A horrible news story makes me realize that I can’t just wait around until Seth hurts one of the children seriously. So I make plans to really leave, this time.
Navigate to other chapters of Homeless... at Home by Shlomit Weber
Homeless... at Home
Table of contents
Chapter 16 - Playing Favorites
Chapter 18 - Woman of Valor
This email is coming to you from Ohio. I came over for a week to help Mom and Dad pack up the old house for their move to the condo.
This visit is delightful. I'm here by myself. I miss the children, and enjoy their daily e-mail, but it's nice to just enjoy being with my parents.
Leora seems distressed at my being away - surprising, because she seems the most self-sufficient of the three (she's 13). Yesterday she wrote, "It was a bad idea for you to go. Abba is being very patient, but we want you to come home."
I was also nervous about leaving them with him. But I guess he is keeping his cool.
And it's good to be over here for awhile to get some perspective on this thing with Seth. Shani, the family counselor, has even given me a homework assignment. I'm to summarize reasons it might be OK to stay with Seth and reasons it would be better to leave him. I worked on it on the plane trip over, and I'll finish it on the trip back.
OK. Gotta go take down and wrap up another hundred or so of Mom’s watercolors.
Love, Shlomit
This week at Mom and Dad's has been such a special time. There's plenty of work to be done, but also, we're also taking time for nostalgia trips.
This house has been the family homestead for a quarter century. My parents have lived here for over half of their married life.
Each room, each corner of this house has dear sweet memories. Kay was married in the back yard. In the kitchen Leora took her first steps. On the back patio the children did artwork with Mom. In the basement, Dad amazed the grandchildren with his feats at the table saw, and gave invaluable safety lessons at the same time.
The dearest is the breakfast room table where Mom and I sit in the mornings, every time I visit, up before dawn to drink our coffee and talk and talk and talk.
And all the things we’re unearthing in closets, basement, and attic, just keep the nostalgia rolling.
Two big cartons were marked, PAM'S LETTERS! When Seth and I first went to live in Israel, I was so excited by everything we did, that I wanted to share it with Mom and Dad, and also, to chronicle it for the future. I knew that we, and our future children, would want to remember what our first years in the country were like. So I asked Mom and Dad to save my letters. And here, twenty-two years later, they all are.
Awesome. It's like time travel. There I was, back then, full of such excitement and joy of the present, but still thinking ahead to the future, knowing that future Shlomit - middle aged Shlomit - would want to remember.
But of course, in these two cartons full of news of uplifting concerts and Shabbat walks and interesting vignettes of Israeli life, and later, anecdotes of ELioRafi's infancy, toddlerhood and childhood - as in all the early morning heart-to-heart kaffee klatches with Mom – there is not one whisper of Seth's problems. For the twenty three years of this marriage I never burdened my parents with any of it. Mommy and Daddy who were always able to fix anything that was wrong - I never called on them to help me with this biggest problem in my life. All the wisdom that they could surely have shed on my understanding. I never availed myself of it.
As I sit here reading some of these letters, I'm reading between the lines. "We bought a new pressure cooker.” No mention of Seth's insulting anger over the whole business. "We're getting a solar water heater." No mention of Seth's refusal to help with the hassle of having it installed. Ditto the apartment and furniture we bought. Only the Pollyanna good parts.
No word of Seth's depressions and tantrums. "This week is Hanukkah. The children and I had so much fun picking out a new umbrella for Seth. You should have seen Eli examining the features of each candidate! He'll be his generation's Ralph Nadar. You should have heard Leora - she could have been filming umbrella commercials! You should have been there when Rafi pushed a button that opened up an umbrella when he least expected it!" No word of Seth's frightening reaction, that evening, when we gave him the present.
"Uncle Henry visited us. He could only stay for a couple of days ..." No mention of the fact that Seth's depressed state had driven Uncle Henry to cut his visit short.
Here, I am, back ‘home’ after ten days 'back home'.
One difference I always feel, when I come back here, is how static everything is. Every time I visit Mom and Dad, there’s something to comment on. Mom laughs that part of her garden is always in her wheelbarrow – being moved from one bed to another. We always wind up, coffee mugs in hand, having a tour of the garden, one of my first mornings there.
There are always new things or newly arranged things. Objects from various collections out on display. Little tables grouped differently. New window treatment. New placemats. Throw rugs. Just CHANGE! So your surroundings don’t burn themselves onto your retinas.
