Mayim Rabim

When we were dating, and when we were engaged, I heard my soon-to-be-husband talk a lot about his rebbeim. As I planned the wedding, his biggest concern seemed to be which one should get which kibud*. Who should be mesader*? he agonized. Who should get which bracha*? To me, wrapped up in the burning question of how to get a kosher meal catered for less than $25 a plate (you can stop laughing now) and how to explain to my in-laws that they could not invite all the people they wanted to invite without giving us more money because I, myself, was paying for this wedding with the seven thousand dollars in my savings account—to me, that question seemed trivial if not insignificant.

In the end, the rebbe that my husband refers to as “my rebbe” the way Chabadniks refer to “the rebbe” had the bracha acharona*. I met him, briefly, at the chassuna*. He seemed nice. Enormous, physically, with many many children. Big black hat. Big black beard. You know. A rabbi.

When, a month or two after our wedding, I had to deal with some impossible personal problems, my husband had one piece of advice. “Call my rebbe,” he said. I didn’t do it. What did his rebbe know about the craziness in my life, the binding relationships that should not exist at all? I had my husband call. His rebbe gave me an unexpected heter*.

All right, I said.

A year later, when I was pregnant with our first child, toward the end of my pregnancy I found myself covered with the unspeakably awful rash that some women get while pregnant—they call it PUPP, which probably stands for something specific, but I came up with a different name every time. Perniciously Unpleasant Pregnancy Pustules. Plague of Utterly Putrid Putrescence. And so on. To say it itched would be failing to even hint at the utter collapse of mental balance, the unrelenting misery, the 5 AM hysteria. It was awful. Lotions and showers and oatmeal baths helped some—and it was almost Pesach, with four days of yom tov plus Shabbos.

I called his rebbe. When I got off the phone, an hour later, and showed my husband the list of notes—I could take a hot bath on yom tov, I could knit chol ha’moed—my husband’s mouth fell open in wonder. “The only thing you can’t do when you’re pregnant,” he said, “is play video games on Shabbos.”

I had that baby, after a long and difficult labor. I didn’t get my period back for a year, and then got pregnant and miscarried twice in quick succession. Already well into my thirties, with only one child to show for three pregnancies, I worried. Would I ever have another?

Another month went by with no pink line. And another. The next month, when it was the day to make a hefsek tahara, I knew I had to get it right—the next week we were going to visit my husband’s parents, in a town with no mikva. I wouldn’t come home until well after I’d ovulated. I had to go to the mikva the night before we left, or I would miss the month.

What happened? My daughter, sixteen months old, had a bad day—a cold, a tummyache, I don’t remember. One thing got on top of another and the next thing I knew, it was five minutes past shkia*. I cried.

“You could call my rebbe,” my husband suggested.

I wanted to hit him. Your rebbe can’t turn back the clock or make the sun go back up in the sky! But I called anyway. I explained. There was a long silence. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “I feel terrible.” We talked about fertility, the miscarriages, my worries. Gam tzu l’tova, I kept saying. “A month is gam tzu l’tova*,” he said. “Two years is not.” But I had gotten pregnant three times, carried to term once. It would happen. I got off the phone feeling better, angry at myself but resigned.

A little while later the phone rang. I looked at the caller ID, surprised. “Hello?”

“I thought of something,” he said. “Can you tell me...” and he asked me some questions. I answered them. Pause. “I want to look something up,” he said. “Are you going to be home tonight?”

Throughout the evening, a few times, the phone rang. More questions. More long pauses. Did you look at the toilet paper? How deeply did you wipe? When? What were you thinking? Did you look to see if there was blood? Did you even glance? I answered, he paused, he asked another question. I hung up. An hour later, the phone would ring again.

At almost midnight, the phone rang. I picked it up. “It’s fine,” he said. “You can count day one tomorrow.”

I didn’t know what to say. I’d missed my hefsek tahara. I’d totally forgotten. How could it just...be okay?

”Are you sure?” I asked, immediately feeling like a complete jerk. “I’m so sorry. Of course you’re sure. I just...okay.”

I counted one the next day, and a week later I went to the mikva. And do I even need to tell you what happened next?

He’s seven months old. He has blue eyes and brown hair and smells so good. And he is named for someone who had faith in Hashem and walked into the water, because that’s what Hashem told him to do.

~ Anonymous

Anonymous is a thirty-something mother of a daughter and a son, who is unafraid to walk into the water.

===

* kibud: honor
mesader: short for “mesader kiddushin” – the person who officiates at the wedding ceremony
bracha: blessing
bracha acharona: final blessing (at the wedding ceremony)
chassuna: wedding celebration
heter: halachic dispensation
shkia: sunset
gam tzu l’tova: “There is a reason for everything” (lit. “This is also for good”)

If you're like me, when you started keep TH you had to retrain yourself. Retrain yourself to not look at the toilet paper after you wiped. I can tell you of many occasions when I put myself into niddah earlier than I expected. There's nothing quite like having to figure out how you're going to get that "used" piece of toilet paper home from Yankee Stadium to show to the rov. Oh yeah, I've got room for that in my fanny pack. And definitely, there won't be anything in contact with it inside my fanny pack. Oh Yeah.

Regardless, look at it this way. Now there's a product on the market to help you from discovering those TP shailahs - you've heard of black underwear, you've heard of black panty liners - well now, there's black toilet paper.

Please, I don't care if it doesn't go with your bathroom decor. I don't care if your nosy relatives and guests are going to ask you, "so are you tahor or what?" Just imagine the thrill of being able to wipe and look without having to mentally repeat to yourself, "don't look at the toilet paper, don't look at the toilet paper, don't look at the toilet paper!"

[sarcasm aside, if you've got a private bathroom, why not? and honestly, I don't know what a rov would make of this]

As I mentioned earlier, I recently had to start using a diaphragm because a medication that I'm taking interferes with horemonal birth control. What I didn't mention is that I continued to take the pill at the advice of the nurse practitioner who fitted me for the diaphragm. I gathered that this had something to do with the fact that diaphragms are only 80%-90% effective, and that it isn't a great idea to get pregnant while taking medication. This didn't strike me as an entirely satisfactory explanation, since the drug is class B, which means that I could stop taking it at the first sign of pregnancy with a very low chance of ill effects. I rarely argue with medical experts, however, so I took my two prescriptions -- one for a diaphragm, and one for birth control pills -- and left.

I filled the diaphragm prescription right away, but I still had a pack of birth control pills plus a few extras, so I set the pill prescription aside. I decided to give myself some time to decide whether to keep taking the pill, and maybe get a second opinion from my GP. So I put off filling the prescription until the last minute, and then I couldn't find it, and then I ran out of pills and it was Friday afternoon and I decided, to hell with it, I had a diaphragm anyway.

