Exodus: A memoir (5 page)

I’m seven months pregnant, my belly already enormous against a figure rendered slight from the weight loss that occurred during my stressful first year of marriage. I’m kneeling on the floor, washing my husband’s feet in a basin of soapy water. I’m
massaging the soles as he leans back and enjoys the relief. He’s worked hard all day.

It’s as if I am seeing myself from above.

I’m so diminished. What kind of woman have I become? I’m pregnant and kneeling at the feet of my husband. My belly hurts, my knees are burning from the bedroom carpet embedded in my skin. I’m aware that somewhere out there pregnant women are getting their feet rubbed by their husbands. Somehow, I know I don’t deserve that.

During the day, when Eli is at work, I lie on the sofa. I am hopeless and depressed. I touch my stomach a lot, feeling for elbows and feet, wondering what’s going to happen to this irredeemable child growing in me. There’s a little bump that I keep touching behind my belly button, which I swear feels like one of the baby’s fingers. I touch it with my own index finger, pushing it in, around in circles, until it becomes a habit.

At one of my doctor’s appointments, my gynecologist informs me that it’s not the baby’s finger after all. It’s an umbilical hernia, common in pregnant women, a result of my abdominal muscles separating.

“You’ll have to take care of that before you have another child,” she warns me.

I can’t imagine having another child. I hope I die in childbirth. I hope the hernia kills me. More than anything, I hope I don’t live to see my own unhappiness passed on to another human being because of my actions. It may not have been my choice to become pregnant, but somehow my body made a home for this baby even when I didn’t want it, even when I was so frightened and horrified at the thought. It went ahead and made a child, and in the end, I’m
accountable for that. Because I still think I could have stopped it. Just like my pelvis clamped shut to protect me from sex, why couldn’t my uterus have shut down to prevent a pregnancy?

“All right now,” Ed said soothingly, as my breathing slowed and fell back into a rhythm. “Let’s wrap this up for today. We can work on this some more when you come back.”

“I have surgery in three days,” I said.

Seven years later, and that old umbilical hernia, which I’d almost forgotten about, was back. Obstructed, this time, between the slowly tightening walls of my abdominal muscles. I could feel it squeezed just under my belly button, and it felt sore and tender, like someone had punched me in the stomach a few days ago. My doctor said it would be a simple procedure. The hernia would be repaired and the separated abdominal muscles would be sutured together.

“I can schedule another session when I’m recovered, I think.”

“Before that,” Ed said, “I need you to start a ritual. When you go home, go out into nature and create a circle somewhere, with anything you can find on the ground. It can be any sort of circle. Then I want you to visit it every day until your surgery.”

I promised to heed his instructions.

At home I walked down the hill to the frozen lake, my galoshes leaving deep footprints in the layers of crusty snow. At the foot of the hill, just before the start of the lake perimeter, I drew a deep circle in the snow with a twig and placed some fir limbs in the center. I stamped on the snow in the circle until it was packed hard—a clear, round depression like a coin in the snowbank.

I came back to it the next day and nothing had changed. Nor had it the next. But on the very last day before my surgery, there it was. A slim, curved crescent on the underside of the circle where the snow had melted, leaving a smile of brown earth like the crescent moon I had seen earlier. How had that one sliver of snow melted when the weather had been below freezing, and there wasn’t a patch of earth visible for miles?

I went in for surgery that morning and walked out of the clinic that same afternoon. My recovery was remarkably anticlimactic. It felt very similar to my recovery from labor and delivery. I lay on the sofa and cradled my stomach, and it brought back those memories of lying on the sofa all those years ago, feeling my baby flail his limbs against the wall of my belly. Whatever had gone wrong in my body during that time had now been corrected. I had been, in a very technical way, made whole again.

What was it about seven years? I tried to remember . . . then it hit me—the
Shmita
year, or in English, the Sabbath year. In the ancient Jewish tradition of agricultural cycles regarding the holy land of Israel, the land was supposed to lie fallow every seven years. As a child, I had learned that among other commandments, the fallow year had involved such prohibitions as no planting, pruning, or gathering of fallen fruit. At the time, it had struck me as wasteful. Now I regarded the memory of the phenomenon almost reverentially. A Sabbath year: a year of rest, a time to allow the land to replenish its reserves and restore itself to full strength.