Sometimes the swappings around involve my siblings. “I wanted the braided rug from the family room in the living room, but the rug from here wouldn’t fit out there. So I‘ve got Kay’s livingroom rug out there, and she has the one that was here.”
Once, years ago, when Seth was away, I swapped things around in this house, but they got swapped back to their rightful places as soon as he got home. Leora once asked why we can’t have mixing spoons in a mug on the counter as Aunt Nancy does. I gave her the stoneware mug Paul brought me from England, and she went through the drawer and decided which things we use often enough or that look interesting. Every time I would pass through the kitchen I would gaze at that new little object – evoking jolly country cooking sessions - there amidst all the sameness. When Seth came home and saw it, of course, there was growling and snarling and slamming of metal on metal as he dumped it all back into the drawer, and the mug went back on the shelf with a clunk. Where it belongs. And that was that. He didn’t even feel he needed to give a word of explanation.
I guess that’s what made it all so depressing. If he had even yelled, “I don’t like what you did and I’m going to put it back the way I had it!” But he didn’t even give us the respect of thinking that he needed to explain himself. Any more than I think I have to explain my actions to Sheba.
I was in our bedroom filing away some papers I brought back here from Mom and Dad's, into my SHLOMIT - SAVED folder. Some of Mom's little watercolors, a take-off on Canterbury Tales that I wrote in high school, some old photos, a copy of Desiderata we kids once gave Grampa for his birthday. Always inspiring, no matter how many times you read it.
While I had the contents of the file spread out on the bed, Leora came in and we started looking at the treasures I've saved over the decades.
"Oh! Pretty!" she exclaimed as she picked up a delicate little greeting card with black calligraphy intertwined with a gold vine.
"Oh, yes!" A sigh escaped me, "The wedding card we got from my parents."
Leora read out loud:
"Two shall be born a whole wide world apart,
And one day out of darkness they shall stand
And read life's meaning in each other's eyes."
What wonderful parents I have. As badly as they surely felt, that I was marrying a Jewish man - that there would be no chance now that I would 'get over' my wish to be Jewish - they essentially gave me their blessing with this little card. What better wish could there be for any newlyweds, but especially when the two come from divergent backgrounds such as ours, than to hope that they'll read life's meaning in each others' eyes.
"What's this?" Leora picked up a folded piece of paper that fluttered out of the card when she opened it.
"Oh right. A couple of years after Abba and I were married, Aunt Jeanie found the poem that the quote came from, and printed it out for me."
As Leora read the poem out loud, feelings of sweet longing welled up in me. Transporting me back to those early days when I really felt that, except for the rough spots we seemed to be encountering, maybe we did personify the first paragraph of the poem:
"Fate, by Susan Marr Spalding
Two shall be born, the whole wide world apart,
And speak in different tongues and have no thought
Each of the other's being, and no heed;
And these, o'er unknown seas, to unknown lands
Shall cross, escaping wreck, defying death;
And all unconsciously shape every act
And bend each wandering step to this one end -
That one day out of darkness they shall meet
And read life's meaning in each other's eyes."
I had hoped that once Seth and I got comfortable with each other we would really be able to look each other in the eye, and that I would see, in his, acceptance and joy and future and meaning. The memory of those first hopeful years was so strong that I was barely listening as Leora continued to read the second stanza:
"And two shall walk some narrow way of life
So nearly side by side that, should one turn
Ever so little space to left or right,
They needs must stand acknowledged, face to face,
And yet, with wistful eyes that never meet,
And groping hands that never clasp, and lips
Calling in vain to ears that never hear,
They seek each other all their weary days
And die unsatisfied - and this is Fate!"
Leora looked up at me and her own eyes widened as she saw the tears in mine.
"It's just like you and Abba, isn't it, Ima!" she whispered.
"Well, it could have been ..."
"No! It is! You have lived together all these years, and you sit next to each other at the table and in the car, and you ... even sleep right next to each other, but ... you're not really together. You never laugh together. You try not to be alone together. You never even look at each other! And when you say something to each other, it's not ... like two people who know each other, talking closely. It's like people who just met and don't know each other very well yet. Ima, you always put on your fake cheerful voice for Abba. It's not the real voice you use when you talk to us kids."
I’ve always tried so hard to see us as the first couple – scrambling up the opposite sides of the final barrier separating us. Our eyes will meet as we reach the sunny plateau. Violins will swell, roses bloom, rainbows arch across the sky. Our own private happily-ever-after Narnia.