That was my first act of idiocy. My second was ignoring Avigayil's advice and looking at the diaphragm when I took it out yesterday morning. There was blood on it -- real blood this time. I emailed the new rabbi (more on her later) and quickly filled my prescription, but it was to late. I am still bleeding, so in accordance with her instructions I will have to consider myself niddah, barely a week after my last mikvah visit.

I couldn't bear to tell my husband that these seven extra days of celibacy are my fault for going off the pill in the middle of the month, so I told him that the spotting was probably the result of the new meds interfering with the pill. Now I feel doubly crappy -- I never lie to my husband. Maybe I'll tell him the truth when he comes home. Or maybe he'll read this post. Either way, it won't make the situation any better.

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!

This raises an interesting question: (comment copied from here)

Kelloggs wrote:

BTW, color isn't the only area in the laws of TH that one might think is predetermined and yet sometimes rabbis find ways to be lenient anyway. I once forgot on day 7 (DAY 7!!!!) to do my bedikah until 5 minutes after shkiah (you can imagine the feeling - after doing mikvah prep I suddenly realize OH CRAP!), did the bedikah just in case, and then called a yoetzet. She was extremely sympathetic and said she'd call a rabbi to confirm, but basically told me there wasn't much hope. Well, she called me back 5 minutes later to say the rabbi she'd spoken to said it was okay, and she thought it was a combination of my having done it so close to shkiah and because for other reasons I wasn't going to be able to go the next night either, so saying "no mikvah" that night would mean 2 extra days of niddah. The point is, here's something that someone intenseley trained in the laws of niddah (the yoetzet) thought was pretty open-and-shut but because of the human consequences here, the rabbi went out of his way to find a way to be lenient.

Which brought to mind something very important that I learned from my Kallah teacher. Not specifically about the 7th day, but in general, she told me to make sure we had at least one accurate clock in the house at all times and that if I "missed" shkiah, to make a bedikah anyway, because as long as it was within 9 minutes of sunset, b'dieved it counted as the previous day!

I have a confession to make: I show my questionable bedikot to my father. As I alluded to in my comment to this post, my father is my Local Orthodox Rabbi. Throughout my life I have asked him questions that run the full gamut of Halakha. Why should this change once I got married and had a few more questions?

To be sure, it wasn’t so simple. I remember the first time I had a question. My husband’s Rabbi does not leave near us, so we decided that it would be most convenient to show it to my father who lives in our neighborhood. I walked into my parents' house with my bedikah cloth in my jacket pocket and went straight to my mother.

Me: “Um, Mom? I have a niddah question. Well, it’s actually not so much a question as it is a cloth. Do you think it would be weird if I showed to Abba?”

Mom: “No! He looks at these all the time. It is just a color on a white background to him. It’s no big deal.”

So off I went to show my father. He took it from me, asked me what part of my Shiva Nekiim it was from, and opened the front door to look at it in the light. He squinted, changed angles and squinted again, then pronounced “No good.” (This is the only time he has told me a bedikah is bad, by the way.)

And so our Rabbi-Questioner relationship was further cemented. I will admit it was awkward. And I will further admit that it has not gotten less awkward over the years. Yet, I am happy with our arrangement.

For one, you cannot beat the convenience. We live five minutes apart. I know where to reach him at all times, and he will pick up my calls even when he won’t answer yours. I will never go through the experience of dropping off a bedikah cloth through the mail slot only to find out that the Rabbi is on vacation for three weeks. My father was once away and I had cloth that needed to be looked at, so my husband brought it to another local Rabbi. It took him 2 ½ days to get back to me! He had no idea whether or not I was waiting to go to the mikvah. I cannot imagine going through that on a semi-regular basis.

More importantly, I have proven to myself that I am committed to Taharat ha-Mishpacha as a halakhic entity. Though I understand that it is difficult for any woman to become accustomed to showing her bodily secretions to a strange man, most would admit that there is an added discomfort in showing it to one’s father. Yet, by showing my bedikah cloths to my father I have shown myself that no matter how I may personally feel about it, Halakha is Halakha and to a large extent exists separately from my daily fears and anxieties. It is this great abstract body where the average person cannot distinguish between brown and red and all of that has absolutely nothing to do with your daughter’s sex life. It emphasizes for me that not only am I committed to this particular detail, I am committed to the entire enterprise of Taharat ha-Mishpacha, and by extension, the rest of Halakha as well. And besides, once you’ve shown a bedikah to your father you can show it to anyone.

Our dear friend RenReb (I hope I'm not being presumptuous, because she never actually said she wanted to be my friend.) has posted an exhaustive article on bedikos, in two parts: "A slight "oops," plus "Bedikot Part I: Definitions and clarifications" and Bedikot Part II: Love of grossness, and a grossness of love

She does an excellent job. The part that made me giggle, though was the scenario I imagined after reading this:

It so happens, for example, that my husband thinks I'm an immature ninny for being grossed out by bedikot. He has never been grossed out by a bedikah. He doesn't see "vaginal secretions" on the cloth at all; he just sees a color, perhaps an ambiguous color, that needs his clarification. The fact that the color is a vaginal secretion doesn't even come back to haunt him later. He wasn't even grossed out when he received his training, and had to, among other things, spend some quality time with a big ol' scrapbook full of bedikot that were done by actual women. I never got to see such a book myself, but being an immature ninny, I squealed my little head off when my hubby told me about it, and he promptly rolled his eyes at me and changed the subject.

What jumped into my head was the following conversation between a husband and wife after the husband returns from showing his wife's bedikah to their Rav.
Wife: Honey, what did the Rav say?
Husband: Umm, he said it was fine. But, umm, he wants to keep it for his scrapbook.
Wife: HE WANTS TO WHAT?
Husband: He asked if he could keep it for his scrapbook.
Wife: HE ASKED WHAT?
Husband: He asked if he could keep it for his scrapbook.
Wife: The Rav collects bedikot? What kind of crazy person collects bedikot? Tell him to collect his own wife's bedikot! This is the person we want for our Rav? He actually has a scrapbook of bedikot?
Husband: Well, yeah, but he wouldn't put your name next to it or anything.
WIfe: Great. Well, there's a load off my shoulders. Why does he collect bedikot? Don't you think that's kind of, I don't know, creepy? Even from the Rav?
Husband: I think it's for training other Ravs. you know, they have to learn from something!
Wife: Oh. (long pause) Well, I'm not sure I want anyone learning from mine!

This post by Renegade Rebbetzin (a sequel to this post) is quite eye-opening as to what it might be like to be the recipient of all those bedikah cloths.

