The saddest Shabbat
“So,” our therapist begins as she usually does. “How are things with the two of you?”
“Philip’s moving out,” Beth says. “He’s found a house.”
Our therapist raises an eyebrow. She asks some questions, where it is, what it’s like. Did she not expect me to move this fast?
“How do you feel about that, Beth?” she asks.
“I’m sad, and I’m angry,” she replies.
We talk some more.
“I don’t really understand why she’s angry,” I say. “She’s the one who’s been saying things like ‘Maybe we should separate.’”
We ask her for the name of a good mediator. I’m guessing she gave us the one who did her divorce, but we don’t pry.
It turns out that what Beth is angry about is that ‘all of the sudden’ I’m considerate and doing things around the house, taking more time with the boy. “If you did a time-motion study,” she says, “you’d see that I do most of the work around the house and with the boy.”
I begin to counter with my usual retort: “That’s because you never count the things that I do.” I realize I don’t have to do this anymore, but I go ahead anyway: “You think they’re trivial or insignificant.”
She goes all the way back to my breakdown, what she does when she’s really angry. Some marriages collapse under the weight of an affair. Mine is collapsing under the weight of a stifling depression that washed over me three months after the boy was born. We disagree about what happened. She seems to think it was preventable, or that I indulged myself in it, leaving her to care for a child alone. I counter that she gave me no support and that I had to fight my way out of it on my own.
Perhaps that’s what really makes her angry. That she’ll be left alone to care for the boy, recapitulating her father’s experience when her mother died. If I were snide, I’d taunt her and dare her to do a better job than he did. After all,her sisters blame their father for lousy job he did when their mother died. I’m snide enough to write it here, but not to tell her.
Well, not unless she calls me a ‘nasty little man’ again.
It’s always dicey seeing our therapist on a Friday night. Friday night is Shabbat: candles, blessings, kiddush. Even when we’re a little stressed we come together for it. Even when I’m depressed and my voice breaks during kiddush. But tonight Beth took to her bed. She wouldn’t come down. Not for dinner. Not even for kiddush.
So the boy and I did Shabbat alone.
“It feels weird without Mom,” the boy says.
“We’ve done it alone before when Momma travels,” I say.
“Yeah. But it’s different when Momma’s upstairs and not on business.”
I serve him cold chicken and hot rice. He refuses the edamame.
“It even tastes different,” he says.
He’s right, of course, but I just give him a noncommital “Does it?”
It’s quicker, and a bit drawn. He knows Beth is sad. He goes up to see her and says, “I think she was crying.”
“Even grownups cry, you know.”
“Yeah,” he says, “but it has to be pretty strong to make a grownup cry.”
I still have fantasies of this separation. One of them was that we would continue to have Shabbat together as a family, alternating houses.(1)
I take a breath. One grownup crying in the house is enough.
From the vantage point of 2025 this is so naive, it’s almost sweet. ↩︎