It took my perceptive daughter to see us as the unfortunate strangers in the second verse. Seth and I have played out Susan Spalding's worst case scenario. Were we really just fated never to connect with each other?
A quarter of a century ago, when Mom and Dad gave me that wedding card, I was struck by the similarity of the verse with a poem Seth had written to me a few months earlier:
If I could look to infinity, a gentler person I would not see.
From worlds apart I come to find, the common bonds that link all mankind.
Seth used to be a romantic, didn't he.
What is romance? I guess it's the ability to look at something through rose colored glasses.
You can shift into a different mode of seeing something. As awful as your high school years might have been, when you hear your school anthem, you see your alma mater as a sweet dear place. Music often invokes the shift. Certain words can. Candle light. Snap shots.
I wonder what happened to Seth’s ability to see us as dear to him? As ‘wife and children’ instead of just carbon units. Just bags of mostly water.
Shani said that I have to figure out whether I want to stay with Seth or leave him. I said that it’s not a matter of deciding, but of predicting the future. Based on my experiences with him to date, I want to leave him. She got that little smile on her face, because, obviously, I'm still here. She said that, in my brain, the voice of hope is trying to shout down the voice of reason. Whoa! Another of those Freudian typos! A couple of years ago I typed 'mirage' instead of 'marriage', and then realized it's even more apt. Shani didn't say 'voice of reason', but 'voice of fear'.
She said I must give each voice a chance to be heard on its own, by writing down what each of them is trying to tell me.
OK. Here goes:
OK. I sat here and sat here. I listened and listened for any hopeful voices inside me, but I only caught two feeble, desperately hopeful whispers:
Seth's parents are normal, healthy people, and his children are, of course, wonderful. So the potential must be there, if we can find out how to tap into it.
Seth has a tremendous amount of willpower. If he really did want to treat us well, he could and would. But he must want to, for his own reasons.
OK. Now I’ll try to sort out the babble of fearful moans and wails and chants swirling around in my chest.
I'm afraid that the children will learn from Seth’s behavior and philosophies, and copy them in their relationships.
I’m afraid of falling into the trap that has caught me every time Seth's moods seemed better, and I agreed to forget the past, instead of requiring that we examine the problems and fix them. The good periods never lasted.
Seth excuses his moods and behavior by saying that the children were annoying, or I was, or the house wasn't tidy, or I wasn't working, or I was working too much, etc, etc, etc.
If he considers external conditions to be valid excuses for behaving as he did, then the next time conditions warrant it, he will give himself permission to behave however he wants to.
As long as he is still operating the same way, the bad times are likely to return.
Seth has never discussed Rafi's first seizure. I want to hear Seth describe what happened. And … what else is he hiding?
Because I still don't understand his bad moods, even after all the time that we spent talking with counselors, I have no better tools for predicting, heading off, or dealing with the next one.
If he believed that any of these were my reason for wanting to leave him, why didn't we ever discuss them and try to solve them: I wanted to stay in the US, I have some sort of problem with sex, I was experiencing a reaction to going on sabbatical.
Does he really believe that I spoil the children? That I'm a bad mother?
I have seen no evidence of a 'process' toward being healthy and honest. What’s the goal of this process? Does he even acknowledge that he is in one?
Members of his family realize that Seth has problems. They talk to me behind Seth's back. That's how you treat children and the mentally incompetent. With a healthy adult, you confront them with their behavior.
- His mother told me, "He can't help it, it's just how he is." If he really can't change, what are we waiting for?
- His mother told me, "He's not as bad as some abusive husbands and fathers."
- His brother noticed that Eli was afraid of Seth. Jerry was concerned enough to tell their mother that Eli's reactions indicate that Seth hits him. The fact that he told her, and not Seth, shows that they are accustomed to dealing with Seth's problems.
- His uncle was easily convinced that Seth's problems are too serious for me to tolerate.
How can I ignore the similarities between Seth and Kathi's book? If there are alternative explanations for why Seth seems to match that profile so closely, I need to hear them.
Every time Seth, even momentarily, loses his temper or gets into a bad mood, I go right back to the way I was with him all those years. I never tell him to stop. I shrink down. Turn to jelly. The fear wells up again and I'm powerless.
I have spent this whole marriage worrying about Seth - what he does to us, what happens to him, what the future will bring.