It's also -- much as I feel bad for the Rebbetzin -- probably the funniest post about bedikahs ever. For the full giggle, be sure to read the comments too.

Thank you all for your comments and responses to my last posting. We weren't staying in a hotel, so the pillowcase wasn't an option, although I'd have never thought of that myself. And there were no stores around, so buying hankies wasn't possible. And a good point was brought up by Shira, about starting the 7 days without a hefsek. I'll have to ask about that.

Another thing I never would have thought of was this, from Renegade Rebbetzin. Scroll down to "RenReb goings-on of late" number 8.

RenReb rocks.

I have to say, I don't think I could ever bring myself to use a t-shirt out of the hamper. But then again, I'm a pretty big wuss.

The bedikah cloth. Don't leave home without it.

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, the Academy, you know, all of that. I am certainly grateful: I do thank all those people.

But I'm also ticked off. This after I got to mikvah a day late last month, and then my cycle ended abruptly on Day 26, leaving me only about 10 days to be with my husband. And the upcoming month is probably our last chance to be together for a good long time, because from what I hear, sex pretty much goes out the window once you're doing IVF. I had a lot riding this month on getting to mikvah as early as possible.

Maybe it was the progesterone I was taking after my last treatment? I don't know. I've been told your period can be heavier afterward, because the progesterone's function is to support your uterine lining building up, so the result is there's more lining to shed than usual. But I'm not sure heavier is supposed to translate into longer. And it's not like this doesn't happen sometimes on a completely unmedicated cycle, too. In fact this period was a lot like the one on Pesach - I chalked that one up to my polyp, but the polyp has been removed.

I don't know what the lesson is supposed to be: learning that it's not under my control? I would think that lesson has been pretty well hammered in through years of infertility. I don't think there is a lesson here, only a challenge. A series of challenges. And right now the challenge is: keeping a lid on my blood pressure.

Well, I went searching, because comments on this had me curious.

In short, no one had heard of the custom I thought I remembered being taught, that of wearing white underwear on vestos (anticipatory days).

The sefer I looked in was Rabbi Binyomin Forst's "The Laws of Niddah." I found nothing in the many chapters on vestos, so I finally looked under kesems with regards to colored underwear. Interestingly, I found this in the footnotes, on page 208 of volume 1:

27. Rambam writes that Chazal established that a woman should wear colored garments. Kesef Mishnah and Beis Yosef 190 note that the Talmud (Niddah 61b) seems to indicate that a woman may wear, not should wear colored garments. Rema 190:10 seems to follow Rambam's opinion that women should wear colored garments. However, Toras HaShelamim para14 explains that Rema merely advises that a woman wear colored garments to prevent kesamim problems. Chochmas Adam 113:9 and Chasam Sofer, Y.D. 161 seem to follow Toras HaShelamim's approach.

and, more to the point:

31. See Pischei Teshuvah para22, citing Amudei Kesef. Amudei Kesef also writes that a woman should not wear colored garments on her "niddah days." His intent is unclear. Badei HaShulchan (Tziyunim 190:205) interprets this to mean her expected vest day. Thus, a woman is required to don white during the days that she expects her period. Igros Moshe also suggests that a woman wear white during her vest day as a means of effecting a constant bedikah. However, since all other authorities make no mention of this halacha which relates to all women, they seem to disagree.

Which seems to say to me, that while I didn't necessarily make it up, it doesn't seem to be halacha l'maaseh and is certainly not obligatory on anyone who doesn't currently hold by this custom. Oh, and I also submitted a question on this topic to Nishmat... I'll try to post their answer here as well.

I have a hard time taking onot seriously. I'm glad eden does even though it caused her a major head- and heartache this time.

Not that we don't separate on them, not that I don't observe them, umm, religiously, wear white underwear and do the required number of bedikos.

Which reminds me, I'm not exactly clear on what the exact number of required bedikos is! My period is irregular enough that we do keep the "or zarua's onah" (ie the day or night before), so I'm counting out the 30th day, night and day; the 31st day, night and day; the date of the Hebrew month, day or night (based on when my last period started) and the night or day previous; and the interval, day or night and the previous night or day. That's a lot of days to keep track of! At least I'm not also carrying through intervals (haflagas) that haven't passed... that was too complicated for me to deal with! And my Kallah teacher never mentioned it, Baruch Hash-m! (Thank G-d!)

The Lubavitch custom seems to be one bedikah during the onah ("around the time you got your period") while the Ashkenaz custom is (I think!) one after the onah is over before resuming relations. Do I have that right? I generally do both, at least one during the onah, and definitely the one after.

The reason I can't take them too seriously, though, is that in many years of marriage, I've actually gotten my period on an onah, umm, once? maybe? That might have been the month I counted wrong and we separated what was supposed to be a day too early. I've become niddah the day before an onah, the day between the onahs, one or more days after one... but rarely (if ever) on it. So what exactly is the point of keeping all those "anticipatory" days?

I can't believe this happened.

I would link to this post and point out the amusing irony, except that it's not funny and I'm shaking, not laughing.

I sat down and figured out the days we needed to separate this month, then put away the calendar. We went to my parents for Shabbat. When we got home on Sunday afternoon I didn't check the calendar, thinking I was sure I remembered we didn't have to separate until Monday morning; it couldn't have been Sunday morning, or I would have packed my bedikah cloths. Right? Right. Knowing that it was probably our last chance for this month, we made love on Sunday night.

Monday morning I checked the notebook, just to confirm it was the day I should do a bedikah. It was.

But so was Sunday.

Both were daytime onot, so they expired after sunset (we do not keep the onah-before custom), and technically we would have been allowed to have relations on the night in between, if my bedikot from during the day were clean. But I never made a bedikah before we went to bed.

I had a vague memory that the Yoatzot site said something about it not being a problem if you forgot the bedikot on one kind of onah, so I looked it up, hoping it's the onah beinonit because that's what Sunday was. But of course, it's the other two kinds.

I was a wreck before I did the bedikah Monday morning, afraid it would show I was bleeding and could very well have been Sunday night too. But it was clear. Thank Gd.

My kallah teacher promised us that hilchot niddah had so many protective stringencies, we would never even come close to violating an issur karet. I found it immensely reassuring. What happened to that?

My goodness, look at all the rebukes to this old request for an online niddah posek! Four in a row, with increasingly admonitory tone. It just goes to show you, I think, that many men have no idea how uncomfortable asking questions can be for a woman.

Yes, we do what we need to do for the sake of keeping the halacha, and yes, the rabbis are only in this l'sheym shamayim (for the sake of Heaven), and ok, in the end we get over it and it's fine. But it's not like it comes naturally! There's no need to lecture us about it.

