| Family First Feature |

The Therapist Is In

By Gila Arnold | October 13, 2016

“Miriam,” he says at last. “I think you should be asking yourself why Hindy’s idealism is bothering you so much. I’m no therapist, but I’m married to one, and if something is getting under your skin to this extent, there must be a deeper reason for it.”

I f I ever wrote a book I would call it What the Therapist Who Knows Everything About You Wishes You Knew About Her. But the book like the title would be way too long. And besides, as my daughter Hindy likes to say, who has time to write books when they’re busy playing superhero to the frum world’s crises?

While I’m not exactly scaling walls or flying through the air (Hindy’s birthday present of a cape marked with a big red M notwithstanding) I will admit that her description hits the mark. And I say that with the fullest modesty. After all if I have any talent to help others it’s a blessing from Hashem.

It’s my blessing — and also my curse.

Today it’s Bayla sitting in the leather chair opposite me, clasping her fingers and swinging her legs for all the world as if she’s an excited two-year-old instead of a married woman dealing with crippling emotional issues. Only she doesn’t realize how crippling they are, and she refuses to acknowledge that her prolonged childhood abuse has had any impact on her life. She refuses to acknowledge that there was any abuse at all.

Sometimes I feel like wringing my clients’ necks.

Instead, I nod quietly as she talks in soft, lilting tones about little Yanky (named after her abusive father) and his adorable attempts to climb onto the counter and grab some cookies. She tells me all the little happenings in her quiet little world, as if that’s all she has to think about, as if by filling the silent office with these details of the life of a good, good mother, she can ignore the real reason she is here, at the demand of her husband, to try to save a dying marriage, a dead-from-the-start-marriage, and she, who doesn’t understand, who refuses to acknowledge, comes each week, dutifully, the good, good wife.

Ani hagever… As I sat in shul just a few days ago on Tishah B’Av, listening to Eichah, I related to Yirmiyahu’s cry. I am the man who has seen it all, the terrible things that were foretold.

And I am the person who has heard it all. All the tragedies and horror and shame. All your neighbor’s secrets, all the sordid goings-on in the dark underbelly of our community. I am the one who knows of the scandals before they hit the papers, who hears the details that even the blogs haven’t unearthed.

Have you ever stopped to think what that’s like?

My friends see me as privileged, cool, in-the-know; to be privy to it all, and not as a yenta, but as guidance, helping, working to make it right. Communal institutions see me as an expert, a sought-after speaker. But I know the truth. Knowledge is a burden, especially a certain type of knowledge, and there are secrets that I’d be far better off not knowing.

Tonight I’m scheduled to speak to a group of shidduch-aged girls and their mothers. The lecture is in honor of Tu B’Av, but the topic, “Warning signs to look out for in shidduchim,” is far from a light-footed dance in the fields. I look out at the audience, at innocent girls, naive mothers, and think, I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but someone needs to tell you, to educate you about the real world, so that you too do not become a statistic, a person clasping her hands and hurling out her words in my office.

So I spend the next hour sharing my stories about the warning signs that went unheeded, the niggling concerns that were brushed aside, and the terrible, terrible outcomes. The mothers and daughters take notes, ask questions, their brows furrowed in fear, and by the end of the evening I go home satisfied that my message has been heard, that these girls are — ha, ha, ha, laughs the devil — no longer so innocent.

Ah, my job. It’s my mission in life, and I’ve come to accept that, but that sure doesn’t make it fun.

“Mrs. Korman,” I’m often asked, by well-meaning parents and mechanchos, “Are you sure it’s in our girls’ best interests to hear such things? To go through life seeing evil intent wherever they look, afraid of everything, suspicious of everything? Can there possibly be so much evil out there? In our own community?!”

In response, I sigh my world-weary sigh and shake my head at their naïveté, and talk about heads in the sand and our responsibilities, and if they heard the things that I heard day in and day out, and that I myself have always educated my children to be aware of what’s out there.

I return home from the lecture, and open the door to find Hindy prancing around the living room, music at full blast.

