Wake Up Your Brain

He speaks to me in the hallway outside the classroom of my local community college, and tells me, for the umpteenth time, to join the honors program.

“It’s a miniature Columbia,” he says, but he doesn’t understand, that’s just it. In the regular classes, I know I can excel. I can smile and be friendly, and I don’t have to say much. The others are from various religious backgrounds, colorful ethnicities and nationalities, with thick accents and foreign gestures. Many are from working class families, unintimidating. And so I feel comfortable as a frum woman, with my own limited educational background, and my clumsiness with English. But I wouldn’t know how to be with ambitious, overachieving types, those who grew up knowing their destinies included honors programs followed by the Ivy Leagues.

Besides, I wouldn’t know what to say. “Dr. so and so sent me to sign up for the honors program”? That just seems awkward and weird.

My professor steps back into the classroom, and I wander the hallways. I pass the honors program office several times without entering. I try to figure out exactly what’s where, but still I don’t enter. My husband still doesn’t like the idea of me going to college at all, and my kids complain that I spend too much time with my schoolwork.

I still need to take my bag from the classroom, and so I still need to face my professor, if not today then during the next class.

I finally enter the honors program office. Somehow, I find the words.

*   *   *

When I was 16, I played around with the radio one day. I was curious and bored and interested in music. A somewhat rebellious friend had mentioned Z100, and I was trying to find it along the dial. Instead, I stumbled on NPR, where some guy was talking about female circumcision. I stayed with that and listened, then went to my brother in his room to tell him about it. The world was filled with so many strange things, and I needed to share it. My brother, who was a bit older than me, asked what it meant, and I told him I didn’t know, even though I had a general idea but didn’t want to get into details.

When I was 18 and newly married, I suddenly felt clueless about everything and incompetent. I didn’t know how to be a wife, and wondered if I would ever learn. My vegetable soup would get burned and my roasted potatoes would come out half-cooked, and my husband would not stop complaining about the mess in the house.

Once I attempted to bake a marble pound cake. It smelled really good after baking in the oven for an hour. The surface was a gleaming golden brown, and as I pulled it out, admiring my improved culinary skills, the whole thing jiggled awkwardly, and then the perfectly marbled top flopped into itself and flooded with orange juice. Only later did I realize my mistake: the recipe called for “1 gl. of orange juice.” Instead of a glass, I’d used a gallon.

I had always been the spaced out kid, the lazy klutz. I liked books, and I liked music, but I couldn’t handle the chores my parents expected of me.

“Wake up your brain!” my father would yell. He wanted me to be like his grandmother Dina: poor as dirt, yet able to cook up a storm out of nothing. She fed not only her own abundant family, but also half the town. She also sewed all her own clothes. She was also smart and entertaining and quick-witted. I was none of those things.

My husband, a good man, he too would get frustrated with my inadequacies. Often he would get angry, and sometimes he would yell at me in frustration, and for a long time I thought it was all my fault. He had simple needs: a spotless clean home, good cooking, and laundry always perfectly folded and neatly returned to drawers and closets. Just like at his mother’s. Also, “that’s what normal homes are like.” Being “normal” was very important to him. He was happiest when the freezer was stocked with frozen kokosh cakes and containers of chicken soup. Then he beamed with pleasure and pride.

When the babies arrived, each felt like it came just as my balabusta skills were catching up, throwing me back to the helpless, fumbling, inadequate homemaker I had been, as if to prove I would never match up to those who were “normal.”

It was only the radio that kept me sane. Whatever was on, I listened to: Rush Limbaugh and Leonard Lopate and Dr. Laura and Brian Lehrer and Sean Hannity and Dr. Joy Brown and Ron Kuby. It made peeling vegetables and washing floors and doing laundry and changing diapers almost tolerable.

It also made me starved for more knowledge, and when Leonard Lopate spoke one day about an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, I sat down on the kitchen floor right in the middle of mopping it and held my head in my hands. I wanted to visit that museum, and to learn about art, and about all those things Leonard Lopate talked about and about which I knew so, so little.

I had a friend who became modern. At one point she enrolled in college. Some type of Internet thing, Phoenix, maybe. After a couple semesters, she moved on to a “real” college. She would describe her professors, and her fellow students, and she showed me some of her textbooks. I was so fascinated and so insanely envious, that I went out and bought all those books for myself. I listened intently as she outlined her plans, and I tried to live through her vicariously. I dreamed of one day doing all this myself, although I didn’t know if or how it would be possible.

Mostly, what held me back was fear. Fear of my friends’ and family’s reactions, of whispers behind my back: There goes Yudit, the “rebel,” the “modern one.”  Fear of having to write, to use words to express myself when everything that ever came out of my mouth seemed like a jumbled incoherent mess. Fear of speaking to people I did not know, who would not understand me or the world I come from. Fear of failing, of it all coming to nothing.

I was also lonely and shy and the very idea of sitting in a class with lots of other smart people frightened me.

My son, in elementary school, began to show signs of a learning disability. I saw in him some of the anger that he would see in our home. I saw the signs of an impulsive nature, of a mountain of energy with no good place to go. It was frightening, and I needed to find a way to help him. Someone told me about a parenting class and I signed up.