I want it to end, one way or the other. He said he could solve his problems so I wouldn't have to divorce him. That was four years ago. I'm still going around and around concerning myself with Seth Seth Seth Seth Seth!
He's not my child. I don't want this job. I don't want the talking and arguing and justifying. I thought we were going to be on the same side, now, laying it all out on the table and getting it over with. I hate it. I want out. I want to concentrate on the real things in life. I want to be a mother to my real children and not to Seth.
If he believes he behaved abominably, and abused us and needs to change himself radically, he has to set goals and target dates and work whole-heartedly to make the necessary changes.
If he's trying to stall and defend himself and say that I should accept him the way he is, I don't want him around.
I haven't changed my requirements in four years. He simply hasn't met them. No, I'm not willing to take him one day at a time, as I’ve done all these years. No, it's not enough for him to behave nicely for awhile. It's way too little, way too late.
I have a problem. That problem is Seth. There is no way I can change him from the outside. The only things I can control are my thoughts, words and actions. He does not have the maturity or honesty or generosity to solve his problems. He is just looking to excuse them.
Seth is the reason for my crummy life. The difference between a reason and an excuse is that I am willing to do something about the reason.
I'm worn out with all this. How many more years of it can I take, and for what? I don't like him. I hate to be near him. I dread being alone with him. I stiffen and hold my breath when he walks in the door. I want a normal life. The children certainly deserve a normal life. Not to have to try so hard to guess what will be coming at us next. Not to have to warp ourselves to be acceptable to him. I want a loving, generous home like the one I grew up in. We never had to defend ourselves against other family members. We didn't fear each other. No one of us would be able to conceive that there could be a winner and a loser in any family issue. If one loses, everybody loses. I don't want him influencing my children. Progress is so slow because there's something fundamentally different about Seth that allowed all the problems in the first place. I want to be alive, as I am when he's not around.
I'm afraid that when I am finally free, I will realize, as I suspect now, that I should have done it long ago. The children will have had a limping-along childhood instead of a full, happy one. It's already very late.
The children and I are good together when he's not around. The children are good together when he's not around. They bloom. Life is good and 3D and happy. I have ideas. Confidence. I like myself. I'm hopeful. I breathe more, and I realize how much breath-holding I do when he's here. I smile more. A real smile because I'm happy and enjoying my surroundings - not the plastered-on grin to try and look harmless.
I want to be free. To get back to who I was before I met him. To what I am when he's on another continent.
I don’t feel hopeful anymore. If Seth had done serious work four years ago, he could have won me over. After all the scary insights of the intervening years, I don’t think there is even a remote possibility.
It's a good thing I only had the two plane flights to scribble down this list of Hopes and Fears. Otherwise, who knows how long it would have gotten. It took days just to type it all in to the computer.
Shani smiled and asked, "So, Shlomit, did you do your homework?"
I nodded.
"You were able to listen to your voice of hope and identify some things it has been trying to tell you?"
"Yes. Two main things. Well, two things."
"OK. That's something. And your voice of fear?
"A few. Um ... pages."
"OK ... Good ... I think it will help us focus, if we have a list. What are the hopeful items?"
I read them to her.
"Good! That sounds good! You believe that Seth has the basic qualities necessary, and the willpower needed to be a good husband and father. How about if you give me a copy of your list and I'll look at it at home. And, Seth? Do you have a copy?"
"No thanks, Shani," Seth said with an amused wink in his voice, "I think I'll just let you digest it for me. I wouldn't want to get indigestion!"
"OK," Shani started last night's session, "The past few weeks we've gotten sidetracked from the main issue which is to resolve the factions that have developed within your family.
“As Shlomit reported, the interim solution has gone a long way toward easing the conflicts that have resulted," she smiled at me. "Letting those litter mates in your nest deal on their own with issues that involve only them. But the problem deserves a more permanent solution, than just having Seth gritting his teeth and staying out of the squabbles."
"I agree entirely, Shani," Seth said emphatically, "Poor Rafi needs to feel that he gets as much consideration in the family as the other two do." Seth flipped a sidelong glance at me and then leaned his elbows on his knees and looked down at the floor in front of him, shaking his head. He sighed wistfully. "Poor kid," he murmured, "he doesn't even have decent bedroom furniture ..."
"But ... but Rafi has The Loft! He has the desk Eli built for him!"