“Mommy!” Without losing the rhythm of the song, she skips over to me and pulls me into a dance. “How did the presentation go?”

“Fine, baruch Hashem. There was a nice turnout.” I soon get out of breath from her hyperenergetic whirling and sit down on the couch. She continues dancing, waving her arms and kicking out her legs in her unique way of exercising.

“Set them straight, those girls?” she says with a wink, in between leaps. “Opened their eyes to the big, bad world out there?”

I manage a small smile because I know she thinks she’s being funny.

Malkie, Faigie, Avi, Tirtza, they’ve always treated my advice and cautions with proper seriousness. Each one of my children, at the appropriate age and developmental stage, received a private Mommy chat about personal safety, updated periodically according to a new stage and need.

But Hindy, she’s always been the irreverent one. “Don’t worry, Mommy,” she’d say flippantly when heading over to a friend’s house. “I’ll make sure there are at least five adults in the house with us, all female and over the age of 70.”

When she was about to fly on her own for the first time, to seminary in Eretz Yisrael, she groaned loudly when I told her to take precautions if she found herself sitting next to a man.

“Mommeee! Please!” Major eye roll.

It doesn’t help that my husband is on her side. When I wonder aloud what I’m doing wrong with her, if there’s some kind of unfulfilled emotional need that’s expressing itself in these little defiances, David performs a perfect Hindy eye roll and says, “Well, you can be a bit of a fear monger, you know.”

Fear monger? Eyes narrowed, I rattle off the statistics, and the personal stories, of abuse, addiction, kids who are OTD, and all the other harrowing, irrefutable evidence.

David lets me go on, listening quietly, and at last says, “Listen, I’d be stupid to try arguing with an expert. But — and don’t take this the wrong way — your life perspective can get skewed by what you do all day. I mean, hey, I look up at the sky and see blank web pages waiting to be designed.”

He smiles, as if assuring me that’s a little joke to lighten the upcoming punch.

“Miriam, I think you tend to miss out on the bright, optimistic side of life.”

So here I have it. Everyone in the community takes me seriously except my own husband and daughter. “Maybe I should go jump around the living room,” I say. “Would that lighten me up?” Even therapists are allowed to be sarcastic.

Hindy is in the same floaty, post-seminary stage that all her sisters went through. Only hers is more irritating, perhaps because it’s combined with the Hindy enthusiasm.

“Mommy, you’ve got to hear this shiur,” she exclaims when I come home the next day and find her sprawled on the couch, iPod buds in ears, eyes closed in rapt concentration. “Our menaheles, Rebbetzin Meyerfeld… she’s, like, the coolest, most inspiring person in the world. I recorded every single one of her classes this year. She’s just so real, and she’s always talking about how we have to be true to our real selves — you know, our neshamos. You wouldn’t believe how many girls she’s influenced to dress more tzniyusdig, to daven every day, and so many other things. She changes people’s lives!”

I’m tempted to snort at that, because she knows exactly what I think of charismatic teachers who take on an almost G-dly status for their students. But I refrain, because we’ve gotta keep those communication channels open, as I always tell others, and attacking my daughter’s favorite teacher is not a smart way to go. Especially because this teacher has offered her the highly coveted role of personal teaching assistant for the coming year.

Don’t think I take such an honor lightly; we’ve been hearing about it all summer.

“All I’d really been hoping for was to be a madrichah,” she tells anyone who will listen. “So when Rebbetzin Meyerfeld called me into her office and said she sees real leadership abilities in me, that I have the potential to be mechanech the next generation, that she actually wants me to teach the girls, I was totally on the floor!”

I was furious when she first announced the offer; who did this rebbetzin think she was, dangling such a tempting position in front of a seminary girl without first consulting her parents? “Power trip,” I’d muttered darkly to David. “Gets her thrills out of having girls blindly follow her commands.”

Still, I am a mother, and I couldn’t be blind to the big compliment she’d paid my daughter, or the way this job would look on a résumé — shidduch or otherwise.

Nevertheless, it’s starting to grate on me, Hindy’s in-the-clouds idealism, almost as much as Bayla’s determined insistence that everything’s perfect.