I took my son to professionals. They diagnosed him with ADHD, and I got him the treatment he needed. I kept in touch with the rebbes at his cheder, bearded Chasidic men who at first seemed lost at how to relate to me but then relieved that a parent was involved. My own schooling had been of the extreme Chasidic sort, where girls were not taught Hebrew religious texts, and so I tried to teach myself loshen-koidesh so I could study with my son chumash and mishnayos. I hired a tutor to teach him how to read and write English, and bought all kinds of educational workbooks to make up for the inadequate secular studies at his Chasidish cheider.

If I could not be an efficient balabusta, and I could not be a college student, I would be a good yiddishe mother to my son in this way. I would make sure he had the tools he needed for his own life, so that opportunities did not remain closed to him too.

Chinuch is the man’s department,” my husband’s rov said to me, shaking his head with stern disapproval.

We had gone to discuss some of our shulem bayis issues. I didn’t want to see him, had no idea what I was going to say, and besides, I didn’t know how talk to men. But my husband was beginning to resent the work I was doing with my son, and finally I agreed to discuss it.

The rov told me that my job was to make sure my family had supper to eat, that my kids had clothes to wear, and to pick out paint colors for the walls. My husband does those things very well, I thought, better than I, but instead I remained silent.

Furthermore, the rov said, it was my job to make sure that my husband felt “like a king.” If I did this, the rov explained, my husband could in turn make me feel like a queen, and then we would both be happy. But, the rov said, waving his hands back and forth as if this whole matter was one big piece of narishkeit, none of this was possible if I did not stop meddling in my husband’s department. To fix things further, the rov recommended a marriage counselor, a friend of his.

“Why are you so independent?” the marriage counselor asked. “Why aren’t you more feminine?”

I did not know the answer to this question, nor to most of the questions he asked. He was an elderly Chasidic gentleman, with a square gray beard, and the manner of one who knew people’s secrets even before they themselves did.

“You hate men,” he said, “and you discuss all the bad things about your husband with your friends.”

“Not so,” I said, daring to speak up because he was just so wrong. “I don’t have those kinds of friends. I also don’t talk on the phone much. Also, I am ashamed to let anyone know what goes on in our home.”

I must then be one of those women who seek to dominate their husbands, he suggested. He had a theory about women like me. “Zei huben lieb untzireitzen mener,” he said.  “They are friendly and sweet to men so that they can arouse and agitate them. Deep down all they want is to dominate them.”

It was a strange thing to hear for so many reasons, although I didn’t know where to even start, and so I said nothing.

He also believed I read too many books. “If you were my daughter,” he said, “I would put you on medication.” It was his firm opinion that I was psychologically troubled, probably from a bad childhood. “I knew your father, he was a nervaize person. Boys do okay with that sort of thing, because men are logical. But girls get damaged by that.”

I left the counselor’s office numb with rage.  Everything was a blur, my mind in a daze. Driving home from the session, I crashed my husband’s Trailblazer into the car in front of me as it waited at a red light. The car had stopped, started rolling and stopped again. I didn’t see it stop. I pressed on the gas pedal. Hard. I could barely see anything at all. The pressure inside the top of my head was unrelenting.

I was done listening. And I was done trying to please everyone.

The following Thursday, instead of heading home after work I took the bus to the local college. I told no one. I thought I would gather info and see how I might work it all out. Once there, every reason to hesitate fell away. Within a couple hours, I had taken a placement exam and registered for classes.

*   *   *

Now I walk out of the library juggling a pile of books in one arm while fishing for my car keys with the other. The books are mostly for literature classes: Joyce and Flaubert and Nabakov and lots of small yellow and black striped CliffsNotes books. I have only one more bio class to take in order to complete my Associates degree, but before that, I will be attending a two-week seminar abroad, at one of Europe’s most prestigious universities. This is part of the honors program, in which I am now enrolled. The program, along with airfare and every other part of the trip, has been paid entirely through various scholarships. I have been awarded a good number of them already, but each one still surprises me when it comes, still hard to believe I was found worthy.

My children enjoy reading my bio textbook. My husband still doesn’t like that I am in school, although he wishes me well when I tell him about upcoming exams. He also congratulates me when I tell him about scholarships I won. And yet, at the Shabbos table he will remind our children that only the Torah contains true knowledge. That what they teach in goyishe colleges or found in library books is shtisim, frivolous and silly.

When I drive past the college with my children, they point and say, “There’s mommy’s goyishe college and her goyishe friends.”

Those words stab me, although I don’t show it. I also know that I influence them indirectly. I hear my children proudly repeating to their friends things I’d mentioned. My son, entering adolescence, now reads books non-stop—something I would never have imagined several years ago.

Every time I step onto campus it is like I enter a different world. I like myself better there. It reminds me of when I was a girl, when I used to swim at the college’s Olympic size pool, during those hours set aside for frum people in the neighborhood, and I would wonder what it must be like to be part of all that goes on there. To be taking classes, instead of being a stranger who visits the pool for an hour. Now it feels like I’ve conquered something, like I have crossed a barrier, which, I now realize, existed all along only in my imagination.