Dear Abba,
Hi. Thanks for the
invite to Florida, but I can’t just drop everything and take off to Florida
with less than 2 weeks notice. C
has school the third week of December (including her violin recital and a second
school-wide recital that week), then we have holidays over those two weekends
that we celebrate, and we are having a visitor the last week of December. And like you, I plan my schedule months in
advance, and have a very busy winter break schedule planned with my coauthors,
with deadlines the first week of January for a 35 page conference paper and a
15 page major NSF grant proposal, and advance preparations for my new job as
Director of Undergrad Studies in Sociology that I start officially in January. Taking a 2-3 day break (+ half a day to pack
and get everything ready + a day to recover) will make my break a lot more
stressful because I still have to write 50 pages somewhere.
We also took that big trip in August to visit everyone
specifically so that we wouldn’t have to travel over winter break. And the cost of travel for us is more than
the cost of plane tickets and lodging.
We have to board our dogs, which requires a vet appointment ($120 for
both) to get shots for “kennel cough” (the shot only last 6 months), and an
appointment at the Kennel ($65 a day).
And the last two weeks of December usually gets booked up at the dog
kennels months in advance. Plus in
general I would rather visit you in *State* as long as you still live there, because
that way I can see my friends up there and other family members in the same
trip.
To be honest, apart from all these reasons, which
are all
true, there is another one that I’m not sure if I should bring up with
you
(Since I’m not sure it will do any good). I had hoped that after all the
drama we had before my wedding that I would never write a long email
like this to you again, and D has asked me not to fight with you
about this, but after going back and forth I
think it’s better to just say it instead of silently resenting you from
afar
and avoiding spending time with you without telling you why.
Ever since I found out you are not going to D’s wedding it
has brought up a lot of hurt feelings for me. I spent years being upset about
you not attending my wedding, and maybe I fooled myself into thinking you had
‘gotten over it’ and had accepted my family. Over that time there has been and
continues to be a lot of painful reminders of the past, and I have felt
rejected by you and mom’s actions many times, but I know it is a difficult
adjustment for you as well, and for C’s sake I try to hold my tongue. But the fact that you are not attending
D’s wedding has shown me that if you could travel back in time and do
things differently, you would do things the exact same way, despite all the
hurt it caused me and our family, the damage it did to our relationship, and all the years in which we barely talked to
each other.
It seems to me that you still look at my life
choices and my
husband as being ‘lesser than’ you, and I don’t think anybody likes to
hang out
with people who look down on them and clearly disapproves of the entire
way in
which they live their life, and feels so strongly about it that they are
willing
to skip two out of three of their children’s weddings and ruin their
chance of a normal healthy relationship with their kids, son/daughter in
law, and grandchildren.
I often wonder if you only tolerate us
now that we have a kid, so that you can hang out with your grandchild and try to kiruv her into your
religious beliefs. Or at least that’s how it looks from my perspective. The fact
that you usually fly in for 3 hours at a time, just long enough to snap
pictures with her to show off to your friends and give us a ton of jewish stuff
and then fly out again, reinforces this view to me. As does the fact that I
asked you to not send C Jewish books anymore, and yet they are still coming.
When E has a ‘real’ jewish kid some
day are you going to drop her like a hot potato? When she has no interest in being religious
as she gets older, are you going to lose interest in her or treat her like a
second class citizen, the way you and mom treated me differently than D and
E when you thought I was the only one not religious? Or, just
as bad, are you going to treat her better than D's kids because
she's a 'real' jew and you can try to kiruv her but his kids won't be
halachicly jewish? Are you going to skip her wedding some day and hurt her
the way you hurt me and now D? What
about when she inevitably realizes for herself the way you feel about her father and, by
extension, her? These are things I worry about and feel I must protect her from.
So I’m not sure where exactly that leaves us. I can’t just go on pretending everything is
ok and just swallow my resentment and take fun family vacations together while
you treat my brother and sister in law in a way that shows you don’t regret the
way you treated me, and which is leading to a lot of hurt and angry feelings on my
part. I want so much to have that family life you are thinking of, where we
come to visit you in Florida just like I visited Sabba and Savta as a kid, but
I feel like that is a fantasy of some other family that never will be real,
because of the choices you have made and continue to make. In a way I feel like
this must be what it is like to be related to a heroin addict. I see you
going down a path this is once again irreparably harming your relationship with
my family (and D’s family) even further than it is already harmed, and driving
an even bigger wedge between people in our family, but I am powerless to stop you. So even though I love you, I feel I have to
distance myself from you to protect my feelings and my family.