Was this my Sabbath year? Seven years after I became a mother, during which time I struggled to raise myself as I raised my child, is this the milepost on which I can lean and take a breath?

mercy

The goal, the reason for moving, for starting a new life, was to heal and recover, but being a parent made the matter more urgent than abstract. I worried I’d never be the mother my son deserved if I didn’t fix what was wrong with me. No matter how much I gave my son, he would always have to deal with a mother who was anxious and overwhelmed. What were his chances, then, of developing a healthy approach to living?

A few months after we moved, I was driving Isaac to school, and we came up over the hill that leads to an old college campus, an assortment of dignified buildings gracing an enormous slope of land behind our lake. The sun was just rising behind the buildings on the left, golden rays melting into the illuminated treetops.

“Mom, why do you always say to eat my breakfast because the kids in Africa are starving? If I eat it, how does the food get to
Africa? I don’t understand,” he said from the backseat. I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the thoughtful expression on his face.

“It’s an expression, Isaac,” I said. “I’m trying to teach you not to take food for granted, or waste it, because there is hunger in other parts of the world. It’s bad behavior to waste food when there are others who need it desperately.”

“But, Mom, why don’t they have enough food in Africa?”

“Because they’re poor.”

“But why? Why is America not poor?”

I tried to explain to him the differences between first- and third-world countries, but nothing I said seemed to satisfy him. He started coming up with ideas about how we could make Africa wealthy.

“Mom, what if we opened businesses in Africa? What if we opened restaurants? Why can’t we just go and bring them food from here?”

I told him about some of the issues that were preventing progress from being made in Africa. There was tribal violence, lack of education, lack of safety, lack of cleanliness and health care. I tried to summarize delicately; I wanted to educate, not traumatize.

He still wrinkled his forehead, as if determined to solve world hunger in our brief conversation, before he was dropped off at school for the day. As if he wanted to approach his studies with an unburdened conscience.

“Hey, I have an idea for you,” I said. “You know there are already some people who are making a big difference in developing countries all over the world. Those people are effective because they’re very educated; they know what they’re doing and how to do it. If you keep doing well in school like you already are, someday you’ll get to go to a great college, and while you’re there, I bet you
can figure out the solution to world hunger. That’s the amazing thing about getting an education,” I said, “the more you know, the more you’ll be able to accomplish.”

“Okay,” Isaac said, “but it will be a lot of years until I go to college.”

I dropped him off in front of the school building and drove away smiling. I had this feeling that somehow my sacrifice had already paid off. My son was already embarking on a journey of education that could take him anywhere. Every door in the world might open for him, if he chose to knock on it. If I continued to nurture his curiosity and courage, he would never feel the sensation of walls closing in on him the way I do all the time. Wasn’t this enough for now?

One morning soon after that conversation, as we were driving down the same roads, my son told me about waking up in his father’s car and finding himself alone. After waiting for a while, he proceeded to open the car door, cross the street by himself, and wander around a few shops to see if his father was in one of them. Eventually Eli came out of the fish market and saw that the car was empty, at which point he went back to look for Isaac. He found him, looking lost, at the cash registers of a supermarket.

“I was very scared,” Isaac told me. “I waited for Dad, but he didn’t come back.”

My fists clenched tightly around the steering wheel as Isaac told me this.

That night Isaac had a bad dream.

“I was on a ship with my dad, and it was sinking, and I was afraid I would never see you again.”

He crawled into my bed and huddled close to me, his body trembling. I put my arm around him and blinked back tears. Only
too vividly did I remember my own dreams of abandonment as a child. Would it be like that for Isaac? Would he never be granted the security of knowing that someone would always be there? I had never left him unattended, nor would I, but repeated attempts to convince Eli to do the same had failed. I couldn’t bear to see my son endure even the smallest part of the fear and anxiety I had grown up with.

It seemed so clear to me what that dream meant. I had to send him off most weekends to be with his dad, while I remained helpless at a distance. I had not been able to save him when he was abandoned in that car; I had not been there to advocate for him. I could only be in control of his life with me. It was terrifying to consider that things would always be this way. That I would never be there when his father lost his temper, or simply his judgment, that Isaac would have to navigate those situations for himself.

Eli expressed no remorse for his decision to leave Isaac in the car on his own. He reacted angrily when I asked him to sign an agreement saying he wouldn’t leave his son unattended again. I was beginning to understand that the fight was far from over. I would be battling for my son until he became an adult, until he could decide for himself. I was forever tied to the man I had not chosen, to the fate my family and community had chosen for me. I would always be only half-free. This knowledge drove me wild with frustration and anger. How could it have come to this, after so much struggling? Would I always be dragging my chains around, swallowing the bitter remorse surrounding the irrevocable decisions that had been made for me in my youth?

