During the decade and a half of my marriage, the process of making challah sustained me

A divorced friend texted me a picture of her kitchen countertop covered in a line of freshly baked challahs.

Good for you, I began to text back. I haven’t made challah since my separation.

Ha! Can I actually send that? I wondered. But divorce humor! It’s funny! I added, “No pun intended” just to make sure she realized I’m not odd enough to make a joke like that on purpose. Then, I promptly erased the entire text. A joke better suited for real life, I thought. The truth is this: While it might make a good joke, the whole thing is agonizing.

During the decade and a half of my marriage, the process of making challah sustained me. I would knead it by hand, mixing the frothy yeast and oil into the dry ingredients, savoring that magic moment when the batter of disparate ingredients transformed into a creamy dough. I let it rise, punched it down, and let it rise again. When I graced the Shabbos table with the finished product — whole golden loaves, crunchy on the outside, sweet and chewy on the inside — my husband thanked me, saying that even if I failed in other things, at least I was a good cook. He could say something like that, because aside from our children, there was rarely anyone else at the table. Guests were off-limits. “Why would I want anyone else at my Shabbos table when I have my precious family?” he would say.

It wasn’t until after my divorce that I fully understood the magnitude of abuse I had lived with — the gaslighting, the manipulation, the devastating isolation.