"Oh, right!" Seth said, sarcastically. "Rafi has 'the loft'," he mimicked me, applying quotation marks with his fingers.
"What is the loft?" Sandy asked.
"If you ask me, it's a pile of rickety boards that poor Rafi has to sleep on, instead of a real bed," Seth muttered.
Shani looked at me – a silent invitation to explain.
"Well, it was just before Eli’s Bar Mitzvah," I explained, feeling as wobbly as Seth claims the loft is. Multi processing - trying to answer Shani's question, and at the same time, wondering what Seth is angry about. For months Seth has been insinuating that I neglect Rafi, that Eli and Leora dislike him and mistreat him. Shouldn’t he be glad for this indication that we do love and care for Rafi? The loft celebrates Rafi! "The children and I built Rafi a sleeping loft in his room. The children all play up there. Have slumber parties up there. Sometimes we all climb up and read books up there ..."
"Why, it sounds lovely!" Shani said, "Like every child's dream room! But it's ... not very sturdy?" She glanced at Seth who just rolled his eyes.
"It's very sturdy,” I declared. “All the tumbling that goes on up there, causes nary a wobble.”
"But, the best part was building it, Shani. To see the three of them cooperating so nicely on the design – and of course Rafi was delighted to have veto power. We learned so much. That's the project that really started Eli on his carpentry. On his own, afterwards, he built Rafi a desk to go with the loft."
Shani and I exchanged smiles, but Seth broke in.
"Shani? You might be interested to know that Shlomit has performed a feat that is unique in the history of medicine."
Why do I get the feeling that I don't want to hear what comes next?
"OK ..." Shani prompted. Her smile had also faded.
"Shlomit has given birth to three children and hasn't yet cut the umbilical cord to any of them. How's that for a miracle?" He sat back to let it sink in.
"You're implying that Shlomit has too close a relationship with the children, Seth? That she ... babies them?"
"I'm only saying that she never lets them do one single thing on their own. She's got to have them flocking around her every single minute. These children are teenagers, or just about, and she still reads to them!"
"But, Seth, you and I used to read out loud to each other ... It's nice. It's like watching a movie together, only better ..."
"Well, we don't any more ... because she's constantly reading to them. We can't even go for a family walk without her bringing a stupid book along."
"So, you feel, Seth, that Shlomit's close relationship with the children is preventing them from developing a sense of independence?"
"All I know is that people have insinuated that she isn't a good mother." Seth said in disgust.
"What? Seth? Who?" I stuttered, stupidly.
Wow. He's really leaning on that 'fire' button tonight. I could almost hear the 'pch-pch', 'pch-pch', 'pch-pch', of that computer game with the anti-aircraft installations.
Why does he drop these bomb shells in front of Shani? If I'm doing something wrong with the children, why can't we just talk about it, and I can do something about it? And be a better mother, as I want to be?
"Oh, right!" he snapped at me, eyes blazing. "You'd love to know, wouldn't you! Right. I should tell you who said it, so you can start trouble. I'm sorry, Shlomit, but I don't spread gossip. I just thought Shani should know that she can't always trust your descriptions of things."
"But ... what did they say? What did they mean? Didn't you de..." No, of course, he didn't defend me, did he. "Your mother? Did your mother say something?"
"Shlomit, I repeat. I am not going to spread gossip. Let it suffice that someone in the family implied that you're a bad mother."
"Your side of the family?” I guessed.
He sat there a moment with his mouth clamped shut.
"OK, yes. My family!" Triumphant.
Why doesn't he just beat me all over with a stick. It would make me feel the same way.
"Well," Shani said gently, "We were going to discuss ..."
"She can't discuss anything that has happening in the here and now, Shani. She's just totally obsessed with the past. Listen to this. You won't believe it. As you know, she went to visit her parents for a week. Note that with all her talk about what an awful father I am, as soon as it suits her to use me as a baby-sitter, she leaves the children with me, not worrying about how I'll treat them. Proof that I never did anything to those precious children of hers, in spite of what she, for her own warped reasons, wants to claim. So, anyway. She comes back, and what is she bringing? Two huge boxes of old letters she has written to her parents since we were in the absorption center. Twenty-plus years ago! Who needs that stuff? Let bygones be bygones! She's so obsessed with the past that she's got to pour over it again and again."
"Oh, but it would be a shame to throw them ..." Shani started to say, looking at me with pleased wonder.