It took a little while for others to pipe up that an online system for asking niddah questions already existed. It has one of the limitations the naysayers pointed out, namely, a stain does have to be physically seen by someone. But the concept on the whole is quite workable, the value should be obvious to anyone browsing the site, and there was no need to scoff so much.

And it's no coincidence it was created with female consultants, not male. Presumably, many of the same women who are uncomfortable asking a rabbi face to face, would also be more comfortable asking a woman than a man. Whoever came up with the concept, clearly gets it.

Besides, even if such a thing didn't exist, I think they've misunderstood as well as misjudged the question. It's one thing if you know your rabbi in a rabbi-congregant sort of way; it's another altogether if you socialize with him regularly. Or how about if you've married into his family? I wouldn't want to send someone my underwear and then have dinner with him that evening. There are certainly arguments for going to someone you don't know quite that well.

Grrrrr. I assume they meant well, but it ticks me off.

I'll save my thoughts on the whole not-looking-at-toilet-paper thing for another time, but for now I want to comment briefly on this question and answer from the Yoatzot site:

If you are ashkenazi, and wiped yourself immediately after urinating, you are considered niddah - unless you have a cut or sore in the area that may have been opened or scratched as a result of relations. If you are sephardi, then you are tehorah even if you wiped immediately.

Does that strike anyone else as utterly absurd? I mean, I understand that there are differences between Ashkenazim (loosely, Jews of Eastern European and German origin) and Sefardim (loosely, Jews of Spainish, Moroccan, or Middle Eastern origin) when it comes to stuff like harchakot, chatzitzot, number of dunks, etc. But something so weighty as whether a woman is or is not niddah?? Not even, "If you are X you are niddah and if you are Y you need to ask a more specific question." Same circumstances, polar opposite halachic outcome.

I know there are situations like this in other areas of halacha (such as women saying brachot on certain mitzvot), but it still seems so jarring to me, almost wrong. We Jews are already divided along so many other lines - denominational, political, philosophical. Must we still cling to a divison based not even on our present geographical location, but merely on the homes of our husbands' fathers' fathers?

Confusion... so often I find myself completely comfortable in all my thoughts on Taharat Hamishpacha only to find myself totally and utterly bewildered the next month.

My current niddah is the first cycle I've had since my surgery 2 months ago. Everything was going fine and my husband was actually really excited that I was able to start a cycle on my own (seriously, I think it might have been the first time ever recorded where a husband literally jumped up and down for joy at the announcement that his wife got her period), then it came to the 5th day and time to do the first inspection. Only I was still bleeding, and not just trickle blood, bright red blood. I thought this probably was normal because it had been a while since my uterus had emptied out. So the next day I tried for a hefsek and got one clean. I put in the moch and then had to run to the store to get ingredients to start challah before it got too late. Maybe it was the irritation from running around, but I ended up having a shailah on my moch dachuk. So I set it out to send to our Rav. The next day the morning bedikah was fine, which was a relief. But that night my evening bedikah looked a little odd, so I set it out as a shailah too and started to get nervous.

You see, every shailah I ever send into my Rav always comes back no good. The only time I have ever gotten a positive result was when I sent it to a Rav in another city one month when my Rav was not in town.

Sure enough my Rav told my husband that both bedikahs were no good. At that point I already had another shailah to send in, which (if negative) would push my mikvah day back to day 15, not day 12. Since this might be the first time ever in my life that I might actually ovulate on my own, being three days late is very upsetting. I started thinking that perhaps the reason all of a sudden I'm having so many questionable bedikahs was because of my surgery. Perhaps what I was seeing was residue not necessarily from the uterus. I expressed my concerns to my Rav before sending in the last bedikah. He said he would look at the next shailah and then if it is still negative he was going to send all three to anther Rav with more experience in women with surgical issues. It was negative, so he sent them away.

Relief, right? Wrong. Yesterday I sent an e-mail to my Rav saying that today was the original day that I was supposed to go to the mikvah and I am eagerly waiting to hear what the other Rav has to say. He wrote back saying that he is sorry if I had my hopes up, but his decision that the bedikahs are no good still stands, he is waiting to hear back from the other Rav on the basis of a diagnosis if something else is wrong. Diagnosis???? I thought I was getting a second opinion. The last bedikah did not look like blood to me so I was hoping to at least be able to go to the mikvah tomorrow night (only two days late) instead of Shabbos (three days late).

Maybe this is the result of the frustration of going through so much infertility treatments, but it is really difficult to take no on shailahs when so much is at stake, especially if they actually look promising. Is it this frustration that is blinding me into being upset, or should I be worried that every shailah is always negative?

(for part one of this misadventure, see stupid bedikah tricks)

It turns out my usual rabbi did get my bedikah, look at it, and pronounce it okay; he just forgot to call me and say so.

Or at least that's what I think happened. The fill-in rabbi (hereafter FIR) was tracked down by my husband's chosson teacher before I even got through, so he already knew the details. When I called FIR, he said the usual rabbi (hereafter UR) had assured him all the shaylahs from the day he left were okay, but he might have also said there could be someone he forgot to call back. I pointed out that I had not dropped off my shaylah the day UR left, but two days before that. FIR said he would check whether UR had been talking about me. I gave FIR the phone number I'd written on the envelope for UR, in case that made it any easier to check.

When I called FIR back, all he said was "It's okay." And where normally I would have obsessively double-checked, "Both of the things in the envelope were okay?" believe me, I did not ask aaaaaaaany follow-up questions after that.

The anonymous shaylah system is a little crazy in terms of its potential for things (or people) to fall through the cracks, but I must say, I am rather impressed at how quickly everyone swung into action when they realized it had gone wrong. FIR apologized several times for the trouble, too, when it wasn't his fault at all.

I just wish there hadn't needed to be quite so many everyones...

So last night was my fifth day, and I usually try to make Hefsek Tahara on that day. But things were upside down in my house with a new cleaning lady, my husband home (not usually home thursday nights), and my best friend arrived from out of town. Things were a little hectic to say the least. Candle lighting in NYC is 8:13 this week, which means shkiah is 8:31. I realized at 8:28 that I hadn't made hefsek tahara yet (in the middle of eating pizza no less). So I ran to the bathroom and started trying. Problems, problems, problems. Finally, at the last second I thought one was almost close enough to "clean enough", and then just shoved a bedikah in and left it there as moch dochuk. And then I went about my merry way.

