Expecting Miracles Sneak Preview: Section Six

A Time to Invest in Ourselves

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Once during my first pregnancy, when a guest asked me what I do, I misheard him and answered, "G-d willing, I'm due at the beginning of May." When he repeated his question, I joked that the answer was anyway pretty much the same- what I was doing was being full-time pregnant. I started wondering how other women managed to be pregnant while taking care of several young children.

The women in this chapter are all young mothers who discussed the challenges inherent to having several children close together. Each one discussed the dangers of making martyrdom a model for motherhood, and the importance of staying aware of and investing in their own emotional, spiritual, and intellectual needs.

Motherhood and Coping Emotionally

(As in all the interviews, identifying details have been changed) Chani is a thirty-four-year-old mother of seven children She grew up in New York in a family of Lubavitcher Chassidim, and moved to Israel fifteen years ago. She and her husband serve as shluchim [emissaries] of the Lubavitcher Rebbe in Jerusalem's Gilo neighborhood, and work in Jewish education with the large community of Russian immigrants there.

How I Felt

My first four children were pretty close together. I had them all a year and a half to a little over two years apart, and between number four and five there was a space of three years. Yeah, yeah, there's a point in everyone's life that she has to catch her breath.

I got married before my twentieth birthday, and it took me about six months to get pregnant. I was coming from circles where it was very normal to get married when I did. I was among the first ten girls in my class to get married, and there was definitely momentum in that direction. On the other hand, I wasn't in the circles where they're saying, "Twenty, and not married!"

I didn't really think about my pregnancy so much. I bought What to Expect When You're Expecting, which had just come out then. Can you imagine? That was pretty long ago. That was how I got through the pregnancy, and it was fine like that. My family and I were really excited but otherwise it was a really uneventful pregnancy.

The Fourth Pregnancy

For the first three pregnancies I was fine, and then by the fourth I thought, "Wait a second, I need to breathe." My oldest was six, and all four of them needed my time and attention. It was just a lot, in addition to keeping the house some level of clean, so that we could find the floors once a week. Also, my husband works very long hours, and I was far from home, since we'd moved to Israel, so I didn't have a support system where I could call and say "Hey mom, will you watch the kids for a few hours?"

After that baby I looked at my husband and said "Not until everyone's out of diapers. I'm just not coping here." That was a really tough stage, that I just said "No more." At one point, many women say ,"Husband, either you find a rabbi to speak to, or I'm going to have a breakdown." I think a lot has to do with what you're used to. I grew up in a large family, but I was the youngest, so I didn't grow up with a lot of kids around. I had a lot of big kids around, but not tons of little kids.

Anyway, it doesn't come automatically to anyone. No one is born knowing how to juggle three little kids on one hip. The routine was just overwhelming, and we were having Shabbos meals with many guests, and it took time until I could look around and say, "Yeah, I have everything under control. If I had another kid I would be able to manage."

Jewishly Planning a Family

I recently went to a discussion where Rabbi Manis Friedman was talking about what constitutes a big family. He said that when the Lubavitcher Rebbe talked about having big families what he had wanted to do was to up the trend of having 2.2 children. Rabbi Friedman is himself the father of fourteen or fifteen kids, but he said that if you're an only child then two children is a big family, and if you're coming from a family of seven, then nine is a big family. The Rebbe had just meant for us to go a little bit beyond what we're used to.

Obviously, when you are Jewishly planning a family there are certain legitimate concerns, and there are certain things which are not legitimate concerns. "Am I emotionally coping" is a legitimate concern, or "Are my other children going to suffer emotionally because I don't have the head for them, the energy for the?."

"Can we afford to send him to college?" is not a legitimate concern, or "Will we have to give up our annual vacation?" "Afford" is not a legitimate concern, unless we're talking about not having money to feed the children, which ranks up there. But there was a case recently in which foster children could not be placed with families if they would not have their own rooms. That is not a legitimate concern!

But when we're talking about a mother's ability to cope, that is definitely a valid reason to take a break, and especially where we're talking about circles where the father is often not a full-time partner in childrearing. Whether he's working or learning, he's not there. Everybody reaches the point where she says, "I can't, I'm in over my head," whether it's after her first, her third, or her fifth, and she says, "Why should the first one, three, or five suffer? I need a chance to recoup and conserve my energy a bit."

After my fourth birth when it had become impossible to cope, I would speak with older mothers of large families of more than ten kids, and they would say all,"Oh yeah, I remember that stage! I went through that too. It's the hardest stage you'll ever go through!" Later on, even if you have four children under four again you will never be in a situation where you don't have anyone to help you out, since older kids can help to a certain limited extent. They can hold a baby for a moment, or help one another get dressed. I said to these mothers "Frankly, what you're saying doesn't help me. It doesn't make me feel any better. I don't want to know that every other mother suffers like this!" I just wanted to wallow in my own misery.

I pray that my children will learn from the Lubavitcher Rebbe; he loved Jews unconditionally, loved Eretz Yisroel [the Land of Israel] unconditionally, loved G-d unconditionally. That's what I want for them. If they become doctors who love G-d unconditionally, that's great. But if they grow up to be Jews who grow up to keep Shabbos and kosher and hate other Jews, I'll be very, very disappointed.

I pray that Hashem will give me the peace of mind and the serenity to give them all the love and the attention that they need, and to give me the patience I need to get through it.

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Also in this section: Being Happy is Hard Work, Educated Imas