"Seth, no!" I wailed, "The fact that the letters were even written means that at the time, I was very much involved in the present. In settling down here in our new country. I wanted to remember every bit of it. Why do things, if you don't want to remember them and share them with people you love? The fact that I asked my parents to save them, back then, means that I was thinking of the future. Right? Today is ... today is yesterday's tomorrow."
"Maybe Seth objects to the fact that you've been spending time reading them?" Shani guessed.
"I haven't read any of them since I've been back."
"Well," Shani sighed, "I'm afraid our time is up for today."
I was really glum on the way home. It just seemed that he lined up the things I'm most happy about and proud of, and one by one shot them down.
How well he knows me. It's true that I'm proud of every aspect of that loft. Till tonight, Seth just ignored the whole endeavor.
And the thing with the umbilical cord. Especially reading to them. I'm so glad I have a relationship with the children. The children are very mature for their ages. Too responsible and independent, in some ways.
And ... did a relative really say I'm a bad mother?
The children were in bed, or just about, when we got home, and Seth went right to bed, too. I just did the good-night kiss rounds and came down here to let my frustration flow out my fingertips.
He seems to be trying to pull things apart, instead of getting them together.
How will I be able to read to the children - or even talk to them - now that I know he's sneering at me. It's so creepy to think that he has been watching and disapproving all this time.
At least I'll know not to read those letters when he's around.
And won't I wonder, any time we're with his family, which of them has told Seth that I'm a lousy mother?
I want to be a good mother. If I'm off track, I want to know, so I can be watchful. Reading self help books has helped, but it would be a bigger help if their father could help me see where I need to change.
And … if he really thinks I'm a lousy mother, how can he calmly pursue a course that will result in their being only with me?
I always wished Seth felt positively enough about Eli, Leora and Rafi that I could crow, 'Aren't they great!' to someone, unhesitatingly, without its sounding like bragging. Now it's the last thing on earth I would dare to say.
I don't know where I stand. It really is like getting the rug pulled out, isn't it.
Ah! It's amazing what a night's sleep and few sips of Java can do for your outlook.
I was very glum after last night's meeting with Shani, but maybe Seth did have a point, about the children. He just didn't present it very constructively.
They are teenagers now, and I do need to make sure that my zest for family togetherness doesn’t let me pull them away from other things they should be doing.
It's good that Seth brought the possibility to my attention.
Ah - here Seth is, now, coming down stairs.
…
Whoops! I guess I can forget the "Trying To Be Helpful But Caring So Much About His Children's Upbringing That He Got Overly Enthusiastic" scenario.
His response, when I thanked him for reminding me not to tuck the children too firmly under my wing, was a scornful, "Yeah, right, Shlomit!"
Oh, well, whether he meant it constructively or not, I will watch out that I'm not smothering them.
The children say I never react to anything. To a household catastrophe or even if one of them bumps a head or smacks an elbow. I suppose I learned so well to control my reactions to Seth's explosions, that now I don't react to anything. Part of me does react, though. My heart races. My breathing quickens. A whoosh of feeling rushes over me. I just don't react on the outside.
This morning I felt that familiar stillness on the outside and racing on the inside, sitting at my desk at work, after I clicked on this Jerusalem Post headline:
"Baby dies, brother critical after father sets fire to room."
Eden and Avital's father didn't just fall asleep with a lighted cigarette, though, or let the oil get too hot frying chips. He didn't leave a sweater draped over a lamp or plug too many appliances into a socket, to start that fire.
He poured gasoline on his beautiful little children and set them ablaze.
Etti, the children's mother, divorced Erez Tivoni because he had abused her for years. She had custody of the children, and he was to have supervised visitation only. After playing with them nicely for awhile, at the agency that serves as a meeting place for supervised visits, after giving them presents and candy, he asked the social worker to leave him alone with his children for a few minutes. The last thing she heard, as she walked out, was Eden saying, "I love you, Abba!" As soon as she left, Erez shoved his children into the corner of the room, poured gasoline over them, set fire to them with his lighter, and then went to the other side of the room, away from the heat, to watch them burn.
He told police that if he couldn't have the children, he didn't want anyone to have them. He has not expressed regret.
Well, I guess I'll go to bed now. My mind is numb.
I couldn't sleep, so I came down to write this. I suspect that I'm not the only one in the country being kept awake by images of a father who could set out to murder his children so casually.
