a bad case of "too many cooks"
Sometimes the amount of rabbi-juggling in my life seems both inevitable and normal. Sometimes it works out to my benefit, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it just seems entirely out of control. And that's when I take a step back and wonder: how on earth did this happen?
The course of our association with a rabbi did not, let's just say, run smooth. I had a rabbi before I got married. But I took kallah classes with another (or more precisely, with his wife). So although the first couple of questions I asked after I got married were to my former rabbi, it seemed to make more sense -- for consistency's sake (ha! yes, in retrospect that's ironic) -- to switch to the kallah class rabbi. After all, there should be fewer surprises that way: I had a pretty good idea of his stance on major issues already, based on what his wife presented in class.
Unfortunately things with this rabbi did not work out (I won't get into the details of why, because some of you may know who he is). Did not work out, in fact, so spectacularly that my husband called HIS old rabbi in desperation for help. And thus we moved on to our third rabbi, with whom we stuck for years. He had a slightly different stance on many points than either of the first two, which meant I spent a little while frantically re-asking every question I could think of to make sure I was doing things consistently (ha!! again). But on the whole it was a wonderful, wonderful move and I'm more grateful to that third rabbi than I can say for bailing us out.
All was smooth sailing (except for the fact that I didn't want to send bedikah cloths to any of these people, since none of them lived in town, and thus found myself calling on whichever of 2-3 local rabbis was home, along with their varying opinions) until we realized we were dealing with infertility. We were one of the lucky couples whose rabbi told THEM he was not qualified to deal with infertility questions. He referred us to... guess who?
Rabbi Number 1.
So all of this might go part of the way to explaining why, when I called our new (yet old) rabbi to ask whether there was any leeway after a bad bedikah, he said to me "Why did you even do a bedikah that day? In my opinion you didn't need to."
I've been married for almost a decade. How can something as big as this be news to me???
Arrrggggghhh!