Often, at the end of a long, hard day, I’m honestly sick and tired of listening
I don’t remember exactly when our friendship shifted.
Maybe it began when I first told you that we’re moving because my husband had gotten a position as rav in an out-of-town community. You joked about my promotion, that now you’d have to stand when I walked into a room and call me “Rebbetzin.” It was all in jest; you and I laughed about how suddenly a 30-year-old is expected to advise women twice her age.
It wasn’t as though I’d taken a course, I quipped, I didn’t get any certificate to prove my capabilities. But maybe for you, that conversation wasn’t all jokes, and perhaps it was then that insidious feeling of inferiority crept into our friendship.
Or maybe it only shifted a few months into the job, when my relational skills were honed. When I was constantly asked to counsel, to lead a community of seekers, I naturally grew self-conscious. The role became my shadow, spreading its distancing effect when I went to the supermarket, when at the park with my children. I was never “one of the women,” but separate, placed on a pedestal I was only too anxious to descend. I became aware of every individual’s minuscule seismic shifts, only discernible on my personal Richter scale: the slightest hunched shoulders, the hurried hand through a messy pony, the shifting eyes.
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