One facet of our many-faceted consciousness is a Borg-like collective consciousness. It's what allows ESP and empathy and crying with friends.
Maybe little Eden, in his pain, and his mother Etti, in her grief, just have too much to process, so they're sending it out to the rest of us to lose sleep over, too.
I'm sure that some of the emotions that crashed over me when I read their story were mirroring their emotions. I couldn't know what it's like to lose a child or to sit by the hospital bed of a child who is fighting for his life, burned over 80% of his little body.
I can't possibly know what it's like to be burned alive. That tender baby skin.
But parts of their story are way too easy for me to imagine because I've been there.
The basic cave-woman-level horror of having your mate turn and attack your children. Their father. The husband of your youth. You made these children together. OK. G-d did most of the work. But he blessed you by letting you help perform the miracle.
You thought this man would be the one always there to help you to raise them. You thought that if anything ever happened to you, he would be there to protect them. And now you realize that you didn't even manage to protect them from him.
My mind can get around that part of what she must be feeling. Anger at herself for letting it happen. Why didn't she scream and yell until they had to pry her arms from around those sweet children, "No! Don't let him! He's dangerous!"
But, of course, then they would have admonished her to be reasonable. After all, he's their father. He has rights, too. It's healthy for children to have a relationship with their father. The social worker will be right there. If he’s not nice with them, he knows he won’t be allowed to see them next week.
The episode as reported in the Jerusalem Post was skeletal. Pixels on my screen. But the scene must have been horrific. With sounds and smells. "I hear children screaming!" - "I smell something burning!" Flames and panic and crying and sirens.
Their mother was in the next room. Did she hear the screams? Did she see her baby's body?
How does the realization sink in, that instead of giving your children a snack and tucking them in for their naps, your afternoon will consist of an ambulance ride, the doctor's dire report, and funeral arrangements for your little Avital.
She had finally gotten away from him. She was finally safe. He couldn't beat her up ever again. Except that he beat her up once and for all, on the inside, didn't he.
And I can imagine, because I have seen it in Eli's eyes, in Leora's eyes and in Rafi's eyes, the horror and fear the children felt. A big full-grown man - your own father - grabs your arm and throws you across the room, his face contorted with the hatred he feels for you. A minute ago he was nice and you loved him and suddenly now he hates you and he's hurting you. Let him hurt me if he needs to, but why does my Abba hate me?
Eden is a few months younger than Eli was when Seth threw him across the living room and kicked him upstairs. That devastated look in my five-year-old's eyes when he told me, afterwards, "Ima, I don't even know what I did," - that's a look I will never forget as long as I live. It's a look that should never appear on a child's face. An innocent child's face. Eli lost his innocence that day. The world is a scary place. Awful things can happen in it. You look at pictures of Eli even now - even in his graduation pictures from junior high - and you see an echo of that haunted look.
If Eden survives - and they're not very hopeful - much of his skin will be scarred for life. But that's nothing to the scar he will wear on his heart. "My Dad wanted me to be dead. My own Abba wanted me to be dead."
Desiderata: You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.
How can you ever be sure you deserve a place in the world if your own father wanted you dead?
Eden's father is right there in Kathi's book, isn't he. Alongside ... alongside Seth.
I think I'm picking up a message that Etti's heart is sending to all women with husbands like Seth. "Get your precious children away from that man before it's too late."
Today, too, of course, the Jerusalem Post is full of the Tivoni infanticide: "Though Erez admitted to taking actions that led to his children's injury and death, he refused to take responsibility for the result of his actions."
What kind of warped logic is that? You do something, and it leads to something awful, but you're not responsible for the result?
What is spooking me is that it's the kind of logic Seth goes by. He doesn't see any connection between his treatment of us and the fact that his relationship with us is a shambles. He has never indicated that he regrets anything he has done to us.
Now, of course, Erez’ rights will be rigorously defended. He is protected by the laws of our civilized society. They will determine whether he is mentally healthy enough to stand trial, poor guy. You can rest assured that he will be treated much much better than he treated his own wife and children.
The professionals are trying to "understand how a father is able to do something like this to his young children, who only moments before were playing with him and displaying the warmth and love that only young children can display toward their father."
How many times have I seen my children approach Seth, or behave normally around him, because it was safe enough yesterday, only to find out the hard way that Seth is dangerous, now.
