But I am only one person. And this is only one column. And to be frank, I am far too tired to imagine everyone else’s tired when I am so buckled down by the weight of my own. Hopefully, the fact that I feed the homeless and donate to Holocaust survivors mired in illness and abject poverty in ramshackle Ukrainian villages helps assuage any prospective claims of misandry fired in my direction, through it probably won’t. That’s fine. Because, with rare exception, single working moms have it rough. 

And so, here is my own personal treatise on a very specific sort of maternal exhaustion affecting, well—me. 

The tired begins the moment I am awoken by the cacophonous symphony of my buzzing iPhone alarm. I am a night owl, and motherhood hasn’t changed that. I can not fall asleep before midnight, I can not get any serious writing done until my two unruly teenagers are asleep—breathing but not demanding my services—and the shadowy quiet of night spreads itself across earth. On average I am doing work until 3 a.m. and when my alarm sounds at 7, I embark on the day not with the plucky optimism of having benefited from a full-night’s rest, but like a misfit, low-ranking soldier that’s napped fitfully in a foxhole. 

In general, my kids are with me more than they are with their dad, but their clothes and books and retainers split their time between two different addresses. What this means is that, almost always without fail, there is a pair of favorite jeans or a leotard or a Nintendo Switch forgotten at a residence that is not the one at which my children wake up in the morning. Things both my ex-husband and I shuttle back and forth: sneakers, sweatpants, Zoloft. More than once I have begged a pharmacist to refill one of my son’s prescriptions prior to its due date because somewhere between my ex’s place and mine, the oval blue pills have gone missing, most likely nestled in the oceanic crevasse of a sofa. 

Charts and lists have been suggested by sociopathic experts on time management who have mistaken me for someone that is able to seamlessly juggle a demanding full-time job, raising two children (one of whom is autistic, the other a hormonal helion) and serving on various professional boards while also managing a haircut. Instagram mommies who do insane things like package Chanukah gelt in lucite boxes with blue velvet ribbon and arrange painfully adorable Bento box lunches like something out of a Wes Anderson film, are convinced that “bright little corners” hold the key to maintaining one’s sanity. Florals, they say. Florals. I have a friend, also a divorced mother of two, who runs. She gets up every morning while the moon still hangs in the sky and completes half-marathons. I have a cousin who does Pilates. Golf has been suggested. If I golf, everything else will fall into place. World order will be restored.

You might be thinking: this woman is lazy. This woman is complaining when she should be penning a gratitude list of just how lucky she is. She has kids. She has a roof over her head. She has a job wherein she gets to do things like pal around with noted individuals within the entertainment industry and amass free subscriptions to streaming networks. And you are right. And I am grateful. But that doesn’t mean I have the bandwidth to julienne cucumbers and Roma tomatoes in addition to getting my kids to their orthodontist/psychiatrist/therapist appointments on time and make deadline on that 2,000-word feature story for Oscar season. I’m so happy that cucumber-cum-watermelon body wrap has stripped five years off your skin’s age: You look amazing! But I’m just not living in that universe.

Thank God for the single parent friends that I do have who refrain from offering advice, or places to go for a hot-stone massage. I have a friend from college who heads the pediatric cardiology unit of her local hospital while raising two kids solo. She hasn’t made her kids anything for dinner save for macaroni and cheese from the box. She doesn’t do yoga. She doesn’t meditate cross-legged on the floor while humming mantras from her guru on speed-dial. This friend is relatable. 

This friend is a hero.

Peak Jewish Divorcee is a bi-weekly column charting the (mis)adventures of a Jewish, newly single working mom in Los Angeles. 

The post I’m Tired appeared first on Jewcy.

We were married, but we weren’t married, trapped in a nameless liminal space where our identity as a family was murky at best. If divorce felt like Dante’s 9th circle of Hell, the months-long separation period while cohabiting under the same roof recalled a Viking funeral. Our marriage lay in a boat, set aflame as it drifted off to sea, awaiting its arrival at Valhalla. 

Ten months after my soon-to-be-ex-husband took up residence in an apartment building 1.2 miles down the street, the world erupted into a fiery petri dish bubbling with viral plague. We were not yet divorced—Covid-related closure of the courts had stalled our paperwork—but the margins of married life were receding as if water ebbing to and from shore. Sometimes, it continued to lap at our feet. Eventually, our separation found its own rocky groove, a mathematical percentile of messy division. We spent 87% of the time fighting over custodial arrangements, the other 13% was dedicated to passing our kids’ Ritalin and forgotten gymnastics leotards back and forth. 