At about 9:00 I realized that I never officially had a "hefsek tahara". Because I didn't have a previous bedika that was perfectly clean, all I had was technically a moch dochuk. And in my mind I never said this is hefsek tahara and this is moch dochuk. I was so frazzled that I forgot how you're supposed to do it!!!!

AAAARGHHH. Hashem had a sense of humour. I reached the Rov on the first try (a miracle in itself). But alas, as they say I was BOL (bedikah out of Luck). The moch dochuk can not count as the hefsek tahara! The hefsek is halacha, the moch dochuk is din. So you can have hefsek tahara without a moch dochuk, but you can't have a moch dochuk without a hefsek tahara. And trust me I tried to wheedle him into giving me some sort of heter, you know it's crazy in my house, and now this means I will have to immerse on shabbos, isn't that a problem? And, G-d bless the Rov, he said he was sorry, the halacha stood as is, and that in the future I should set an alarm clock for candlelighting time so that I don't get stuck again (and of course I explained to him that I usually do it at that time, but again things were a bit upside down in my house).

So I will try again to make hefsek tahara this afternoon/tonight, BUT my husband is away for shabbos, and I have a house full of guests! And of course, if there is a problem with the moch dochuk, I will have to make a second hefsek tahara at the end of shabbos just in case friday's is no good. (This is because there is no eiruv between our house and the Rov's.) G-d help me!

I don't know why I do this but once in a rare while I forget to call the rabbi before I bring a shaylah over. You can't tell whether he's there or not once you get there, you just put the envelope through his mail slot. He calls you whenever he comes home and picks it up.

Invariably the one time I forget to call, he's out of town for a week. Because it sometimes takes a day even under normal circumstances, I don't know this for sure until at least 2 days go by and I haven't heard from him.

The first time this happened we had to call my husband's chosson teacher and ask him for help, and he had to get the keys to the rabbi's house, retrieve the bedikah, and give it back to us, so we could then bring it over to the OTHER dayan's house and he could rule on it. Oy. It was several years ago and I sort of hope everyone concerned has forgotten by now, but I doubt it.

The second time I wasn't even sure my rabbi was away until the other rabbi called me instead. It turns out my rabbi had asked the other one to pick up any shaylahs while he was away. Handy solution, right? Maybe that's why I stopped worrying about whether anyone was going to be home.

So this time a few days go by, and we start to think maybe the rabbi has gone away again. Summertime, that would make sense. My husband calls his chosson teacher: yep, he's away... but the other rabbi is filling in for him. Eh?? Further conversation elicits the fact that when I dropped off my shaylah, my own rabbi was actually still in town. Wha????

No one knows where my shaylah is. The second rabbi is supposedly on call, but his phone just rings. The chosson teacher has been called at all the numbers we could find for him. And I still don't know what we're going to do when we reach somebody; what happens if they just can't find it?

And of course it was my hefsek tahara, not one of the dispensable ones...

Here's another thing I didn't anticipate about mikvah night falling on Shabbos, three months in a row: not getting to stock up on bedikah cloths! I was down to the hard scratchy ones I had never even opened, once they started selling the "extra soft" kind. (I guess this is the equivalent of that pair of underwear you wouldn't be caught dead in, except you forgot to do the laundry again?)

Actually, with the heter I have to do only three bedikot (hefsek tahara, one on the first day, and one on the last) it's probably been an even longer time than I realize since I bought a new package. It ends up being more than three, because it takes me a few tries to get a clean hefsek tahara, but still.

This month mikvah night was, thankfully, on a Thursday. I came home with a package of the T-shirt cloths that I raised my eyebrows at a couple of years ago like a suspicious old lady. (What is this newfangled nonsense you want me to try? Are you sure they work?) And they are SO SOFT. They make my "extra soft" ones seem like a joke. Why was I denying myself, all this time?

Well, I know why. I've put off buying new ones until the last possible moment in the semi-unconscious hope that I wouldn't need to buy more. Because I'd be pregnant.

And psychologically, it's been worth it. But at this point, I have to, and I'm going to take my creature comforts and enjoy them. Actually, I'm considering upgrading my mikvah prep tools to really nice things too. Spa quality. I want to think happy thoughts when I take out that little bag.

It's time for some retail therapy.

I had such a hard time this month.

Most of the time consulting with rabbis is uncomfortable, but not overly so, right? The rabbis go out of their way to make it as painless as they can: you can drop off a bedikah cloth in an envelope, leave your phone number instead of a name, and never have to make face-to-face contact. When you talk to them on the phone, they make sure to respond seriously to your questions no matter how silly, to be matter-of-fact no matter how embarrassed you are. As much as such an invasive thing can be, it's usually a pleasure.

But then there are the encounters that leave you shaking and upset, the ones that make you never want to do this again. Sometimes it's extreme, like the rabbi who failed to recognize that I was developing an anxiety disorder about taharat hamishpacha, and instead got annoyed and abandoned me in the middle of mikvah night. Sometimes it's as trifling as a rabbi who presumes more than he knows, and tells you more than you asked.

As you already know, I was still bleeding bright red on Day 5. I had tried a hefsek tahara that morning, which was pronounced kosher by my own rabbi (much good that did me.) Of course I had to start over the next day. I think I made two hefseks, one in the morning and one in the afternoon; both still had some red in them. The next morning was Friday, Day 7, and we were going out of town for Yom Tov. I decided to wait as long as possible to increase the chances that I would have stopped bleeding by then. But I was seeing brown streaks when I wiped, and was getting increasingly nervous. The last thing I wanted to do was have a shaylah over Yom Tov, without having contacted anyone in advance that I could ask.

I psyched myself up to call the local rabbi when I got there. Wanting to impress upon him that I was probably going to miss my ovulation day if this kept up, I started by saying "This is the second or third day that I've been trying, and-" He interrupted, "Let me stop you right there.

If you've been trying for two or three days, the best thing is probably to stop. More bedikot are only going to irritate you and aggravate whatever's going on. Just wait until it stops."

Huh?

I knew what he was referring to; I have certainly irritated myself towards the end of shiva neki'im, what with doing so many bedikot, and for that reason (among others) I've been given a heter to do fewer of them. But that wasn't what was going on here at all. This wasn't a scratch, it was a period that just wasn't over yet. "I really think it's stopping," I said. "I'm only going to try once today. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work."

"Oh. In that case, if it's old blood that's coming out, the best thing to do is try a douche. Of course you're cutting it close, it's almost yom tov and you need to wait a couple of hours after douching before you make another hefsek..." I tuned the rest of this out because I was too busy thinking, Huh? and No way!!

