for a while, but I threw myself into bar mitzvah season anyway. I took care of arranging the class gift for each boy, of course, and I had Shimon volunteer to walk the boys to the shuls that were far enough from the center of town to make parents nervous.

At one kiddush, I overheard the boy’s mother talking to her sister. “Bracha’s the bar mitzvah guru,” she explained. “She really has her finger on the pulse of… well, everything. There are just some people who really have it together, you know?”

And I couldn’t disagree with that, except…

Except.

The bar mitzvahs rolled out, one after another, and as I lingered at kiddushim, chatting with everyone there, I noticed the others who lingered. They were different families each time, different clusters of boys, but they were always there: the ones who were invited for the meal.

Bar mitzvah after bar mitzvah passed, and we hadn’t been invited to a single meal, not even for Naftali’s closest friends.

At the Goldblatt kiddush, I was chatting with the bar mitzvah boy’s mother as the cleanup crew began to set up for lunch. “We’re doing a small meal,” Sori Goldblatt said, a little apologetically. “You know how it is. We could only really invite the boys and a few close friends.”

I remembered when the Goldblatts had moved to town, how I’d been the one to greet them at the park on the first Shabbos and bring Sori over to meet the other women. We schmoozed at the bus stop all the time. We were friends.

But there was a barrier there, and the realization was crushing.

I had hundreds of friends, of surface-level relationships where I was liked and appreciated. But close friends? People who would think of me first? How often did a friend call or text me just to say hello, to share a simchah or talk about a struggle?

When was the last time that someone had reached out to me instead of the other way around?

It’s been years since the truth had dawned on me. My friends are getting older, and there are chasunahs to attend, grandchildren’s brissim to drop by, and shivah calls to make. I’m there for it all. Am I invited to sheva brachos? Not unless I offer to make them. Am I told about my friends’ new grandchildren? That’s an honor reserved for close friends, and I still haven’t figured out how to make those.

To everyone else, I look as though I’m flush with friendship, the most popular woman in town. But the humiliating truth is this: At the end of the day, when the bustle of daily activity has settled down, my phone is silent.

T

here are no easy answers when it comes to loneliness, no one-size-fits-all solution. Loneliness is a complex emotion, tangling its way through us at the most unexpected of times. We can be surrounded by friends and feel utterly alone. We can have support and love and still feel as though there are things we can’t share. The loneliest people are sometimes the ones you’d least expect. Sometimes, they’re so obvious that it’s painful to watch them try to connect and fail.

When younger children play at the park, they can make friends in moments. It takes a single moment next to each other on the swings, a shared smile, and that little boy or girl is a playmate. A common interest, and two girls are inseparable in school.

What changes as we age that makes us so afraid of finding each other? As we grow more independent, more autonomous, does the idea of trusting someone else with a piece of us become anathema? Is it fear of vulnerability, that potential for dismissal or rejection? What keeps us from reaching out and saying, I need you?

You can find dozens of common-sense suggestions for how to cope with that lack of connection, can probably piece through many of them on your own. Chesed. Therapy. Community events. Speak to strangers. Open yourself up. Seek out other lonely people. Call a friend.

But in the whirling eddy of isolation, the greatest challenge is often recognizing the lack in the first place.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 945)