“It’s really the same thing,” I insist to David. “This woman I’m working with, without revealing any details — well, she’s in complete denial, and one day, somehow, her defenses will be peeled away, and she’ll suddenly be hit in the face with her painful past, and… I’m scared it may destroy her. Closing your eyes to the real world is not a good thing.”

David tilts his head to one side, as if trying very hard to take me seriously, and says carefully, “So you think our daughter, who’s maybe a bit too fired up about Yiddishkeit, is in the same situation as this client of yours who’s had a severely abusive past?”

I glare, and purse my lips. He just doesn’t get it, my very unpsychological husband.

Anyway, as he reminds me, it was my decision to allow her to go back another year, because I thought the experience of being a madrichah and teaching assistant was just what she needed to mature and learn responsibility. Forcing her to back out of that commitment would not do much in the way of teaching her responsibility.

In the ensuing weeks I help her shop and pack. She chatters the whole way through the preparations: “…and the neighborhood families, they’re just amaaazing! I’ve spent sooo many Shabbosos with them, and did so much chesed, and got to know practically everyone in the neighborhood. Well, okay, not everyone, but enough to realize how special they are.”

“How special are they?” I can’t keep myself from asking.

“Mommy, these people have, like, eight kids, and live in two-bedroom apartments, and the husbands learn in kollel, and they have gedolim pictures all over their walls, and the mothers call their children names like ‘tzaddik’l’!” She swings out her arms in widespread rapture. “That’s exactly the kind of home I want to have!”

I bite my lip so hard I can taste blood, but, somehow, my self-control is not making an appearance. “I can buy you gedolim pictures right now if you want,” I say. “’Kay, tzaddik’l?”

I deserve her eye roll. I really do.

“Mommy, you just don’t get it. Their lives are just so spiritual, so focused, so… real.”

Oh, really? I want to cry out. And what do you know, young lady, about reality? You who’ve ignored every single speech I’ve ever given you about the realities of life? Who not only has no idea what’s going on in these families beneath the surface — financial stress? fights? abuse? — but has no clue that there even exists a beneath-the-surface!

This time, I manage to keep my mouth shut. But that’s only because I’ve dropped her suitcase, which I’d been lifting up on the scale, onto my foot.

“Ouch! Hindy, what in the world have you put in here? Twenty bottles of shampoo?”

She gives a tinkling laugh. “Of course not. Don’t you realize you can get shampoo in Eretz Yisrael? Lo sechsar kol bah — it has everything there!”

“Excuse me. I must have mistaken you for my daughter from last year, who filled up her entire suitcase with hair supplies. So what are you bringing that’s so heavy, then? A meis mitzvah for burial?”

She sighs at my crudeness. “Seforim, Mommy. All the seforim that I bought last year — Mesillas Yesharim, Michtav MeiEliyahu, Chofetz Chaim — well, I’ll need them all again, right? No point in buying them a second time!”

Ah, my practical, practical daughter.

I am at my wit’s end by the time David gets home. Even my computer geek husband is perceptive enough to pick that up, and suggests we go for a walk

“Frustrating time at work?” he asks, eyes turned upward to that big, blank web page in the sky.

“Well, one client finally admitted that stealing her sister’s inheritance money was not a nice thing to do. And another told me that she had a terrible dream last night that she suspects really happened in her childhood, but she was too embarrassed to tell me what it was. And then, of course, there was my sweet little in-denial client who decided today that she wants to open a gemach in her dear father’s memory.” I step on a dead end-of-summer leaf, and feel the satisfying crunch.

“But what’s really getting at me is Hindy. I’m worried that another year in that environment is going to be — not to sound melodramatic — toxic for her.”

“That is pretty melodramatic,” he concedes.

“I keep asking myself if I’m not doing my job as a mother, letting her go back. Just picture her starting shidduchim after another year in that head-in-the-clouds place!”

We walk a few paces in silence, and I recognize the look on David’s face. He’s mustering up his courage.

“Miriam,” he says at last. “I think you should be asking yourself why Hindy’s idealism is bothering you so much. I’m no therapist, but I’m married to one, and if something is getting under your skin to this extent, there must be a deeper reason for it.”