First of all, running out to the store to find a douche right before Yom Tov, then figuring out how to use it for the first time? No thank you. But more importantly, there's a reason it would be my first time. Some rabbis recommend douching, but others (including my own rabbi) warn that you can disturb the chemical balance in the vagina. This part of the body is designed to clean itself, and it doesn't particularly like artificial cleansing. I'm sure other people have good luck with this method, but me, I haven't had a yeast infection or any other in all the time I've been married, and I'd just as soon leave well enough alone.

I tried to bring things back on track. "OK, but if I do try a hefsek and I have a shaylah, can I bring it to show you on Yom Tov?" He said yes. All right. Phew. That was all I wanted to know, you know?

I respect this rabbi's vast knowledge and his many years of experience very much. But I am not a newlywed or a child, and I know my own body better than someone who has never met me before. And yet it took a great deal of effort to remind myself of this, to resist the impulse to bow to his guidance and get off the phone. Why would it possibly be a good idea to cut someone off the very first time they talk to you, and assume you already know what they're talking about?

Things went from bad to worse the next day, when somehow "any time is good" turned into knocking on his door in vain every two hours all afternoon, finally culminating in just desperately waiting on his porch in the hopes that he was either out or asleep, and would have to come in/out of the house on his way to mincha. By the time I caught him I was in a complete state. Not to mention that this encounter had to be in person, given that there was no way for him to call me, and I somehow ended up touching his hand while trying to show him which was the hefsek and which was the first bedikah, and... did I mention ugh?

He was trying to be so nice. Even his wife was trying to be so nice. I don't mean to blame him; I suppose it was just a mismatch of personalities. And I'm sure he wasn't at his best on the phone, rushing around two hours before Yom Tov; it was kind of him even to speak to me then. But these things matter, and even for someone committed like me, they color my experience of taharat hamishpacha and how I feel about the whole month so much - I can only imagine what effect it would have on someone who was trying to decide whether she wanted to keep these laws.

So far the one good thing that's happened this month is that I remembered to make an appointment in advance for my Friday night tevilah. (My third time in a row! I learn slow, but I do learn!) But despite the rabbi pronouncing my hefsek kosher that day, I'm almost surely going to ovulate before mikvah; in fact, judging by my usual symptoms I bet it's happening tomorrow. And as you also already know, I find Friday night tevilot especially difficult.

Who was it who said the month of their worst mikvah experience, they got pregnant? I don't normally put stock in things like that. But if any of you can make that come true? I will GLADLY accept. :)

More than once, as I'm about to be seduced, I've looked down and seen the first few drops of blood.

Only a few times, but definitely more than once.

Even more often, I've looked at my calendar, counted the days, set my heart on one last time for the month, and then something has come up. One of us is too tired, one of us doesn't feel well, a delay or distraction or deadline comes up that night... somehow we're prevented. Each time something different; I never see the pattern while it's happening. Inevitably I storm and cry about it. Partly because I'm especially shaky about separation just before it happens, partly because I'm hormonally off balance from the approaching period.

But a couple of hours later, wouldn't you know it: I'm bleeding early.

I've wondered why this happens to me every so often, and whether it happens to others. I think it's partly because I'm irregular by up to a week, so that sometimes my halachic separation days are spread a day or three or five apart. And maybe I push my luck, planning to be intimate with my husband on those intervening days, when really I might get my period at any time.

When I was first married I called the rabbi in a panic one night because my separation time had been during the day, and my last bedikah before nightfall was questionable. He said, I can't look at it now. We have to wait until tomorrow morning when it's light out. I wailed, but I thought we had one more night, I told my husband we would! He said, gently, this is what I advise all couples to do: sit down with the calendar together. Not right after you come home from mikvah, make it a few days later. Figure out what is your last completely safe day, before any of your separation days start. Make sure to be together on that day. After that, give up on the rest of the month, until you know whether you've gotten your period or you're pregnant. It will save you a lot of emotional turmoil in the end.

I was horrified, and did my best to forget I'd ever heard that. But I've been married a lot longer, and while I could see the wisdom even then, I am better able to tolerate the idea now. I try to do this a lot of the time. And still, even when I do, I sometimes get caught short. So incredibly short.

Each time it happens, I think to myself: what if all the frustrating delays, the obstacles, the inexplicable urge to glance down at the pajamas or sheets at the last instant, is really Gd trying to protect you from something far worse?

Well, it wasn’t quite. But it was a closed, cloistered, ultra-frum neighborhood in Jerusalem, and I was only visiting. We were pretty much newly weds, and this whole mikvah thing still felt awkward.

Our had trip started with a bang as well – the first morning, jetlagged and exhausted, we were awakened (in bed, together) by the maid who was used to cleaning rooms by 8:00 am. I was horrified; so was she. My husband wasn’t quite conscious enough to notice.

Then, later in the trip, I had a sheilah on a bedikah cloth, and we didn’t know who to ask for a name, so my husband dialed our Rabbi in the States from memory – and got the wrong number, but someone else in our community, who recognized his voice – so he took advantage of the situation (there I was, cringing), and just asked for the number directly. (OK, he didn’t *say* it was for a niddah sheilah, but they knew we were in Israel, and to my mind, why else would he call from overseas?!)

Which eventually got us a Rav (an American, at least), whom my husband visited, . . . and came back long after, having schmoozed halacha while he was there. I was wound tighter than a spring. In any case, I needed to use the mikvah after Shabbos.

We were visiting a friend of mine that Shabbos, sleeping in her neighbor’s empty apartment and eating meals with them, so it seemed to make more sense to use a mikvah in her neighborhood than to go searching near our hotel. I felt awkward asking her directly, so before Shabbos, I had my husband call the Rav who had answered the sheilah for an address and directions.

The entrance was a non-descript, unmarked door at the rear of a building. The directions weren’t TOO bad, but it was behind a narrow alley between the mikvah building itself (maybe the front was a shul?) and some other building, and I wandered around for probably 10 minutes in the dark before deciding that must be it. At least I had been warned by my kallah teacher to ALWAYS bring my own preparation stuff on trips, as “you never know”. I could barely understand the attendant’s Hebrew, there was a wait, and I was very conscious that my dear husband was sitting by a bus stop with his gemara and our overnight bag; I couldn’t not say goodbye to my friend, so we had packed up and “left” first.

I finally got a room, prepared, rang for the attendant, and got to feel like I was a misbehaving child; the attendant (a different one) came into the prep room, looked at my hands, and without a word – except tsk, tsk - immediately took a pair of nail scissors to my hands – I was horrified, embarrassed, furious, and scared that she’d cut me! When she was finished (at least (?) she filed them after), I had NO nails to speak of. And no real interest in mikvah anymore. At least not there.

I went, though. And we went back to our hotel, and I cried in my husband’s arms until I had gotten it all out of my system.