We were not yet not a family. But we were not the one we had been. 

Summer came, camps were cancelled, and our children, quarantined for four-and-a-half months at that point, had watched a collective total of 10,000 YouTube and TikTok videos. They were cranky and inconsolable, ricocheting off one another like moths in a beaker lit aflame. Tzvia, our mercurial tweenage daughter, had morphed into a raging hellion. And Sam, our autistic thirteen year-old son, was unravelling under the pressure and stress of a loudly imploding world; his anxiety and depression had spiked to a boiling point. Early on in the pandemic, I walked outside into our tiny fenced-in backyard to find Sam lighting a wooden table on fire. Weeks later, he stuck a fork inside an electrical socket and ignited a bright, ashy spark that burnt my computer charging cord to a crisp. Minutes later, a trio of firefighters arrived at our doorstep. 

Desperate for a change of scenery, my ex and I agreed that we had to do something. Mid-July, we took advantage of our temporary work-from-home set-ups, arranged precautionary COVID-19 tests in Los Angeles, and hightailed it back east where the coronavirus numbers were starting to flatten. I flew with the kids to Boston; My ex left a week later for Burlington,Vermont. 

In Boston, the kids and I spent two weeks with my parents, mostly zipping through the Dunkin’ Donuts drive-thru for strawberry Coolattas and swimming during our reserved two-hour block at the local JCC where the local yentas in skirted bathing suits barraged me with endless questions about my impending divorce. Then the kids and I road-tripped to Vermont, blasting Borns’ “Electric Love” as we pulled into Shelburne. There, my soon-to-be-ex-husband, our kids, their cousins, and my soon-to-be ex-in-laws (we need another word: been laws?) would be staying for a week at their family home, perched high atop a leafy hill overlooking fertile cow fields exploding with grass and the golden shimmer of Lake Champlain. 

I booked a room at a nearby hotel where I would stay for two nights, getting my fill of maple creemees and roosters clucking at dawn. A week later, my ex would return the kids to Boston. 

But once in Vermont, the impracticalities of this pandemic-era plan soon became clear. My ex’s sister was quarantined with her husband, daughter and my 80 year-old, immunocompromised soon-to-be ex-mother-in-law in the property’s main house; My ex was staying in the one-bedroom “tiny house” on the front lawn, several yards away. Until their tests came back negative, our kids weren’t permitted inside the main house, and vice versa. Both kids were screaming to go in different directions. Our son needed a parent around; our daughter needed a parent around. And while the hotel where I’d booked a reservation was implementing coronavirus safety protocols, no place was completely failsafe. 

Finally, my soon-to-be ex-husband relented: “You can stay two nights in the tiny home.” 

Then he pointed me down the hall toward his mother’s empty bedroom, a tidy square space painted eggshell white with seascape-themed watercolor paintings and sheer fabric curtains like something out of a Virginia Woolf novel. 

My ex was not thrilled with this arrangement—that, he made clear. He needed me to stay and help with the kids, but he didn’t want to need me to stay: “Two nights only,” he repeated. As I passed my soon-to-be ex-husband in the kitchen, he sucked in his stomach in an exaggerated curve, his body forming a hard ‘C’ so as not to make contact. Later, walking along Shelburne Beach as I followed behind with towels, he flicked his wrist to shoo me away. In the check-out line at Trader Joe’s, he picked a fight over money. As we were pulling out of the supermarket parking lot, our daughter threw a bottle of water at her father, triggered and traumatized by the last decade-plus of dysfunction.  

Did I mention he had a new girlfriend back home in California? 

Over the next two days, my soon-to-be ex-husband did his best to ignore me and I followed him around the tiny house, desperate for attention, willing him to act like my husband and not like somebody about to divorce me after 14 years of a loud, messy, combustible marriage. It was our first time sleeping under the same roof in about 15 months—us, the kids—and, to me at least, it didn’t feel uncomfortable. It felt familiar, in the way being a family does, even when being a family is difficult, even when it feels like a nightmare. But it did remind me of why we made the choice to actually break up, after years of merely threatening to do so in the presence of myriad couples counselors—one of whom became so frustrated with us, he fired us on the spot and kicked us out of his office. 

