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Jewish World Review August 11, 2003 / 13 Menachem-Av, 5763 The lie that was a blessing By Dr. Debby Schwarz Hirschhorn
I was an only child. That meant I got a lot of attention, but it also meant my parents were able to give each other a lot of attention as well. Without a passel of kids to distract energy, and with me, a fairly well-behaved child, my parents throughout my life were like two lovebirds, catering to and attending to each other's needs. Through bitter life experienced, they had learned to be kind to each other. My father, the youngest of four, lost his own father when he was four. He grew up in Hungary, but was persuaded that his future was in America, so he made his way alone at the ripe old age of 20 to the United States, never to see his mother again. He struggled, and he was alone.
My mother, a middle child of many, quit school in what today would be considered middle school to work in a sweat shop as a milliner. She took the trolley every day and was careful not to lose her nickel. She made good money when everyone else was starving during the depression. Yet, she forever bore the scars of quitting school young, thinking to the end that she was not the intelligent person she was. My parents met, married, had me, and lived a decent, hardworking life. My father always treated my mother like a queen, and she respected and admired him. Things that good have to go wrong, somehow, and he died before she was "ready." Maybe she never would have been ready. She told me she was so jealous of elderly couples she saw walking down the street holding hands. She had had visions of them doing the same thing. She spent two intensely lonely years before I got married myself. Not only lonely, but severely depressed as her health failed along with her emotional resources. When her heart could barely function and she could literally not get out of bed any more, the cardiologist told her she must have bypass surgery. "What for?" she complained, sadly. That's when I told the Ultimate Lie. We had just been married two years, my husband and I, and the untrue words popped right out of my mouth: "Mom," I said, "I'm pregnant." In that moment, everything changed. A look that I hadn't seen in a long, long time, came over her face. There was a brightness there, a glimmer of …hope. She had the surgery. And the Good L-rd Above decided I shouldn't be a liar. After two years of trying, with the thermometers and all that, I immediately became pregnant. My mother, who used to be pretty good in math, never bothered to notice the extra month when my daughter arrived the following year. She got ten more years after that. Time enough to become absolute best friends with my daughter and to see three more grandchildren born. Time enough for Yom Tov (religious festivals) together, visits to the zoo, snuggling in bed, baking zesty Hungarian recipes, music lessons, and kindergarten graduations. The lovefest was mutual. The older children have fond memories of my mother, and my daughter, who remembers her best, felt she had been blessed to receive a whole cultural tradition just through knowing my mother. We all know that lying is wrong, right? Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in Washington and in the media consider "must reading." Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here.
JWR contributor Dr. Debby Schwarz Hirschhorn is an Orthodox Marriage & Family Therapist. To comment, please click here. To visit her website, please click here.
06/02/03: Confessions of a religious feminist, Part II
© 2003, Dr. Debby Schwarz Hirschhorn
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