Several weeks later, I discovered I was expecting.

~ Michal

Michal is an Orthodox woman, "over 30," living in a fairly large city with a reasonably cozy Orthodox Jewish population

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 hormones run rampant in my system. Then again, I might have spotting at 14 days, right after getting to mikvah, necessating my starting all over again as niddah (yes, I did ask a shaylah that time!) after just one night together, or extended spotting before and/or after a "real" period, making the time we're apart longer than the minimum 12 days, and often a day or two past 14 as well.

So when I hadn't had a period yet and it was day 35, I wasn't so concerned. I didn't even run right out and buy a pregnancy test. However, I did start spotting... or did I? Something triggered my doing a bedikah. I don't remember exactly what, but it was probably similar to Michaela's situation, some sort of unidentified dark discharge on dark underwear. I should have left well enough alone. Anyway, the bedikah wasn't clear. If I remember right, it was dark yellow and mucousy with dark brown streaks. Pretty gross, actually. So I figured my period was about to start, and stupidly tossed the bedikah cloth.

I told my husband I wasn't niddah yet, but probably would be soon. We slept in separate beds, and curtailed most casual touching, but still handed things between us. Days passed. The spotting didn't turn into a period. It disappeared, then I would notice a little brown streaked mucous again, then nothing. Now I was really upset I had tossed the bedikah... I didn't have it to ask about! Anyway, a full 10 days later, I actually started a real period. And I had more spotting than usual afterwards too, and more difficulty getting that hefsek taharah than I had ever had before, (not counting post-partum) making mikvah day not day 12 after my actual period started, not day 14, but day 20! Which was a full month from that initial spotting.

That was a hard lesson in "save questionable bedikos" so that you can actually ask a question if it turns out you have one!

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 dark brown that could be problematic. So...we slept on separate beds, but in the morning we still exchanged a brief kiss. I did another bedikah (don't ask me why, since there was no reason to do so that I can see) and it was just as confusing as the one from last night. The spotting was practically nonexistent during the day, and we hugged a couple of times, though we did nothing more than that. At no point did I say to mysef or to my husband, "I am niddah." Shabbat is over and I'm still getting only little bits of brown dribbles. If I hadn't done those bedikot, I coud probably conclusively say that I'm not niddah...but I did them, they're there, and I have to deal with this in-between-ness now.

I don't generally bring T"H shailot to the rabbi of our shul; I've heard through the grapevine that he's not the best person to go to with those things, and besides I prefer to keep this area of my life separate from my shul life in general. We are privileged to live in a community where that separation is possible (multiple rabbis in our city), but of course the rabbi I usually go to with these questions was not easily reachable on Shabbat. I couldn't get in touch with him shortly after Shabbat this evening either (I don't have his home number....hmmm....maybe time for a new T"H rabbi?) so I'm still unsure of my status. And mad at myself for (what feels like) squandering my ast few days of not being niddah. And frustrated with my indecisive uterus.

UPDATE as of Sunday noon-ish: Asked a shaila. I'm not niddah. I shouldn't have done the bedikot, but they were OK anyway. Got a bit of conversation out of it too, some of which I appreciated (explaining why the bedikot were OK) and some of which I smiled politely at (stories about women who were told by their doctors they couldn't conceive and then did, stuff about Chana's prayers being answered, etc.). I truly appreciate that he took the time to sit with me and that he was trying to make me feel better, but really all I wanted to do was run back out to the car and kiss my husband.

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, it’s not too late. Thanks for calling. She’s right here.” I take the phone. The soft, soothing voice of my niddah rabbi on the other end. “Mrs. X? I’m not sure what the shaelah is.”

So I tell him that the last three periods have been weird, but he knows this already because I’ve called him so many times, dropped off stained underwear and not-quite-clean bedikahs, waited for the verdict, which was always that they were fine, I could keep counting, hold my mikvah date, wouldn’t have to delay our separation any longer.

Until tonight.

I tell him about the four days of dark spotting at the beginning. He remembers from my phone call asking whether I was officially a niddah. I tell him about my four days of bright red heavy flow, how I’ve never had that many before. I started craving meat and bought chopped liver for Shabbat lunch because my iron was so low. I tell him how I tried on day five, laughing all the while, to get a clean hefsek, but there was no way that was happening, and I tell him how on day six, erev Shabbat, I didn’t even bother because the bleeding was so heavy. Then I tell him about how I tried again on Shabbat, and I surprised even myself by getting a clean hefsek, and I tell him how later that night, the blood was back again and bright red, and that’s my question, that’s what he’s looking at on the pad that I stuffed in an envelope for his scrutiny.

The rabbi is quiet. He is thinking, maybe he is trying to find a way to make it not niddah. “It IS red,” he says. It’s the first time in nearly five years of marriage that he’s told me I had to start all over again, that I couldn’t keep counting down to the day when I could embrace my husband after the peace of the mikvah waters. He is quiet when he says, “Maybe you should go to your doctor, Mrs. X. I don’t want it to be fibroids or something.”

I’d heard urban legends of niddah-expert rabbis catching cysts, cancer, and other conditions from simply looking at a stain and talking with a woman, but this was my first time experiencing it. He repeated what my midwife had said when I called her, panicked, earlier in the week. I felt cold though the furnace churned in the basement.

I hung up the phone and went to my computer, clicked on a search engine, typed in “fibroids.” I had two precious babies upstairs, 19 months apart, whom I had no trouble conceiving, no trouble carrying, no trouble birthing. Would I now face fertility troubles like my sister, my friends, so many people I knew? My husband walked in. “Please,” he pleaded. “Please turn off the computer and go to bed. This won’t help. You’ll just scare yourself.”

I looked at him. Oh how I missed him, and it hadn’t even been that long. We were brazen with our together days, fighting and insisting it’s ok if we don’t hug tonight, we always have tomorrow. I remembered what my kallah teacher had said, niddah sensitizes you to the details of life. I never thought I’d care whether I could pass the salt to him or not, but I do.

I shut down the computer, went upstairs. Moonlight streamed through the cracks in my bamboo shades. I listened for my children’s sweet breathing, saw my husband’s darkened form, banished in his bed against the wall. His body lifted and released. He slept.

The next day, as twilight neared, my hefsek was clear. Clean white. I began counting. Although it was only two days longer that we were apart this time, the week ached as it crept along. I missed my husband. My bed was huge, an empty sea, a lonely raft. Still, I was amazed at how my rabbi, with no medical training, could predict a condition by the strength of his Torah knowledge. I’d been questioning, cynical, stopped covering my hair four months before. I was fed up with people around me meticulously checking lettuce for bugs but trusting their children to unlicensed, dangerous day cares because they were run by Jews. I judged everyone harshly, seeing people walk the legal line of Halachah but ignore its ethical mandates. I wished I could take my niddah questions to a woman, hated having to ask men for permission to keep counting. I kept hitting my head on this glass ceiling. It was everywhere. I didn’t want to be kept in a corner.