In the tiny living room, I scrolled through instant messages on my ex’s iPhone, spying on texts with his girlfriend: “Miss you sweetie.” He’d never called me sweetie—ever. I told him his financial problems were all his fault; he accused me of being “impossible.” We were swimming in the lake when he asked if the guy with whom I’d been corresponding on JSwipe knew that I was “large?” It was his go-to jab, always followed by an “I’m kidding,” and one that had never been funny, not since I gained 70 pounds during the pregnancy of our daughter and went from being skinny to zaftig, which is really just a Yiddish euphemism for fat. 

Despite all this, I was planted in denial. I didn’t want to be alone in life, and I was terrible at saying goodbye, no matter how bad things got. The worse they got, in fact, the harder I fought to make things better. In our 15 years together, my ex and I had weathered drug addiction, rehabs, death, unemployment, raising a special needs child. I had no interest in adding divorce to this depressing repertoire. Standing in the kitchenette rinsing a pint of fresh-picked strawberries in the sink, I again asked my soon-to-be ex-husband if he wanted to stay married. No, he answered. 

Two days passed. Kids and I were coronavirus-free, and I was due to drive back to Boston. And I should have wanted to go. But I did not want to go. Because even if my relationship with my soon-to-be ex-husband was on par with icebergs jostling for space in the Arctic, I liked my been laws, I liked their friends; I’d been coming here for 14 summers. I’d known my nephew since he was five, my niece since she was born. There was nothing ex about them. There was a global pandemic, we had a monster for president. The earth was in a fragile, perilous state. Who knew when we might be able to spend time together again? Why should our divorce be the reason I can’t take photographs of my kids and their cousins toasting s’mores in the backyard of their grandmother’s house, licking melted marshmallows off their fingers? 

In the end, it was my soon-to-be ex-mother-in-law who insisted that I stay. 

Over the next five days, My ex took Sam golfing while Tzvia did her cousin’s make-up and biked circles around the neighborhood. My ex took Tzvia to the Shelburne Country Store where she filled up a brown paper bag with Nerds and rock candy and I drove Sam down to the LaPlatte River Nature Park where we hiked across mossy trails and trekked through swampy puddles and my nephew taught Sam how to fish. Sam’s soft, small hands gripped the bottom end of the pole and he pulled, pulled, pulled as a copper-colored bass wiggled and writhed, flapping its fins, water spritzing everywhere. My nephew slid a silver hook from the fish’s gaping mouth, and we watched as it thrashed its way through the pea-green river, swimming toward freedom. Later that week, my ex and I and our kids and their cousins and Fozzy, the family’s Muppet-like Moyen with wild russet curls, scampered through the woods and swam in a cool, freshwater gorge. As we scaled the mulch-blanketed mountain path back toward the car, my soon-to-be ex-husband held my hand to steady my balance and make sure I didn’t fall. 

Sometimes, he said mean things. Sometimes, so did I. And when I couldn’t take it anymore, I retreated to his mother’s room, wrapping myself in a white cloud-like blanket. Eventually, we’d regroup, and things would shift and we’d head to the backyard and lather pads of butter on ears of corn and watch the sun sink to a flash of red.  

On our last day together, we visited the grave of my ex’s brother, who died in 2013 in a cliff jumping accident in Lake Champlain. We had problems, but really our marriage ended after my brother-in-law died. That was the last time my then-husband ever said, “I love you.” Seven years later, Sam and Tzvia placed smooth black stones atop their uncle’s grave, per Jewish custom. I cried for a moment and my soon-to-be ex-husband, also for a moment, placed his hand on my shoulder. Quickly, he pulled it away. We seemed to have completed a cycle. Our children had just spent seven days with both parents living under the same roof for the first time in well over a year. Maybe we would—and could—do it again. 

We never would have planned this. We were terrible at planning things. And even if we had tried to plan this, it never would have worked out. But here we were, standing in a cemetery—together. Weeping over what we had lost; grateful about what we still had. Things felt over—really, really over. I would not be asking to stay married.   

For us, it was the end. For our family, perhaps it signaled the start of a new type of beginning.

Peak Jewish Divorcee is a bi-weekly column charting the (mis)adventures of a Jewish, newly single working mom in Los Angeles. 

The post In-Betweeners appeared first on Jewcy.

