A charmed life

This past Friday’s New York "Jewish Week” contained an article by blogger Esther K. Kustanowitz, (of My Urban Kvetch), “Homing In On Change.”

“The Upper West Side is more than just a neighborhood. It is a social system that is supposed to work like this: you move there, become a member of the tribe of Jewish singles, date for a few years, find the right person, then get married. But for those of us who have spent years living within it — and remain, inexplicably, single — it often feels like the system is breaking down. For me, the change was a tectonic shift: monumental, but barely visible to the naked eye. One day, there it was: my gaggle of single gals had all but disintegrated, I had no one to walk home from shul with, and my married, parenting peers were canceling nights out for time at home. But I was still me, chasing my spiritual and social shadow on West End Avenue, like Peter Pan reincarnated as single Jewish female. . . ., a solitary single against a series of teams. I was barely in the black; they had extensive financial portfolios. . . .. I was writing and creating; but they were procreating. Needing a change, I did something I never do: I took a vacation. But even there, in the very act of my self-assertion, I found myself an odd-numbered wheel, rolling in the wake of other people’s romance as we strolled a near-empty beach at sunset: two by two, by one. . . .

. . . there’s been an emotional and spiritual disconnect, a crack in the foundation of the city that I would otherwise consider my home. The rupture represents unfulfilled hopes and my disenchantment with a community that even after a decade, has failed to nurture my soul. I felt connected, once. But whether that connection has been severed, frayed or just removed for repairs, it doesn’t matter—it’s gone. . . .

Single friends around the world — some of whom have never even heard of the Upper West Side — tell similar stories of feeling spiritual and social disconnect, albeit in different cities.”


In a recent e-mail to a sister blogger, I wrote, “what's particularly difficult for me to accept, as a woman who was single until the age of 28 and had her only child at 34, is that, in traditional Judaism, there seems to be a reduced role for a married woman who doesn't have children, and no role whatsoever for a woman who never marries.’


Even when I was in my late thirties, when people would ask me if I “knew anyone,” I never had any names to offer. By then, the guys worth marrying were long “taken.”


It gets worse, folks. Having barely caught up from two weeks in Israel (and a trip to return our son to college), and having written maybe a dozen posts about my trip, then a few more, I’ve just begun to catch up on my blog reading. This afternoon, I was saddened to read that one of my sister bloggers has now been separated for several weeks.


What can I say to either blogger that wouldn’t be trite? I have no help to offer.


I must live a charmed life. I’m fortunate to have a husband who’s still bonkers about me, even though I haven’t always made his life easy. I’m fortunate to have a son who outgrew his disabilities enough to become a college physics major.


I have no words, and I cannot help you. I’m sorry.