Dear Abba,
I am so very angry.
You are my father. Aren't you supposed to be taking care of me? A parent, unconditional love.. what happened to all that?
So much has happened over the past two years. I got so tired of you telling me that I talked too much, so I stopped talking. Then I didn't talk enough, so apparently to you, I must have had something chemically wrong with me.
Why couldn't it just have been that I was working on myself as you had been harping on me to do all those years earlier?
I am 35 years old. Thirty-Five!! And for all that I am, for all that I have done, I have nothing to show for it, at least according to you.
You treat me as though I am a status symbol, giving me little to no attention unless you need to shine me up and put me on display. And when something doesn't look pretty enough, you cover me with something to cover up the real me. Any cover will do, a son-in-law, a grandchild, but as long as it makes you look good.
What about making ME look good? When does my life become what is important?
I struggle daily. I wish I could tell you how much pain I am in. The miscarriages have nearly torn my apart. The loss of the twins in November came about as close to killing me, physically and spiritually as anything I have ever experienced in my entire life; and somewhere down the line, those became about you, too.
To you, the miscarriages became about G-d. G-d did not want me to have those babies. G-d did not want me to have sick children. *I* could not have handled a sick child, and G-d did me a toiva (favor) by allowing those children to not enter the world.
To me: I lost my children, and nowhere did I have to go to grieve. With no one was I able to mourn, and at no time was I given the understanding, the compassion, or the tools to do what I needed to do to move on.
And then, I began to lose my husband, to of all things, the family. That is what became the most important thing in his life. Never again was *I* as his wife to be important. No, you as his father, Mommy as his mother and the boys as his brothers became more important than me, as his wife.
Every decision that was made became a "Family" decision. Even when the decisions had little to nothing to do with family. Should we move for the health of the marriage; a family decision. Should he keep his job; a family decision. Everything was family, nothing was marriage minded. And you act surprised when I began to emotionally separate myself from you?
if I did not life my life exactly according to the way you thought I was to life my life, something was wrong. To the point where you broke into my house, using keys for emergencies only, went through my mail, phone messages, drawers, and personal life, looking for evidence of drug use that was not there.
You really thought I was a drug addict. You had others attempt to get me committed because you did not like my life or religious choices... and worst of all, you betrayed my trust with my husband.
You convinced anyone you could that I could not be trusted. You tried to "gaslight" me into making myself think that I was crazy, and you had my husband steal things from me, including mail and other things to insure that I would think I was going crazy.
The doctors and psychologists told you that I was not crazy. They told you that I was not mentally unbalanced, they told you that I was not the problem. Rather, they told you that perhaps the level of invasiveness and intrusiveness into my life was not healthy. They told you that perhaps the type of parenting that was being implemented was not prudent for a good healthy child/parent relationship...
And still, you truly believe that I am mentally unbalanced.
And, after your Son-In-Law brutally assaulted me in front of your granddaughter, you took him in, and left me to rot out in the cold...
Are you feeling proud of yourself?
Do you feel that you have used the word of G-d to justify what He intended you, as a man of G-d to do with his children?
We are supposed to mimic how we believe He would behave. Who are you mimicking?
And so... I move on. I'm sure, dear Father.. that though we haven't spoken in a few months.. that we will "speak" again.
Dear Mommy...
Sunday
Monday
July 25, 2010: The Police Report
I was assaulted on July 25th, 2010.
The man who beat me up was my husband, your son-in-law, your brother-in-law, and your nephew-in-law. And you have him living with you. You took him in, and left me, broken and bleeding and alone.
I continuously use the repetition of the words "in law" because he is not family, though quickly became family while I became more and more lost.
People look at orthodox or observant Judaism as a beacon, something that should be held to a higher standard. The concept of "those things don't happen where we are" applies directly to where we are. Yet, there I was, lying broken and bleeding on my kitchen floor, screaming for the police department to come save me from the man, whom I had thought was going to kill me in front of my then 8 year old daughter.
In some way, I wasn't surprised. The calm prior to the storm had been building for some time. I knew he had pulled away from me, though I wasn't sure where he had pulled away to. I knew that help, at least for me, was not forthcoming, and that this battle, to whereever it was going to lead, was going to be one that I would more than likely be fighting on my own.
Depression became a constant companion. I knew there were others like me out there. But others truly like me, there weren't.
People from the family that I come from, from the prominence of the level of religious observance and political wherewithal that my family held, do not get depressed.. and certainly do not have divorce in their family...And this would have been my second.
As it was, I was broken. A failure to the name. I couldn't have "good healthy" children. My pregnencies were riddled with miscarriages, another burden of shame, and people were afraid to have me discuss anything of those sorts too.
Almost as though my failures as a wife and as a parent would be contaigious.
And yet, here I lie... broken, and bleeding.
When the police arrived, the whispers started... I must have done something, because the quiet nonassuming man that people had come to know would never have raised a hand towards me. And yet, the bleeding and bruising was on me.
My father did not come.
My mother did not come.
My brothers did not come.
Rather, my uncle came, in a way, to add more shame to my already failing sense of falling, and I threw him out of my home.
The police report offered little balm to an already ripped and bleeding wound. He admitted drinking, though his version of the report is barely coherent. Charges were not filed because of who my family was, shamefully, I allowed them to coerce me into doing what even I knew was wrong. It was the last time I would allow that to occur.
