What We’re Here For
| June 10, 2025Do you have a safety pin? Rolling pin? A bowling pin?
MY
husband’s aunt is lovely. A fine woman whom I get along with well. When I sit with her at simchahs, I love the stories she shares, the advice she dispenses, the lens she sees the world through.
But next week, she’s coming to my apartment.
She’s coming to town on Monday for a Tuesday wedding, and her side is making sheva brachos on Thursday and then she’s going to Shabbos sheva brachos, so she’ll be in my apartment until Friday. She really is a lovely woman, but we only have one shower, and she can make herself invisible as well as an elephant can.
I’m talking to my oldest friend, venting about first-world problems like having only one shower in my comfortable apartment, and that my husband comes from a large, warm family.
She validates and listens just enough that I start to take it back.
“I really do like her,” I say. “I like her, and I’m happy she feels comfortable coming to us. It’s just not easy. You know?”
“It’s avodas hamiddos,” my friend asserts, gently putting me in my place. “And that’s what we’re here for. Right?”
I agree, of course.
Of course I agree. I know that that’s what life is all about.
But then, my guest arrives. And the things she asks for!
“Chaya? Do you have a safety pin? Rolling pin? A bowling pin? Do you have eye makeup remover? Nail polish remover?”
I don’t. I roll out my dough by hand. My makeup comes off on its own or with soap and water. Somehow, though, instead of admitting to all this and maybe even laughing, the way I would with a friend, I feel ashamed and judged and less-than in my own home.
My kids make messes. I don’t have enough food in the fridge. My mother would never have served guests this kind of supper — without a vegetable in sight. I feel like I’m not measuring up.
She sits on the couch, offers to help too much and then not enough. She opens cabinets and stands at the door of my room. Soon enough, my westernized brain starts screaming: Set boundaries! Be assertive!
So I check in with myself: Am I resentful? How does this make me feel? Is this too much for me?
I check my emotional pulse with two fingers, counting, counting, counting intently, completely occupying my hands and head. And then, somewhere between breaths, I lose my place. I rub my eyes, blink, and I see my friend’s words — it’s avodas hamiddos — laid out in front of me like fresh snow that fell in the night, softening everything, coloring it differently.
I’m ashamed to admit that it’s such a paradigm shift, but over the course of the visit it becomes a refrain. Over the next few days, when I feel a lack of respect for my time, my work, my children’s schedules, and a million micro annoyances, I quiet the buzzwords buzzing like a swarm of bees: boundaries and self-care and toxicity. Instead, I listen to the whispers that remind me these are opportunities to chisel at and sculpt my character.
I tentatively take my fingers off my emotional pulse, try to check that I’m okay a bit less compulsively, and I find that I am much more productive with my hands free. I find that it’s so much easier to remember that the challenges come from Him, not them, when my mind is not so occupied with my furiously fluctuating emotional well-being.
Don’t get me wrong. I am no proponent of burning up or burning out. But as a wise friend reminded me — “That’s what we’re here for.”
The answer is not always “block the number.”
(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 947)
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