The newsletter is yet another reminder that I am on the outside looking in, that I don’t belong. But do I want to rejoin?
Snail mail. How old school. Well. It is, in fact, an old school.
Usually, I must admit, mail from seminary goes straight into the junk pile, but for some reason I set aside this newsletter to read over Shabbos. When I open it, I find an article about marrying off one’s daughter. One about a son’s bar mitzvah. I keep scanning, for what exactly, I don’t know.
Who was that girl who went to that seminary 30 years ago? Was she really me? The newsletter somehow becomes the symbol of a long-developing gulf, an ever-widening space between that person and me. My kids’ shidduchim, tainted by the cast of the OTD phenomenon like a long shadow that never seems to move on; my son’s bar mitzvah, overshadowed by the bar mitzvahs of his big brothers whose tefillin have been shucked and abandoned.
We’re now parenting, if not from naivete and fear, then from PTSD, determined not to repeat our assumed mistakes of the past, exaggerating every perceived sign of teen angst. Maybe, maybe, with sheer vigilance, we’ll be able to avoid some of the pain that plagued our family, and still plagues us, like aftershocks of this never-ending earthquake.
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