Here begins letters to a broken family. Letters that I wrote over the past year and then some, as the journey that I take, discovering who I am, as a Jew, being born a Jew, and knowing that I will die as a Jew, but not knowing if I wish to live as a Jew after being fully cognizant of how the Orthodox Rabbinic Jewish community runs rampant over it's women...
Stand silent no more do I...
Dear Abba,...
The man who beat me up was my husband, your son-in-law, your brother-in-law, and your nephew-in-law. And you have him living with you. You took him in, and left me, broken and bleeding and alone.
I continuously use the repetition of the words "in law" because he is not family, though quickly became family while I became more and more lost.
People look at orthodox or observant Judaism as a beacon, something that should be held to a higher standard. The concept of "those things don't happen where we are" applies directly to where we are. Yet, there I was, lying broken and bleeding on my kitchen floor, screaming for the police department to come save me from the man, whom I had thought was going to kill me in front of my then 8 year old daughter.
In some way, I wasn't surprised. The calm prior to the storm had been building for some time. I knew he had pulled away from me, though I wasn't sure where he had pulled away to. I knew that help, at least for me, was not forthcoming, and that this battle, to whereever it was going to lead, was going to be one that I would more than likely be fighting on my own.
Depression became a constant companion. I knew there were others like me out there. But others truly like me, there weren't.
People from the family that I come from, from the prominence of the level of religious observance and political wherewithal that my family held, do not get depressed.. and certainly do not have divorce in their family...And this would have been my second.
As it was, I was broken. A failure to the name. I couldn't have "good healthy" children. My pregnencies were riddled with miscarriages, another burden of shame, and people were afraid to have me discuss anything of those sorts too.
Almost as though my failures as a wife and as a parent would be contaigious.
And yet, here I lie... broken, and bleeding.
When the police arrived, the whispers started... I must have done something, because the quiet nonassuming man that people had come to know would never have raised a hand towards me. And yet, the bleeding and bruising was on me.
My father did not come.
My mother did not come.
My brothers did not come.
Rather, my uncle came, in a way, to add more shame to my already failing sense of falling, and I threw him out of my home.
The police report offered little balm to an already ripped and bleeding wound. He admitted drinking, though his version of the report is barely coherent. Charges were not filed because of who my family was, shamefully, I allowed them to coerce me into doing what even I knew was wrong. It was the last time I would allow that to occur.
Here begins letters to a broken family. Letters that I wrote over the past year and then some, as the journey that I take, discovering who I am, as a Jew, being born a Jew, and knowing that I will die as a Jew, but not knowing if I wish to live as a Jew after being fully cognizant of how the Orthodox Rabbinic Jewish community runs rampant over it's women...
Stand silent no more do I...
Dear Abba,...
Tuesday
Walking Away...
June, 2010
Dear "Family",
Dear "Family",
I am walking away; a mere shadow of my former self. The pain envelops me like a Holocaust cloak casting shadows in the growing dusk. Doubts don’t grow, pain does. I have no questions, merely agonizing, painful statements of fact.
I was not meant for this life. I did not want to be who I was cookie cuttered out to be; and yet forcefully molded and shoved into the lifestyle, I rebelled at every turn, until my life turned into something beyond painful, something that manifested itself into a physical illness that is literally eating me up from the inside out.
I would like to say that I married young, made mistakes, didn’t listen. But I didn’t. I would like to say that I was pressured into making a series of stupid mistakes, but I wasn’t. My entire existence was a mistake, and my entire life is an existence that was molded and developed because of a series of religious follies that were, or are misrepresented by men and women who are uneducated and intolerant.
I am angry and bitter, cynical and frustrated. My life a deep hole that I will never climb out of. I realize that my mistakes are my own, and that my having made the choices I made, will cause my children to suffer, which they shouldn’t, but because of the "warm loving: community that I live in, they will.
I would like to say that my family will love me unconditionally, but I can’t, because they won’t, and that is the most painful admission of all and because of that, I am walking away.
They would never admit this fact either. Unfortunately, if they knew of my sins, they would walk away from me, and it would not be me doing the walking away.
My husband tells me that he does not know if he ever loved me. He does not know if he was ever attracted to me. So why did he marry me? He does not know. He does not know if he is gay, or straight, or bisexual, and because of his confusion, he has trapped me, at a young age, into a loveless marriage, with two small children, whom I love, but do not know if I like because they now remind me of him.
Divorce is not an option. My family adores him, and they will never see my side of the story. But he knew when we married, something was wrong, and although I asked him, he lied. And his lie, has caused me to hate him. He is selfish. He never listens, he asks and then never ever listens.
He does what he wants, even though he is ten years older than I, he acts like a child. He makes decisions solely on what he wishes to do, never thinking about anyone else, and for nine years, in order to make my family believe that I have made the correct decisions about my life and that I am happy, I covered for him. So, I look like a fool, and he looks like a wonderful man. In this community, this is often the case. The women look like ditzy twits, even though we often struggle to keep our families together, and the men wander around doing as they choose. My pain causes me to lash out in anger and hurt and frustration and I just cannot take it anymore. Daily I fight with myself not to take all the myriad of pills that are sitting in my dresser.
I suffer, and therefore I am walking away. I will be criticized and castigated in the court of public opinion, but my choices are simple. If I do not walk away, I will be carried out.
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