Your past doesn’t dictate your future: 3 accounts of painstaking but authentic change

How much can people really change? As children, we’re easily molded, can transform into someone new from one year to the next. But once we hit adulthood, it feels as though we’re set in stone. This is who we are. This is who we always will be.

But is that really true?

There are those we know who have changed, who have looked at their lives and — through hard, internal work — turned them around. It isn’t always easy. It isn’t always perfect. But every tiny change we make creates shockwaves within us, shifting the makeup of who we are.

These are our stories.

Hollows of the Hearth

W

hen I got married, I was only 19. At the time, it felt ancient, when my best friend was already expecting and I had already gone to a dozen classmates’ weddings, but looking back, I was so young. Too young to really navigate the complexities of so many relationships that I had never experienced before.

My kallah teacher had cautioned me about making sure that there was mutual respect in the relationship, that there needed to be a strong base to resolve conflicts when they cropped up.

So I was totally on top of it from the start. I praised my husband when he was helpful, listened to the chiddushim that he brought home from kollel, and was careful to always speak positively about him. I understood how important it was for him to feel honored and confident. And our relationship was stronger because of it.

It was those other relationships that threw me for a loop. Shlomo was the baby, the last one out of the house, and his parents had trouble letting go. He was easygoing, too, quick to cave to their whims.

It fell on us to be there often, to give my in-laws companionship, no matter how difficult it was for me. My mother-in-law was critical and prone to nitpicking, a my-way-or-the-highway decision maker. My father-in-law would complain about everything, from physical ailments to his wife’s cooking to Shlomo’s decision to be a rebbi.

Every Shabbos was agonizing. Every family event ended with Shlomo unhappy, buckling under the weight of his parents’ displeasure. I wasn’t the one who created the friction between them; I just saw it building, eating away at us each time we saw them.

It was one Friday night when I was expecting my first that I finally cracked. Ma was recently gluten-free, of her own volition. I had cooked a few gluten-free kugels for Shabbos, but they weren’t good enough for Ma. “Which ingredients did you use?” After a lengthy rundown, she switched over to cross-contamination. “And you’re sure that it wasn’t near the food with flour in it?”

“I wasn’t cooking any food with flour in it,” I pointed out, my patience straining.

“Are you sure?” Ma looked narrow-eyed. “I don’t know if I should take that risk. I’m very sensitive to gluten.”

And I noticed that she didn’t eat any of my kugels, the ones I had worked so hard on just to accommodate her. (A week later, she decided that sugar was the problem, not gluten. Typical Ma.)

I kept smiling, kept my cool, and vented privately to Shlomo about it that night. He agreed with me, even if he looked uneasy about taking a side that wasn’t his mother’s. But that was just Shlomo, too quick to please.

I slowly discovered that it was easier to handle my in-laws when I was able to complain to Shlomo. Ma would come over to our apartment and rearrange the kitchen. She would call Shlomo and demand that he come over whenever she needed something menial done around the house — after all, how could Ta put together her new bookcase or reorganize the attic? He was just too busy. I couldn’t set foot into her house without her criticizing what I’d put on the baby, “in this weather?”

Ta was nearly as bad. “He’s so loud around the baby,” I whispered to Shlomo. The baby would cry whenever Ta would raise his voice, would cling to me with her sensitive eyes wide. “Why does he always put you down?” I vented to Shlomo after Ta had spent a good five minutes mocking Shlomo’s nervousness around the baby to one of my brothers-in-law. Ta was also obsessed with money — who had it, who didn’t, and what they were doing with it — and it was so materialistic that Shlomo and I agreed that we would never speak like that around the kids.

At first, Shlomo was uncomfortable when I would criticize his parents. And I got it. He had spent so much of his life being forced to unquestioningly accept his family that he had never really understood how unhealthy the dynamics there were. But over the years, he came to agree with me. He didn’t like the way that Ma was so strict with our kids, snapping at them when they came into the kitchen while she was cooking or refusing to let them play with her toys upstairs in case they broke something. He didn’t like the way Ta was so loud and aggressive around them. We came for Shabbos less and less often, and Shlomo would get off the phone with Ma or Ta and report to me what new dysfunctional patterns they were falling into.

It wasn’t lashon hara, I was sure. It was l’toeles, a necessity for us to maintain our shalom bayis with them. Otherwise, we’d both explode.