But my compassionate rabbi, he knew. It’s eerie how Torah has everything, is all-knowing, far-reaching. Where was God in all this? I hadn’t thought of Him in ages.

The week passed. On Sunday, my husband left on a four-day business trip. That night, with the children tucked into sleep and the babysitter sitting on my couch, it was the first time I went to the mikvah knowing I’d come home to no waiting arms.

There was a line at the reception desk, so many women needing to purify themselves. I paid my money, walked to room 13, took off my clothes and filled the tub. Forty-five minutes later, I descended into the warm water of the mikvah, got to the platform and turned toward the wall. I could hear my breath against the tiles.

Taking a deep breath, I submerged. “Do it again,” she said. No one had ever told me that before.

I focused on the shiny blue of the pristine tiles; the water gulped as I went under. “Go deeper,” she said.

Third time, my hands massaged the warm water, I bent my knees, buried myself in the water’s promise. When I emerged, the mikvah lady announced, “Kosher.”

A second time. “Kosher.” A third time. “Kosher.” Then she stepped out of the room as I had asked her to and left me alone for that minute that I treasure each time, my one chance to contemplate and connect with the Source. “Please,” I whispered to the tiles. “Set me straight. Remind me that You’re here. Help me connect with what is true. Please.” Then I turned, ascended each careful step until the cold air hit my warm, wet body. I burrowed into my robe and returned to the world someone new.

~ Leah

Leah is a 33-year-old ba'alat teshuvah living in the Midwest region of the United States. A follow-up visit with her doctor revealed no medical problems.

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" anymore. This makes me sad; sad on many levels.

It means my baby is growing up. It means that I could get pregnant again, although not really. I don't "do well" when I'm pregnant and it puts a great strain on my marriage. In fact, I would go as far to say that when I'm pregnant I'm a completely different woman - a hormonal, whacked out, emotional nutball.

So after I had this most recent baby, I went to the Rov.

And I asked for a heter.

It was perhaps the hardest thing I've ever asked a rov about. Maybe because it was so deeply personal, maybe because the last time I used birth control I didn't have to ask permission from another person, maybe it was because I would have to admit that I don't know if I can handle three babies under the age of four. It took a lot of tears and a lot of explaining that maybe my marriage would be at risk if I got pregnant again too soon, but in the end he gave me one for a certain amount of time.

Well, that time is up in a few months - and of course, now that I'm not nursing clean I need that heter more than ever. I am terrified that if I get pregnant again I will lose it completely.

I went to the Rov while I was in the seven clean days for a shailah on a stain, and while I was there I asked for an extension of the heter. He gave me another six months.

And so I went to the mikvah, the place from which all the brochas for children come from, and then went home and put in my diaphragm. And for the first time in my life, I went to the mikvah knowing that there was no way a child could result from it. It was a big let down and I felt like why was I even going? There was no way I was going to get pregnant!

It's then when I realized that in some small part of my mind I realized that one of the reasons I married my husband was so I could have children. He is just a means to an end - the goal of having children. Of course that's not the only reason why I married him. But now that goal is gone, at least for the immediate future.

And what's left?

The idea that my self worth is not directly proportional to the number of children I bear and raise. That and the real work - of developing a loving and emotionally healthy husband-wife relationship, a substantial parent-child relationship.

Am I going to feel like my life is futile unless I keep pumping out those babies?

I'm afraid.

I think I’ll get my proverbial “feet wet” with a mikvah story about a friend, rather than myself. I was still a single girl when a good friend told me this story.

She was in her 30s, after being frum for a number of years. She was married for over three years and had been told by a few infertility specialists that she and her husband could never get pregnant without medical assistance (funny how often you hear that). She had been given a heter to only make bedikahs on the first and last day of counting (I don’t recommend this practice unless you absolutely must). The trick to this is that you must remember to make that last bedikah; if you forget you have to start counting all over again. (Just a technical note, this is a complicated matter and you should consult with a Rov and a Kallah Teacher if you have such a heter/practice and if you experience what happens next.)

So here was my friend who had made only her first bedikah, and she and her husband went “out of town” to help friends who were running a Purim Party at a Jewish Old Age home. She was due to make her last bedikah that day and toivel that evening. As everything Jewish goes, the Purim party started late, ran late and they left back to Brooklyn late. Sure enough, they got stuck in traffic, and between the craziness of the day and the traffic she either forgot or couldn’t make the last bedikah before sunset. She called the Rov who told her, unfortunately because she had not made any bedikahs other than the first, she would have to start all over again – i.e. if she had made even one bedikah in the middle she could have started counting seven again from that middle bedikah. But now she would have to start over again.

Devastated and with great mesiras nefesh, she counted again, feeling that now this was a wasted cycle, and that by the time she got to the mikvah it would be too late to get pregnant. Gam tzu la tova she told herself. This time she made sure to make her bedikah on the last day. She went to the mikvah feeling sad and blue. She bathed and prepared herself for the mikvah. When she was ready she rang the desk, and in a few minutes one of the mikvah ladies came to take her to the mikvah. Now this is a busy mikvah with four or five mikvah ladies that split up the days of the week amongst them – you never know which mikvah lady you will get on any given day. The mikvah lady, who hadn’t seen my friend in some time said, “I haven’t seen you in such a long time! Do you get a mazel tov? Did you have a baby?” Now I’m sure the mikvah lady had the best of intentions, but this just pushed my friend over the edge.

She began to cry and couldn’t stop. She explained that no, she wasn’t pregnant yet. The mikvah lady apologized, but my friend couldn’t stop crying. As she told me, “I couldn’t tell if the water I immersed in was rain water or my own tears.” She toiveled, the mikvah lady apologized again, she got dressed and went home a broken woman.

Of course, I’m sure you figured out by now, that she had a beautiful baby nine months later; a child that has gone on to be a bright star – a smart, funny, and beautiful six year old – and the now the oldest of four with a fifth on the way.

I tell this story not because of the miracle or divine providence in her getting pregnant, but because of her mesiras nefesh to keep halacha and to remind everyone to watch what they say. The mikvah lady in question was oblivious to this person’s situation and made what she thought was a nice comment. It devastated my friend instead. But perhaps that devastation was the teshuva she needed to get pregnant. I don’t know. I just know that if it was me I would have probably hauled off and belted the mikvah lady.