I was in the front row this year, under the enormous tent that our synagogue puts up for High Holy Day services. There are over a thousand people singing, swaying and praying. It’s like a Jewish tent revival. There’s something about the power of prayer that raises a lot of energy, especially if so many people are doing it in the same place. I found myself crying, once again, as I do every year when we sing Avinu Malkenu, the prayer for redemption. Since we sing it in Hebrew, which I don’t understand, the words aren’t as important as the music, and the sound of a thousand people singing it in unison, standing up, with their arms around each other.
This year I prayed for peace of mind and healing, for myself, for my daughter, even for my ex and his wife. They were all sitting near me in the tent during the N’eilah service, which is the ending of the holiday. My daughter and her stepmother were sitting at the end of one row and my ex and his mother were sitting behind them. I got up and went over to them to wish them a Happy New Year. My daughter looked happy to see me, her stepmother looked stunned but she forced herself to respond politely, my ex mother in law looked really furious at me and didn’t say a word. My ex was polite. I have to congratulate myself for making the effort—it took real effort but this is the holiday for forgiveness, for healing old wounds, for starting over. I believe we Jews are the only religion to spend a whole week on forgiveness, atonement, letting go of regrets, starting over. By the end of Yom Kippur, after praying for hours to forgive, let go the hurts of the past, I actually felt good enough to go up to them in sincerity and wish them all well.
What helped was talking to my friend Avigail in between the morning and evening services. She’s a Jewish scholar and went through her own very messy divorce. Ten years later she was still obsessing about her ex, what a lying loser he was who never did one thing he’d promised to do, plus he turned two of her children against her and tried to turn the other one against her too. I got tired of hearing her complaints and I’m sure everyone else did too. Recently she stopped talking about him. I asked her about it and she said she finally stopped blaming him. It’s blame that gets you stuck in the past. The essence of letting go of the hurts of the past is to recognize that the people who hurt you are NEVER going to change, they are who they are and that’s that, and you have to keep recognizing that reality, over and over.
I would add false hope to that equation. I am still hoping that somehow they are going to recognize the error of their ways. I wasn’t hoping for an apology, but I was hoping that my ex and his wife would realize that they were harming my daughter with their treatment of me, that they would come to their senses and try to behave like menches (good people in Yiddish). That is NOT going to happen, not now, probably not ever.
Avigail also pointed out that I need to accept that I didn’t have what it took to care for my emotionally disturbed daughter, that I just couldn’t do it, and they picked up the slack. I needed them to support me in parenting her in order to be able to do it, but that’s just not going to happen. They see my inadequacy as purposeful, they will NEVER, NEVER accept that it’s not my fault. The more I tell myself they will NEVER change, the easier it gets.
Avigail also pointed out that my daughter chose to reject me as well. <ouch> She may be a child, but she didn’t have to choose them, she could have chosen me. Avigail had 3 kids. Her sons listened to their father, her daughter stuck with her. Her daughter must have been under pressure to go along with her brothers but she resisted. There is no fault implied here. My daughter did what she needed to do to survive, and that’s perfectly understandable. She is an extremely angry kid—for good reason– and I don’t deal well with anger, anyone’s anger. I shrink back when anyone gets angry at me. Ironically I picked an angry man to marry—maybe not so ironic, my father was angry. Both my ex and his wife are angry—the wife is even angrier than he is—she goes on tirades and he’s afraid of her, according to my daughter anyway. So maybe she belongs with them. They can handle her anger–I can’t. Can I accept that this year? I’m going to try.