I stop. Open my mouth to protest, because I have so many good reasons, and research, and real-life examples on my side.

And then close it. Because I’m suddenly hit by a full-blown whammy of a memory.

I am standing by the Kosel, head against the warm stone, tears pouring down my cheeks. My flight home is in a few hours, and I know I should be packing, but I just can’t tear myself away.

“Hashem!” I sob. “Don’t make me leave! I’m so scared that when I go back I’ll lose all this clarity, all the understanding I gained this year about what life’s really all about, and what I want for my own life!”

I clutch my siddur, made precious by an entire year’s worth of real davening, and make a desperate promise that someday, as soon as possible, I’ll be back to build my life, the life of my dreams, in Eretz Yisrael.

I stand transfixed, remembering that girl, that innocent, passionate, idealistic girl whom I haven’t thought of in years. What’s happened to her? Where has she gone? Is she still alive, somewhere deep, deep inside? Or — I swallow — have I suffocated her under too many layers of negativity and cynicism?

***

We walk through the door to be met by an alarming sight. Hindy is lying on the living room couch, face down, sobbing passionately. We both run over.

“What happened?” I cry, kneeling down next to her.

She springs up at my touch and, with a flick of her hand, flings her phone onto the floor. (At least it’s the cheaper kosher phone that she insisted on buying when she came back this June.)

“I’m not going,” she declares, voice cracking. Her eyes are puffy, and she reaches for the tissue David holds out.

I exchange a glance with my husband. “Not going where?”

“Not going to Israel. To seminary. They’re all a bunch of fakes and phonies.”

My heart beats faster. What in the world could have happened? My trained mind automatically springs to worst-case scenarios, and I’m already mentally booking a colleague specializing in teenage trauma.

David grabs hold of the reins. “That’s a pretty strong statement. What makes you say that?”

She clutches a couch pillow close to her, as the tears begin to stream once more. “I just got a phone call from Rebbetzin Meyerfeld’s secretary. There’s been a misunderstanding.” She purses her lips. “The Rebbetzin never meant for me to be her teaching assistant. In fact, she’s offered the job to someone else. They’re sure I understand, and apologize for any unintentional hurt.”

My breath catches in my throat. “What an awful disappointment! How do you think this misunderstanding happened?”

Hindy glares at me. “Misunderstanding? Hah!” She digs into the couch cushions, and pulls out her old phone — the treif one that she hadn’t yet had the heart to get rid of. Her finger stabs the screen a few times, and then she hands me the phone. “Look at that e-mail!”

It’s her seminary’s newsletter update, and splashed across the page is a big picture of a smiling man next to an architectural model of a building. Mr. and Mrs. Harold Sanders to donate $100,000 to build the new Martha and Stanley Sanders dormitory.

“Sounds nice,” I say hesitantly.

“Guess who they ‘suddenly remembered’ they offered the teaching job to?” Hindy spits out. “Sima Sanders.” She grabs the phone away from me and buries it back inside the couch cushions. “Guess my parents weren’t rich enough for them.”

“Oh, honey…”

She looks up at me, and her eyes are filled with raw pain, and something else I recognize as well. Something much worse.

“Well, you should be happy, at least, Mommy. Now you get to have me home after all.”

I shake my head mutely.

That look in her eyes, it’s a look I’ve seen countless times, in clients, in colleagues, and in the mirror. It’s the blow of disillusionment — and, somehow, it’s a million times worse when I see it on the face of my innocent, idealistic daughter.

I close my eyes, and hear my own voice running through my head. She needs to understand the realities of life. She can’t continue living in this naive bubble. But suddenly, those well-worn convictions are being upstaged by a quiet new voice, asking, “Why? Why does she need to confront the pain in life? What’s so terrible about continuing to believe that everything in life is good?”

