coming up for air

It's Monday night, so we're in the ten days of teshuva, which are the days between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. For me, frankly, there has not been a lot of spiritual introspection happening. I've just been too busy. The cooking, the cleaning, the preparation for guests and taking care of guests, Barak being under the weather on Rosh Hashana, and a busy time at work have all kept my plate full, and some other things I've needed to take care of have consumed the rest. I don't feel great about it, but there we are.

A few friends of mine have been having a really rough time lately, with health and family issues that are in the category of Things Nobody Should Have To Deal With, Ever. Because I've had plenty of those myself, the raging desire in me is to fix it. Which of course, I can't do. I can make meals. I can call. I can send boxes of fun things in the mail. I can be supportive. I can be there. I know all of these things help. But I can't fix anything, not really.

Part of why my life--my actual, current life, the one I wake up every morning and live--is still so unreal to me is not just that I never anticipated being a frum Jew. I mean, I didn't, but that isn't what really has me in a state of perpetual suspicion that this isn't really real. It's that for so many years, the standard for my life was that, well, it wasn't so much fun. No need to get into details, but you'll probably notice that I don't talk much about my family (as in my own parents, siblings, etc.) or health as of more than, say, five years ago. There's a reason, and that is that I find it necessary to just hide the entire 28-odd years of yuck under a loose floorboard in a disused lavatory in the haunted house of my psyche. (Nice metaphor, isn't it? Why, thank you.) I can't think about it. I don't blog about it. I don't want to talk about it. I don't want it to be there. It is there, of course, and it pops up now and again. There will be a date on the calendar, or I'll find an old postcard, or something else will make my mind go places it shouldn't. And I call my husband at work and say, you're not staying late today, are you? Or, can Barak and I come by and visit? And I hold tightly to Barak, and I look at my husband and the ring on my hand and the walls of my home, and I tell myself that it is real, it is mine, that I deserve this and--perhaps--will get to keep it.

Most of my friends--my real friends, the ones I can talk to, whom I understand and who understand me--are people to whom bad things have happened. They've lost parents and children. They've had cancer, mental illnesses, desperate childhoods, abusive families. They know that there is no invisible line separating the people to whom unthinkable things happen from the people to whom they do not. They know how fragile everything is. They understand what is important and what is not.

So when I meet someone new, someone in the midst of something terrible, my instinct is to say, I am one of you. I know. I understand. Let me help you. And I look around and I see my healthy loving husband, my beautiful little boy, my nice home and comfortable kitchen and good friends and real family. And I look like someone for whom everything is okay and everything has always been okay. And most of the time, I pretend that that's true. But it isn't.