Mayim Rabim

Someone explain this to me…why did I go from niddah to niddah? Strength to strength I can understand… Backing up: I made the decision to wean…after all, the child has turned two. OK, so said child only nursed sometimes before bed and each morning upon waking. I’d been on a low-dose pill since my post-partum check up. When the child was nursing lots (earlier on), there was no spotting, no nothing. I nursed clean and...

The following appears in a draft of a responsum by Conservative Rabbi Susan Grossman: We live in a society that, while sensitized to sexual harassment and abuse, also treats touching between sexes very causally. . . Therefore some physical contact can continue between partners during the woman's menstruation as long as it is limited to that which is generally accepted in society between siblings. Under these guidelines, partners should not sleep in the same bed...

This is a long overdue post about an experience which I alluded to in my comment to Shifra's post here. I too had gynecological surgery, which I was told would not make me a niddah even if I had spotting (which I did, but only on the day of and very minimal.) The surgery took place during my shiva nekiim, and five days after I was able to go to the mikvah (I did have...

All my menstruating life, I've had irregular periods. I've gone as long as 8 months without a period (I wasn't ovulating), but generally I fall in the 35-45 day range. In fact, over most of my married life, I've had a 33-38 day cycle averaging about 35 days long. Even after my pregnancies I reverted back to my predictable irregular/long cycle. I have gotten use to it; it has it's pluses and minuses. Plus -...

Well. That was a first, and hopefully a last. I had to miss mikvah night in order to make a shiva call. We actually got home before the mikvah closed, but only by about half an hour. If I had run straight from the car to the mikvah, I think they might still have felt compelled to let me in. But I remembered learning that if you haven't been able to start preparing before dark,...

Ok, I’m probably just blowing this whole thing out of proportion, but it has come to my attention that a man passing through our town wants to make use of the mikvah in the morning before davening. While I think this is a very admirable thing for any man to do (I mean would you want to dip every day?) I can’t help but feel a little selfish/protective of our little mikvah. Since we only...

I was moved by a comment made by "visiting" over here. I'm repeating her comment here so I can expand on it:

So tonight's the night. The spouse has been sweet and kind and looking forward to it. He promised candles, kids asleep!, a romantic atmosphere...just like those first times. And wouldn't you know it, I've picked up a stomach virus from Child #2. How sexy is that? Instead of looking forward to the evening, I'm spending the day in my pjs and barely moving. At least I can get a backrub tonight. If this is a...

A friend who got married 10 months ago gave birth today. She called to tell me the whole birth story. And I got so jealous. Gosh, those hormones are in full force. I just finished my period and am in the midst of counting. I want to be pregnant. I want to give birth. I want to have a new baby in my arms. But I can't let my emotions get the better of me....

Um. This just doesn’t seem kosher. My husband and I are going away on a well-deserved vacation tomorrow. We’re leaving very early, and of course, it’s late and we still aren’t done with everything we need to do. And yeah, I’m niddah, but we kinda figured that would happen and there’s no other time we could go. So, we’ll just suck it up and deal. Meanwhile, tonight I notice my husband is wearing pants that...

I'm very possessive about mikva'ot....Tumah and taharah are practical concerns directly for married women, and for their husbands only by extension.

One Friday night, the subject came up at our table. One of our guests had served as a rabbi for a number of years, and his experiences working with congregants had led him to a particular perspective on the role of the mikvah attendant. He told us that before he had smicha ("ordination"), he was sometimes called upon to assist in various lifecycle ceremonies. At weddings and bar mitsvahs, he said, he always made a...

Unbe-freaking-lievable. My hefsek tahara from DAY SEVEN was no good. I suppose I should consider myself lucky the one from Day Eight was ok, right? I mean, they could have gone on being red forever. And all the people who helped make it happen: my husband who made the phone calls and drove me over to the rabbi's, the rabbi who made time to see me at 11 PM on a Saturday night, my agent,...

Mikvah as such is a mitzvah shrouded in secrecy. There are both good reasons for this and bad, and that's essentially why mayimrabim exists, to break some of the secrecy without breaking the laws of tznius (modesty and decency in speech, dress and actions.) I've been contemplating recently: exactly how much do non-mikvah users (including those in the frum community not yet obligated in the mitzvah) really know about mikvah use at all? I've heard...

So there I was, unhappy with the idea of trying to fit myself into a mikvah schedule I didn't understand in the jam-packed days before my wedding, and equally unhappy with the idea of my first immersion taking place like some kind of nasty secret at night. Something had to give. As it turned out, it was the mikvah. Some time back, Eli and I had made arrangements to travel to a large Northeastern city...

Before my wedding, I took an extra birth control pill each day for three days. I needed to put off my period for about twenty-four extra hours to be in the safe zone. As luck would have it, I got it the next evening. It wasn't until a year later that I realized what the implications of this timing were: each year, for the next five years (provided that I remained on birth control), my...

Why is it that when I put on white underwear and start counting I become a walking disaster area? (the same happens when I wear white tops or bottoms too, but I stopped doing that). I look at ink and I'm covered. I look at a knife and I have a nasty cut. I get bruises everywhere (well, I do that all the time anyway). I get blisters all over my feet. My feet decide...

So the last time I went to mikvah, I had an epiphany. The mikvah attendant was new to me (well, new as an attendant, I had met her socially before) so I launched into my usualy spiel about being afraid of the water, and having a heter to only get one Kosher tevilah, but always trying for three anyway, and how having the heter had helped me not need to use it... (For the history...