By Divine Providence, the day my friend Shani’s son Benzi ditched his suit jacket and Borsalino for a pair of ripped jeans happened to be the same day my son Mordy got his acceptance letter. He would be attending Yeshivas Metzuyanim, an A-list yeshivah where you needed lots of pull and an excellent reputation just to be considered.
The juxtaposition couldn’t have been more jarring. Benzi and Mordy had been born ten days apart at the same hospital. Shani and I brought our babies to our respective starter homes next door to each other on the same tree-lined street in an up-and-coming neighborhood. Our older children, toddlers by then, were already fast friends, just like the two of us had been throughout our school years. We joked that we might as well already register the newborns for the same playgroup.
Shani’s husband and mine had both been handpicked for the same kollel, on the fast track to becoming roshei yeshivah, and we both worked—I as a speech therapist, Shani as the manager of a clothing boutique.
But that’s where the similarities ended. Shani and I were otherwise as different as night and day. Where I was measured and analytical, she was spontaneous and fun-loving. That’s what attracted me to her, way back when my family moved to her neighborhood, and it’s also what kept our friendship nourished through our teens, a year spent in separate seminaries, and our subsequent marriages and lives as kollel wives.
Shani was a fireball, a master of all trades who packed her days tightly, zooming from one errand to the next and barely giving herself time to breathe. She would zoom through dinner, baths and bedtime, spending the rest of the night suggesting shidduchim or involved in some tzedakah case or another. Despite logging only four or five hours of sleep a night, she always seemed upbeat and chipper.
By contrast, I considered working and staying on top of my children’s needs to be more than enough to occupy my time. Spending time with my children was a priority. I read to them, played with them, and just listened to them talk.
“You actually tell your children a bedtime story?” Shani was incredulous. “Times five?”
“The baby doesn’t get a story,” I chuckled, trying to soothe my fussy newborn. “And each story takes only a few minutes, so it’s not a huge amount of time.”
“I’d go crazy if I had to repeat so many bedtime stories,” she confessed. “My goal is to get them into bed as quickly as possible. And in my opinion, quality time is vastly overrated,” she said with a laugh, as if she were joking.
On another occasion, as we were sitting in Shani’s backyard watching our children making a mess in the sandbox, she asked me about my plans for the summer. “I don’t have any plans,” I replied. “My husband’s in kollel, remember? We’re on a tight budget. And what would I do with the kids?”
Shani laughed, calling me foolish for not knowing how to enjoy life. She was farming the kids out to her sisters and going away for an extended weekend. “I don’t have any more money than you do,” she said. “I just don’t want to be one of those exhausted kollel-wife stereotypes. No one likes a martyr.”
These comments by themselves wouldn’t have raised a red flag, but together they painted a contrasting picture of the chinuch our children were getting. It wasn’t enough to sour our friendship, which had been going strong for decades, but I felt that Shani’s priorities were seriously skewed.
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