What was it they said about that heedless charge down the hill to freedom? That it would inevitably end in destruction. The price I seemed to have paid for my escape still didn’t seem as high as the
one I would have paid if I’d stayed, but I struggled now with a new enemy: perpetual exhaustion of the spirit. I wondered if I’d emptied an unrenewable resource in my dash toward freedom, if I’d somehow exhausted a store of psychic capital designed to last me for a lifetime.

It might have seemed to some that I’d whittled my life down to the bare minimum, but for me, it became just enough. Living in the middle of nowhere was what I wanted. I needed a life that reflected what I felt on the inside: a profound sense of alienation from the society of my origins and the society I had transplanted into, a sense of being in limbo and therefore of being nowhere.

Ironically, I’d found myself unable to create a sense of home, or identity, in the city where I’d been born and raised. Now, here I was, in a place that seemed just quiet and empty enough for the outline of my spirit to take shape. Here I might become visible, the way a cul-de-sac might merit a spot on a map of a barren locale. And even if it could do nothing for me in the end, certainly it was the place for Isaac to figure out who he was and what kind of person he might want to grow into.

A month after my surgery, we celebrated Isaac’s seventh birthday. The weather was unseasonably warm that week; we planned to have a shindig at our house so the kids could all run around outdoors. My mother took the regional train up from New York, loaded with party favors and balloons she’d found in a 99-cent store. I bought the snacks and cupcakes.

The day of Isaac’s birthday happened to be Grandparents’ Day at his school, so I dropped them both off in the morning and
returned home to blow up the balloons. When I picked them up at lunchtime, they’d created a wreath together, Isaac being the designer and my mom wielding the glue gun. They got along well with each other, having none of the baggage that my mom and I grew up taking for granted when it came to our families. To Isaac, she’s just my mom. She’s another person who loves him, and it’s uncomplicated.

Isaac knows that my mom didn’t raise me, but he’s never asked why. I would like for him to be able to take for granted that a mother is always there for her child, but I can already tell, by the way he clings to me, that he doesn’t see me as the immovable caregiver most children see their parents as. He already senses that I come from an unstable, secret world, and this makes his world seem somehow less certain.

In many ways, I am a repeat of my mother’s life. Perhaps that is why I’ve always struggled with feelings of anxiety and fear when I’m around her. Am I doomed to simply relive her life experience and pass it on to the next generation in an unstoppable cycle of misery? Her marriage was also arranged when she was a teenager. She too was forced to have sex, to have a baby, with a man she didn’t love. While I was being raised mostly by my grandparents, she was working menial jobs to put herself through college, an act that constituted her final rejection of our family and community. My father had presented three wives with a religious divorce by the time she was able to obtain her legal one.

My mom and I can’t talk about these things—it’s too painful for both of us—but talking about books is our safe conversation, the one thing that binds us together. She tells me how she, too, used to sneak out to the library as a child, filling her days with
books by British authors, like the Malory Towers series by Enid Blyton. She was a child of divorce as well, a symbol of scandal among her peers. What made her feel most isolated, though, was her intelligence. She felt perpetually surrounded by the unintelligent, much like the characters in Roald Dahl’s books did, including the one I identified with so much as a child: Matilda.

I have no doubt my mother is happy. Her life began as mine did, it progressed as mine did, and yet here she is today, accomplished, educated, and independent. She’s also single, and I worry about that. My mother and I both acknowledge that we have enormous difficulty trusting others because of our experiences in the Hasidic community. If she hasn’t managed to get over it by her late forties, I can’t help having that sinking feeling in my heart that I, too, may never learn to trust someone. Is this then the ultimate risk that we take when we escape the only world we’ve ever known: the possibility that we’ll never truly be moored in a new one?

My mother designated herself the photographer at Isaac’s birthday party. I set my bulky Canon to automatic so it didn’t feel too complicated for her. The event was a huge success. That particular early-spring afternoon was very hot, and the kids arrived in bathing suits ready to jump into the lake. We distributed water balloons and challenged them all to stay dry for the duration of the throwing contest.

I watched Isaac running around, cupcake icing smeared around his mouth, looking gloriously happy to be the center of attention. I knew how special it felt to him, to have everyone here to celebrate. We’d never been entrenched in a place or community as we were now; it was the first time he could feel a sense of permanence and security. I wished that, in the process of providing that for
him, I could have figured out how to provide it for myself simultaneously, but this didn’t seem to be enough. There never seemed to be a simple answer to what was missing in my life.