It was not the first wedding dress I purchased. That inaugural monstrosity of dupioni silk and crystal appliques came from Priscilla of Boston, the now defunct high-end bridal boutique on Boylston Street where my mother insisted we shop because Priscilla Kidder designed the bridesmaids’ gowns for Grace Kelly.  I’d been living in LA for nine years at that point, but my fiance and I were both from the east coast, and our engagement fete that mid-November weekend—tea and bellinis, a party invite title my father, a Russian-Jewish Masshole raised on kishka and borscht, is still attempting to parse—made for the perfect opportunity to buy everybody’s outfits for the impending nuptials that following June. 

Not that we were even remotely in the same financial bracket as Monaco’s House of Grimaldi—my dad was a public school teacher who worked in advertising sales on the side. But I was his only daughter and my then 93-year-old grandmother never got to throw a wedding for my dad’s sister because she was killed in a car crash over Pesach in 1965, just days after she turned 19, and my dad was going crazy with credit cards buying things for this wedding that nobody could really afford. It was a spending spree out of the DSM-V, from the Doo-wop/R&B band whose setlist included Marvin Gaye and Barry Gibb and Barbra Streisand duets (the lead singer later become a Trumpie and my dad defriended him on Facebook); to the Klezmer quartet playing an instrumental rendition of Erev Shel Shoshanim as I walked down the aisle; to the moshgiach who took 15 minutes to verify the Four Season’s kitchen was kosher and sent a bill for an amount more than a semester of books at U. Mass. 

The Priscilla salesgirl pushed a rack of satin and crepe and pearl-beaded ball gowns into the dressing room area, presenting each one with an outstretched arm as if they were newborn infants about to be measured on the APGAR scale. It was a dizzying flurry of blinding white and I had a hard time distinguishing between any of them. This was already worse than my bat mitzvah, where my ruffled pink dress made me look like a cupcake and my dad clapped halfway through my haftarah portion, signaling that I was chanting too fast, and I lost my spot and nervously laughed and nicked my tongue on my braces, tasting blood as I stood on the bima, looking up just as an eccentric great aunt was entering the sanctuary in a giant red hat too wide to fit through the doorway. 

Eventually, the Priscilla salesgirl held up a dress with a heart-shaped neckline and enough mirrored  crystals on the bodice to ignite a fire if left in the sun. It was a dress befitting the social secretary of a sorority, or at the very least someone blonde. It was all so hideously wrong for a girl who walked around in flip-flops and sweats with CORNELL lettering embossed across the ass. “It’s stunning!” said my mom, now on the verge of tears. “We’ll take it!” 

It was all turning into a circus, and I wanted to say no, but I also wanted to get out of there as soon as humanly possible. So I focused not on the absurdity of the dress, but the myriad reasons neurotic 31 year-olds have a big Jewish wedding to begin with, namely to compensate for what we have collectively lost along the way: my fiancé’s dead father (a world-renowned radiologist who’d died of cancer months prior), my maternal dead grandparents and paternal dead grandfather, my father’s dead sister, the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust and the babies never born. God, the Torah, my ovaries. 

There were so many people, places and things for whom one needed to get married. This dress carried the weight of the entire history of the Jewish people. 

Months later, I walked into Saks Fifth Avenue on Wilshire and saw a different sort of dress: layers of tulle draped over a plain white sheath and a ribbon of pale blue running along the underside of the hem. Simple, clean, subtle. It was a pretty dress, and it didn’t resemble a disco ball. Carolina Herrera had dressed a steady parade of socialite brides, from Caroline Kennedy to Portuguese noblewoman Diana de Cadaval. Renee Zelwegger was wearing a lot of Carolina Herrera in those days—she married Kenny Chesney in one of the eponymous label’s fit-and-flare silhouettes—and not that I was Renee Zelwegger, but I also wasn’t a debutante. So we returned the first dress and put this second one on a credit card and added a custom-made shrug for tznius purposes. Who cared how much it all cost? 

A marriage was forever. 

In the days following our wedding, while my new husband and I were smoking Benson and Hedges and drinking pineapple vodkas on a Third World Caribbean island nation, my mother had the dress French-pressed, sealed airtight in a soft, dun grey garment bag—along with my husband’s three-piece suit and the tuxedo and velvet bow-tie ensemble my dog (a bichon-poodle mix rescued from the streets of Tijuana) had worn to the after party, right before he took a giant shit in the hallway of the Four Seasons. 