You have said you don’t want to go to D’s wedding
because of the message it sends. Well what message does it send to my husband
and daughter and me, and what message would I send to them if I pretend like
nothing is happening and continue to just visit like everything is normal? What exactly am I supposed to say to C
next Fall when she asks why you aren’t at D’s wedding, where she will be
the flower girl? She has already seen a
wedding album from my wedding and asked why you weren’t there, and it was
heartbreaking for me, and I had no idea what to say to her. That her grandparents believe in an extremist
version of Judaism that puts religious beliefs over their children and family
connections, and they believe they have to miss their own children's weddings
to show their devotion to god and their religion?
I don’t even fully understand it myself. I know plenty of
other OTD people whose parents came to their wedding to non jewish people, or
who compromised by coming to the reception but not the ceremony, whose parents
are much more religious than you. So I wonder what makes you different from
those parents? The only explanations I
can think of is that maybe you are under the sway of your Chabad-trained
rabbi, who believes in a cultish version of Judaism with strict “in
group-out group” rules like missing your children's weddings. Maybe you
have developed your own extremist dogmatic version of hashkafa, perhaps
influenced
by those rabbi courses you took, your strong feelings about preserving
jewish
culture because of the holocaust (alienating your kids over religion is
probably not the best way to go about that), and maybe too many times
watching
Fiddler on the Roof (which, by the way, was originally written as a
satire/critique
of shtetls, not a history lesson).
And honestly I think this is partially about
control and you trying to show your disapproval when you feel you can’t control
our actions, and trying to punish me/D to try to sway us to do what you
want us to do and marry Jews, just like the way you threatened to stop paying
for my college tuition if I wouldn’t come home for shabbas when you knew I wasn’t
religious in college (which, incidentally, makes me wonder if every ‘gift’ you
give us for C is a future manipulation tactic to withhold if we don’t
silently put up with your disrespect). Or
maybe it is a simpler explanation and you’re just a narcissist or a coward or an extremely
stubborn man who cares more about getting your way and looking good to others
and maintaining your social standing in the community than about your children
and how much they get hurt in the process.
None of those explanations are very flattering, and I don’t know
whether
it’s a good idea to even share these thoughts with you since I feel it
will
only insult you and put you on the defensive which is not my intention,
but
they are honestly the only ones I think explain your actions. If any of
that hit close to home maybe you should think about why.
This whole situation is also making me hate Judaism and my
own heritage to the point where I don’t want to pass it on to my kid at all. After I came home from L’s wedding when I
found out you weren’t going to D’s wedding I was so angry I gathered up all
the 50+ jewish childrens books in my house and stacked them up in my laundry
room so C wouldn’t have access to them. Yes religion has a lot of good
to it, and we have a rich history and traditions, but preserving it comes at
what cost? Your relationship with your kids and son/daughter in law? Your
grandkids? Even God told Abraham in the end to not sacrifice his own kid. And
in the end you are driving us further away from Judaism, to the
point where I want to pass on none of it. I think there might a dvar torah in there somewhere.
You are of course entitled to
your own beliefs and decisions no matter how much they hurt me. I considered
sending the first two paragraphs of this email and just leaving it at all the
other reasons for why I am not visiting. But I feel it is better to say what I
am really thinking and try to maybe understand each other. I’m also just not sure if you are aware of how
much your actions have hurt me and continue to affect and hurt me, since I
often just bottle up my resentment and don’t tell you. It’s
hard because we live so far apart and
only meet up for 2 or 3 hours at a time, so meanwhile I just sit at home
and
resent you from afar and never talk about it with you. In the end, even
if it doesn't change your mind, I want you to go into the decision to
skip D's wedding fully informed of the impact you are having. And I
also worry that you live in an echo chamber of people telling you this
is the right decision, and don't have anyone pointing out why it isn't.
In the meanwhile,
while I do very much appreciate your invitation and offer to pay for our
flights, I don’t think a trip is in the cards this winter break while I am
still so upset, and if you are not going to go to D’s wedding then I don’t
think realistically I’m going to want to go out of my way to come visit you in
Florida for at least the next couple of years.
It really saddens me that we can’t have a closer relationship where an
invitation to visit you in Florida makes me happy instead of filling me with
dread and resentment, and worry that if I am honest about my feelings I will
lose our fragile relationship again. But I’m not going to bring my husband to stay
in the house of someone who looks down on him and me and our life together
while this hurt is ongoing.
Maybe over spring break or next summer, with plenty of advance warning
and planning around both of our schedules, you can go stay in *Nearbye city 1.5 hours away* where
there is a kosher restaurant and we can meet up somewhere in between like at the Zoo or the *other local attraction* or something with C. I’m also planning to have a tenure party in
April which you are invited to, but I’m not sure yet if it will be on a Saturday
or a Sunday or when exactly it will be. The only trip I’m planning to make
North next year is to D’s wedding, and I don’t think it would be
appropriate to visit you during that trip since it will just upset me and
confuse C, and I’m not going to lie to her on your behalf.
I hope you have a good vacation and I'd be happy to talk more if you would like.
Abandoning Eden