I sit down next to her. “Sweetheart,” I say. “I know how hurtful this is to you. You’re feeling betrayed, and that’s perfectly understandable. But…” I swallow, wondering if I actually believe the words I’m about to say. “You know we have a mitzvah to judge others favorably. Especially when we’re talking about someone you respect so much. Do you think… is it possible that maybe there’s another way to look at this episode?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I see David’s jaw drop to the floor, but that’s nothing to the way I’m feeling myself. How could I have just negated my daughter’s justified feelings? Taken away permission to let her express her anger?

Her face is filled with storm clouds, and I see I’ve pushed too soon. Getting up, I murmur, “It was just a thought, that’s all,” and quickly leave the room.

***

I can’t stand to see Hindy moping around the house. “I’ve always said I didn’t trust that woman,” I say to David. “Such a pious rebbetzin, has girls eating out of her hands… but does she care about what she’s done to my daughter? No, it’s all about the money.”

David is also hurt, I know, but he murmurs with a faint smile, “Harsh words, Ms. Dan l’chaf zechus.”

Touché.

Weeks pass by. Hindy is slowly coming back to herself. We’re looking into different local programs for her. Then, one day, Hindy says, calmly, “Maybe I was too quick to decide not to go back to Eretz Yisrael. I could have still been a madrichah.”

I raise my eyebrows. “After everything they did to you, you’d still trust them?”

She shakes her head at me, my daughter. “Mommy, I decided ages ago that you were right. I have to judge her favorably. There could have been so many reasons why the Rebbetzin did what she did. Maybe I really did misread her. Or maybe she really thought Sima would do a better job. Or maybe she had temporary amnesia. Who knows? It’s all a matter of perspective. You can look at everything in life with a negative light or with a positive one.”

She gives her mussar shmuess with such a serene expression that, for a moment, I feel like shaking her. But I step back, and realize that this isn’t naïveté, or fake self-righteousness. It’s the real thing — good old-fashioned middos at work. I’m in awe.

***

Yom Kippur. I stand in shul, chant Ashamnu, bagadnu, together with the rest. Looking around the room, I can point to three people who have committed some of the more egregious sins that we’re collectively klopping for right now.

And I think, “Oh, Hashem, who are we kidding? We’re going to go right back to doing this all tomorrow. I’m going to head right back to my office, and hear the same terrible stories, stories that will chip away yet another layer of my innocence, if there’s any left, another piece of my faith in the uniqueness of Klal Yisrael.”

I feel like walking out of shul right then, or, better yet, shouting out, smashing something to the ground, expressing some small part of my anger at all the terrible, fallen people, who, in their selfish desires, or their perpetuation of old wounds, have caused me and so many others to lose faith, to start to believe there’s nothing special about us after all, that maybe we don’t even deserve G-d’s forgiveness, not individually, not as a nation.

But something keeps me standing in place. Next to me, Hindy is closing her eyes and swaying in prayer. I think back to what happened yesterday morning.

We were all rushing about, getting ready for the holiest day of the year. Hindy was sitting at the kitchen table eating breakfast, when she suddenly looked down at her phone (the treif one — though she plans on stashing it away for good after Yom Kippur, to burn with the chometz), and gasped.

I turned and saw her face had gone red.

“Is everything okay?”

She was quiet for a moment, staring into space. Then, with a funny expression, she pushed her phone away, and said, “Yeah, everything’s fine.”

She shrugged. “I just got an e-mail from Rebbetzin Meyerfeld.”

I glanced at the screen. The e-mail was titled, “Please your mechilah and an explanation.” Hindy was being unnaturally quiet.

“So,” I prodded. “What was this big explanation?”

“Don’t know.” She reached for her phone, and pressed Delete. “And now I never will.”

I stared at her, open-mouthed.

“I was already mochel, and already made up my mind that she must have had a really good reason. Why do I need to read her explanation and run the risk of thinking it’s not good enough?”

Now, as I stand in shul next to this good, good daughter of mine whose vision and perspective is so much clearer than her fancy therapist mother’s, I think of my clients, all of them, and the dark underbelly of the frum world… and the breakthroughs, the admissions, the grit it takes to work through terrible mistakes and searing memories, no matter how many times the heart breaks from the effort and the pain.

(Originally Featured in Family First)

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