I hung the dress in my closet in Los Angeles, and there it stayed, for a decade. Over the course of those ten years, there were so many things that went missing: my husband’s wedding band, which slipped off while he was swimming in the ocean; our ketubah (lost in a move between apartments), a tiny gold necklace with our children’s names engraved in Hebrew. Our relationship was disintegrating, one ritualistic talisman at a time. There were marriage counselors (one fired us, ordering us to write him a check and never come back) and appointments with psychiatrists poring over our son’s autism spectrum diagnosis and screaming matches over the price of Glatt kosher chicken breasts at Cambridge Farms. In July 2013, my brother-in-law died in a cliff-jumping accident on Lake Champlain; it took three days for divers to recover his cold, broken body, twisted amongst the lake grass. Like a galactic implosion, our marriage dissolved into dust. 

But there’s never one reason a marriage ends—or maybe even starts—and I am no angel with whom to cohabit. I cook a total of three items, I leave dirty towels on the floor, I burst into rages of anxiety-induced panic. During yichud, in those moments when a bride and groom are supposed to merge into one, my husband was silent and pensive, and I was cajoling him over flutes of fizzy Yarden and knishes to say something—anything. Even then we were like water and air. 

Our daughter was about six, an age at which the desire to play dress-up and make-believe is rooted firmly inside a child, and I wondered what that wedding dress looked like, all these years in. I drew it out of its plastic encasement, and there it was, a tea-colored stain roughly the size of my daughter’s head. I had no idea how it got there; it was not there when my mother had it French-pressed. But we played with it anyway, snapping photos of my daughter posing with the accompanying veil, photos of the veil on my dog (now dead), photos of me in the dress, unable to zip it up all the way, two pregnancies and emergency C-sections later. 

On the day that our marriage was dissolved—the court-stamped documents arriving in the mail on Yom Kippur 2019—I still wondered what to do with that dress. We can remove the stain, said a dry cleaner. Save it for your daughter, friends said. She can dye it flamingo pink and wear it to prom, like Molly Ringwald. But this to me made no sense. My daughter is now 12. She wears cropped tops from Brandy Melville and ripped sweatshirts that say Nantucket. Why would I want my daughter to wear a divorce dress, a dress worn during a marriage that did not last? A dress that is  stained, dirty, cursed. 

But to be honest, I don’t feel like selling it, or even knowing that somebody else is wearing it. This Carolina Herrera wedding dress is one of the most beautiful things that I have ever owned. Sometimes I think about framing it, like at a fashion exhibit at the MET. Sometimes I think about putting it on again, just to see what it looks like, a relic of promise that hung in the air from before life ruined it all. Truth is, I’m not in the mood to lose everything. If you want to, I figured out, there are some things from a marriage you get to keep. Some things you can’t get rid of. Some things never go away.

Peak Jewish Divorcee is a bi-weekly column charting the (mis)adventures of a Jewish, newly single working mom in Los Angeles. 

The post The Divorce Dress appeared first on Jewcy.

The Israeli film Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem, is what a Kafka-esque movie would be if Kafka were a feminist. It is a surreal, maddening, even funny story, which—like the recent Iranian film A Separation—uses a personal tragedy to call attention to a larger travesty, a particular kind of injustice that occurs in the world every day.

The set up is simple. A long-married Israeli woman and mother of four, Viviane Amsalem (the terrific Ronit Elkabetz), wants her freedom in the form of a gett, a Jewish divorce. Her pious and, as we learn, passive-aggressive husband, Elisha (Simon Ekbarian), refuses. According to the laws of the land, the couple must appear before a beit din (rabbinic court) and lay their arguments out before a panel of three Orthodox rabbis. If those judges are not convinced that the wife has grounds to terminate the marriage, the husband’s refusal stands. The wife remains trapped.

For all intents and purposes, she and Elisha are no longer a couple; they do not speak, let alone co-habit. Viviane has been living in an outbuilding on her sister’s property for the past three years. But the judges demand to know more. If Elisha does not beat her, if he does not withhold money or sex, if he is not an adulterer, then he is not a bad husband; and if he is not a bad husband, why should she want to leave?

