“I felt so spoiled that I was dissatisfied with my apartment when they were so happy in theirs,” Rochel says.
Still, cultural norms and different family cultures and temperaments are a real thing; Rochel now lives in Cleveland and is very glad that her home today is large enough that several of her kids have their own bedroom, or just one roommate.
Before they expanded their house, her boys shared a room, and Rochel and her husband tried many different permutations of dividing up the shared space, hoping to cut down the bickering. The boys’ own solutions didn’t always work out so well; Chezky once offered to do the division, and his guileless brother agreed to let him do the hard work. When Rochel next entered the room, she saw that Chezky had constructed a barrier around Avi’s bed, with the rest of the space allotted to Chezky. Since Avi wasn’t allowed to step on Chezky’s turf, Chezky had thoughtfully provided piles of clothing and pillows at carefully spaced intervals so Avi could hop from pile to pile without stepping on his brother’s share of carpet.
She admits that so much of what we perceive as “normal” is based on what people around us are doing. If they still lived in that Beis Yisrael apartment, her boys wouldn’t have the same expectations of personal space.
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