Mayim Rabim

I just can't wrap my mind around some of the harchakot. I'm sure their origins are perfectly reasonable, but it's hardly a turn-on for me or my husband when he hands me the car keys or I put a plate of pasta down in front of his seat instead of four inches to the left. I know these things are supposed to serve as reminders of my niddah status, as red danger flags indicating that...

I’m not a big fan of Vagina Monologue feminism (“the more we talk about our genitalia, the fewer women will be beaten and raped”). Separating public from private is part of being human, part of being civilized, part of being holy. Still – many of you will disagree with this, I’m sure – the concept of modesty can become oppressive, and it is often used to oppress women, in particular. Sometimes, I think that the...

It's late. I'm tired. I want to go to sleep, but I can't. My husband (let's call him David) and I have two adjacent twin beds that we cover with a king size sheet during our "together" period. I got my period this morning and now I can't go to sleep until I replace the king sheet with two twins. I'm starting to get a little depressed. My period didn't come until David had already...

On my way to the mikvah one month, I met the attendant heading over to open the building, and she said to me, "Wow, that’s amazing. I was just going to call you." Are you recruiting too? I asked, because the other two attendants had already approached me about whether I was willing to replace one of them (who is – you guessed it – about to give birth.) “No,” she said, “but there’s a...

Well that's it; the mikvah lady has officially run out of things to chitchat with me about, as she checks my hands and feet. We were reduced to reminiscing about the renovations last summer. Reminiscing. Did you catch that? Not too many people she can do that with, most likely, because no one else has been there every month before and since....

I recently went to the mikvah - as in I was in niddah. My baby is basically sleeping through the night and so the nursing is not enough to keep my period away. I got what I thought was my period but it completely "dried up" within three days. So I counted five and seven and went to the mikvah. I guess I will have to update my profile, because now I'm not "nursing clean"...

While married to the ex, my first pregnancy ended in miscarriage. For days and days the doctors went back and forth: blighted ovum, viable, heartbeat, no heartbeat, missed abortion, D&C, mexotrethate, and on. A half or dozen so internal ultrasounds later and it was over. Miscarrying was painful but not emotionally wrenching. There was sadness at the loss of potential but somehow I never really “felt” pregnant. Niddah didn’t seem like such big deal. For...

The first year of observing t'h I truly believe brought me and my husband closer. We were starting to get into that married couple rut of being too tired to be intimate. We didn't seem to be as excited in each other, and t'h brought that back for us. Always affectionate, not being able to hold hands or touch became sort of a game. Then we started trying to have children. Now, I need those...

When I went to the mikvah over vacation this past month, I got into the car and kissed my husband. Just like that. No butterflies, no tension, and best of all, no fights. My first thought was that it's a feng shui type of thing, and my house needs a makeover. Then I realized that I never had this post-mikvah anxiety before I had kids, and that school, internship, a house, toddler tantrums, and my...

This cycle has been going for months. OK, only two months and change, but that's plenty. I know the body takes time to adjust after going off of hormonal contraceptives, and I was never regular before, but not having a "break" is starting to annoy me. It's not that I want to be completed separated from my husband. On the contrary, I love cuddling before I get out of bed in the morning and exchanging...

In my earlier post, ipseq said that she'd like to discuss the unspoken pressure to have sex as the only (halachicly permissible) means of sexual release for the husband, even when the wife is not interested. I think it's an interesting discussion, so I'm opening up this post for it, but I feel the need to state that it's not the sort of pressure that I was talking about in my last essay. The undefined...

Tall Latte's experience and the attached comments reminded me of something that's been bothering me for a long time. Whose business is it, exactly, why you use the mikvah? If you've been to more than one mikvah, you've probably run into a range of degrees of intrusiveness on the part of the mikvah staff. At some places, they're trained to do nothing more than ask if you want them to look at your hands, feet,...

So, I've been sick on and off for a while (I have fibromyalgia but that's a whole other issue), and this current bout of sickness causes me to cough almost uncontrollably for 20-30 minutes at a stretch. Say I've finally fallen asleep on the couch for a short nap after working two jobs, kallah class, and attempting to finalize this wedding. After about 10 minutes of sleep let's say I start coughing uncontrollably for...

Thanks to a comment, I've been reminded that I actually like observing t'h. I enjoy it. Really, I do. First of all, I love having two hours to myself, free of interruptions. I get to soak in a tub, with a good book, candles, and a CLOSED BATHROOM DOOR. No one interrupts. If the phone rings, I pretend I can't hear it. I get to spend two hours on me, me, me. Okay, so part...

Once, at a family simcha, about 10-15 years ago, my cousin tried to explain to me why men need the discipline of time-bound commandments like davening three times a day, wearing tzitzit and tefillin, kiddush lavanna, etc., and women don't need it the same way. This was many years ago, so my memory of the discussion is a bit hazy, but it seemed to revolve around the fact that women menstruate and men don't. Her...

11:30 Saturday night. My husband gets home, sees the envelope on the kitchen counter with my name on it, grabs it, slams the door behind him. Doesn’t wake the kids. I sit in bed, reading, not reading, waiting for him to return. 10 minutes later, he saunters into the bedroom. “I dropped it off. In the rabbi’s mailbox. It’s late. He didn’t open the door.” Midnight. Phone rings. It’s the rabbi. My husband answers. “No,...

Um, hi. Woman who separated from her husband for the past day (in anticipation of her period) when really it was supposed to be tomorrow? Right here. I guess I have a little too much on my mind, huh? It's a good thing my husband is so good-natured. Please, somebody, tell me you've done something this stupid too. :)...

Heh. That has the possibility of becoming the most popular post title around here. It's exactly how I feel right now, though. My husband and I have had sex once in the past two weeks (and it was about a week ago, I think). We've both wanted it, but there was always some reason...I was tired, he was tired, we needed to clean up for Shabbat dinner guests, we needed to set up for Shabbat...

I still don't know whether I am niddah. As of when Shabbat started, there was still only a little bit of spotting. Late Friday night I got frustrated and did a bedikah, thinking that it would probably be red and I could at least have the closure of knowing my status. Nope...brown, and not clearly a particular yellowish-brown shade that I know is okay. No particulary reddish spots either, and a few bits of very...

Michaela's posts here and here reminded me of a really dumb thing I did a few months ago. Background: I'm nursing. While in the past this has not stopped me from getting pregnant again, ie I do not nurse "clean" for extended periods of time (the most was 8 months, and that was with my "milk twins") it does muck with my cycles. 35 and 45 day cycles are not abnormal for me while nursing...

I have a very long cycle. Like I average a 38 day cycle. And I have spent most of the last four years either pregnant or nursing clean, so I have not been in Niddah often. As a result I have difficulty with the calendar and need a review every 6 months or so. And I have difficulty with the harchokos. I was married for a number of years before I got pregnant, so there...

I just finished reading Rivkah Slonim's Total Immersion: A Mikvah Anthology, and I have mixed feelings about it. That's only to be expected, I suppose; each essay offers a slightly different perspective, even if they do all ultimately advocate observance of T"H. What bothered me most was the continual rehashing of the idea that Judaism is a "golden mean" between hedonistic paganism and ascetic Christianity (or, alternatively, between ascetic Chritstianity and contemporary secular culture).

I went back to the mikvah in the prescribed time after my last period. The period had been "normal", for me, which is what my doctor had asked me to look out for. If I had a normal period, she said, then I knew that my miscarriage the month earlier was complete & that it would be safe for my husband and I to start trying for another baby. An actual baby this time, not...