In vain do Viviane and her lawyer, Carmel (played with power and desperation by Menashe Noy), try to explain that the man and the woman in question are badly matched for each other. She has regretted their semi-arranged marriage, which began when was 15, from its first days; ever since, she and Elisha have made each other miserable. The judges shrug as though to say, Nu? They send Viviane “home”—back to her husband’s house—to try to work it out. When that fails, they tell the plaintiff and the defendant to call witnesses.

Since the entire film takes place over five years (!) in a bleak cell-like courtroom and its adjoining waiting areas, the relatives and neighbors summoned to testify liven up the proceedings that otherwise remain as claustrophobic and dystopian as Terry Gilliam’s bureaucratic fantasy Brazil. They inject some much needed energy and even levity. They also help give a fuller picture of contemporary Israeli society, how insular it can be, how gossipy and constrained, even for those who try to live a modest yet fundamentally secular life. As Viviane’s sister says bitterly at one point, “Life for a divorced woman here is shit.”

The judges seem shocked, but more by the language than the sentiment. They must know that, as grim as the process is for Viviane to gain her freedom, her future is even grimmer: any victory is bound to be pyrrhic. Unless—like the wife in A Separation—she tries to take her children and leave, she will continue to be bound by the laws of a theocracy that values her husband’s honor over her happiness.

Image: Ronit Elkabetz as Viviane in ‘Gett.’ (Courtesy of Music Box Films)

The post Review: “Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem” appeared first on Jewcy.

Some good news: Gital Dodelson is finally officially divorced, according to civil law and an Orthodox rabbinic court. The 25-year-old woman—who has been fighting to obtain a get from her husband, Avrohom Meir Weiss, for three years—announced the news on Wednesday via her publicist, Shira Dicker.

Dodelson’s story first came to our attention via this impassioned piece in the New York Post in November 2013, in which she detailed Weiss’ controlling behavior and emotional abuse:

On my last mission to ask for a get, a month ago, Avrohom said, “I can’t give you a get — how else would I control you?” I think that’s the key to it all. He insists the marriage isn’t over until he says it’s over.

We’ve tried everything — the informal route, negotiations. I’ve asked him myself, my parents have asked his, our camp tries to reason with his camp, but, counting down from the time when he sued for custody in March 2010 and I first asked him for a get, we’ve been shut down for 3¹/₂ years. One proposal his side put forward in January was for me to agree to override the court decision on custody of Aryeh and hand over a payment of $350,000. There’s no way I can afford that.

She also appeared on This American Life a few weeks ago in Mark Oppenheimer’s excellent segment on agunot (the Hebrew term for women whose husbands refuse to grant them a divorce—literally, “chained women”). According to Dodelson, Weiss was constantly changing his demands for the condition of the get. At one point he insisted that she agree to tell their four-year-old son (when he was older) that the failure of the marriage was her fault. Weiss’ family refused to comment on the case to Oppenheimer; his lawyer refuted Dodelson’s claims.

It’s a happy ending (or at least a bittersweet one) for Dodelson—but not so for scores of Jewish women all over the world stuck in marital limbo. Fortunately, there are advocacy groups working hard to support them and bring about change. (Over at Tablet, Batya Ungar-Sargon has a fantastic profile of Susan Weiss, the American-born lawyer pushing Israel’s rabbinate to change the way it handles divorce proceedings. Also related: this piece about a real-life ‘Get Detective’ who specializes in tracking down recalcitrant Jewish husbands who have abandoned their wives. Dark but compelling reading.)

Dodelson’s mother, Saki Dodelson, has vowed to start an organization to help other agunot. Says Dicker, “The family isn’t just skipping into the sunset. There’s a real sense of responsibility here.”

Photo credit: Shutterstock.

The post Gital Dodelson Receives ‘Get’ After Three Year Battle appeared first on Jewcy.

An editor once told me that divorce “fractures the narrative of childhood,” a phrase which has stuck with me ever since. But does growing up in a broken family or single parent household similarly impact the way a person experiences religion?

A recent study suggests that it does. Researchers studying Christian children found that a child of divorce is less likely to be religiously engaged than a kid who hails from a two-parent household. “Youth who experience parental divorce,” the researchers conclude, “report lower religious involvement and identity than their peers from intact families.”

Over at Slate, Amanda Marcotte took issue with the study—not with the findings, however, but with how the researchers interpreted their results. “I find it simultaneously amusing and disturbing how assured the researchers are that people like myself—I’m both a ‘child of divorce’ and an outright atheist—are a problem to be fixed,” she writes.

Like Marcotte, I am a child of divorce who experienced marked declines in religiosity as I grew older. And though I’m not an atheist, I don’t take kindly to the presumptions of the researchers that the possible fallout from a divorce—decreased religious engagement—is necessarily cause for alarm. (I am far more concerned with other measures of psychological well-being post-divorce.)

Perhaps I’m particularly sensitive to this sort of assumption because when I was growing up, I consistently heard it repeated by teachers who faulted divorce for all sorts of things—general misbehavior, rebellion (you know how I feel about that word), and of course, religious transgression.

‘I’m sitting right here,’ I’d want to shout as yet another teacher, seemingly oblivious to the diversity of her students, described my family situation as though it was the root of all evil.

Unlike the families described in the study who became less likely to attend religious services after a divorce, my family’s religious practice wasn’t drastically altered after my parents’ split. My mother, my sole caregiver, remained steadfastly Orthodox. We attended synagogue just as much as we had before, which is to say every week. My sister and I continued going to yeshiva. We still kept kosher.

If the researchers had been studying my family’s religious engagement after the divorce, they probably would’ve found nothing to support their conclusions. Yet upon closer examination, they may have been able to detect small fissures in our observance, minor shifts that might have predicted my future choices.

At our Shabbat table, ritual functions my father had previously performed now trickled down to us, three females. Though we blessed the wine and challah in his stead, we did so with the full awareness that we weren’t observing in an optimal fashion, which made us feel uncomfortable.

At school, we had learned that ideally a man should say these blessings, and in my friends’ homes, that was exactly what happened. When these same friends came to our house for lunch, I felt embarrassed as my mom stumbled over the liturgy. They, too, looked uncomfortable.

I noticed other things. I saw how as a single woman, my mother had no counterpart on the other side of the mechitzah, which meant she had no true say in synagogue affairs, and no one to say kaddish for her on behalf of my maternal grandmother.

My mother would complain about this—not angrily or in a way that suggested she thought things should be different. While she identified as a feminist (and was the reason I was pro-choice before I knew what that meant), her feminism was the type that stopped at Orthodox Judaism’s door. She never expressed a real desire to see her status and role changed.

Through my parents divorce, I was getting a glimpse of how truly unequal women were in the observant community. My friends, whose childhood narrative hadn’t been fractured as mine had, weren’t noticing these inequities.

It was as though my family’s “untraditional” structure conferred on me a sort of superpower (honed by many trips to the therapist), allowing me to notice what was wrong with the community. I felt like the kid in The Sixth Sense, who can see dead people when no one else around him can. (Spoiler alert: Bruce Willis is dead in that movie.)

I think of divorce as a storm that not only causes its own damage but also reveals other problems lurking beneath the surface. It’s sort of like what happened in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy (and before that, Katrina), when the existing poverty of the hardest hit, most underserved areas is exposed. The storms didn’t cause poverty; they simply highlighted the problem. In Judaism, divorce definitely isn’t the cause of gender inequality—but in my experience, it made its existence all the more glaring.

Divorce, of course, isn’t viewed as some naturally occurring calamity. It’s viewed as a choice—a bad one. Traditional Judaism, like other organized religions, is arrayed around the family unit. The researchers acknowledged this issue, stating, “Many congregations hold traditional family models as the normative ideal and explicitly or implicitly discourage divorce.” Undoubtedly, this will make some kids feel like outsiders.

Given the centrality of the two-parent family in religion, divorce fractures more than just the narrative of childhood. It disrupts religious ideals, too. But the religious response to divorce shouldn’t be to uphold those ideals at the expense of those who fall short. Take it from someone who knows: that approach might do more harm than good.

Previously: Don’t Call Me a Rebel
The Problem With Modesty Blogging

(Art by Margarita Korol)

The post The BallaBuster: A Jewish Childhood After Divorce appeared first on Jewcy.

• In Boca Raton, turning to social media as a way of publicly pressuring husbands who refuse to grant their wives a get.

• Woody Allen and Lindsay Lohan spotted having dinner together, possibly discussing casting roles in upcoming films.

• Jazzrael, a 10-day jazz and world music festival in New York, is underway.

• In NYC tonight? Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry will be moderating a panel on the changing role of music in new original theater at the JCC in Manhattan.

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