What else could Etti have done? She divorced him. She got the children away from him. They were hidden in a shelter for battered women. She had fought for Erez to have only supervised visitation. She did all the right things. But he tracked her down. He punished her for leaving him. But ... she left him because he was punishing her.
That incident when Eli was five was just the same, wasn’t it. Seth smacked him in the head all through dinner, so next day at lunch Eli wanted to sit farther away from Seth. But when Seth saw that Eli had moved his place setting, he attacked his child. Eli's choices were either to stay and be hit, or to move away and be hit even harder.
Just like Etti's choices.
And … the social worker. No matter how awful somebody is, decent people will tend to treat them decently. Even a trained social worker who has seen the worst, will tend to give a person the benefit of the doubt. Gosh. How can you turn down the request of a father to be alone with his own children? How can you deny a father his rights?
I keep giving Seth that same benefit of the doubt, don't I. But the time has come to realize that I don't owe Seth the benefit of the doubt if he won't even try to alleviate that doubt. I do owe Eli and Leora and Rafi their safety.
I can't afford to wait until Seth does something unspeakable.
Right, Etti?
Shani's greetings were muted, last night. This brutal act of infanticide has everyone spooked.
She knew exactly what prompted my opening remark: "Shani, I need an explanation of what happened when Rafi had his first seizure."
"You were there, Shlomit, I wasn't!" Seth growled.
"I was? Oh. I didn't mean the one in the US. You said there was one a year before."
"I didn't say it was a seizure, as such."
"Well, was it?"
"Possibly," he told the far wall.
"Well, I need to know more about it."
"What do you want to know?"
I gazed at him for a moment waiting for him to realize that I can't tell him which facts I want to know, if I don't know what the facts are. "Well, just ... everything you know, Seth. Begin at the beginning, continue until you come to the end, and then ... stop."
"What's the point, Shlomit? See, Shani, she keeps on ..."
"Well, for one thing, Seth, when I go to talk to neurologists or anyone else who takes Rafi's medical history, they ask about the first episode, and ... I can't tell them very much. They say, 'Oh, weren't you there?' and I say, 'No, his father was.' And they say, 'Well, didn't you ask his father about it???' So here I am. Asking."
"You didn't tell them ... anything ... did you?" Seth’s eyes darted to my face and to Shani's and back to mine.
"Seth, I tell them what I know." I paused. No. I'm not going to protect his feelings. If he is healthy, as he claims, he can hear the truth. "I do tell them that Rafi was hit on the head frequently from babyhood until the first seizure when he was five. And that he received a blow at the time of the first seizure. That's certainly relevant. Repeated head trauma that predates and triggers epileptic seizures. Yes, Seth. I tell them that his ... father frequently hit him."
Seth squirmed in his seat. "What am I supposed to say, Seth? That he bumped into doors alot?"
"What did they say?" he wanted to know.
For a split second, because I was visualizing little Rafi lying gray and insensible on the floor, I thought Seth was asking about the neurologist’s diagnosis. Then I realized that of course Seth was more interested in whether the doctor had said anything about HIM.
"Well, actually, the woman I went to last year for the EEG asked whether you and I were still together. She was surprised and ... disgusted ... when I told her we still are. For now."
"To me this just seems like raking up ancient history when we're supposed to be trying to forget all of that," Seth declared.
"Seth," Shani addressed him, "I can certainly understand that Shlomit would want to know all she can about Rafi's seizures. Why don't you tell us what you remember."
"She could have asked me any time, and I would have told her. I have nothing to hide," Seth pouted, defensively.
"OK. Well, she's asking you, now."
"There's not much to tell," he shrugged.
Rafi's second (as far as I know) seizure lasted for maybe thirty seconds. And yet when Leora and I tell of it, there's plenty to tell. What happened. What happened just before and just after. What we think caused it. What we were thinking and feeling and doing at the time. Exactly where we were in the house at each stage of the drama. What we had planned to do if he hadn't come out of it spontaneously, the relief we felt when he did, exactly what he did and said when he came back to us. The discussions, afterwards, about whether to take him to the ER immediately. How can there not be much to tell?
"He was just, like, shaking. Fainted or something."
"But, like, where did it happen, Seth? You said 'at home'. You said he 'got hit' ..."
"I don't remember saying he got hit. It was in his bedroom."
"Was I home?"
"No. Yes. You were outside. In the car. In the driveway."
"Did you ... did you hit him, Seth?" I asked. My voice was shaky, my mouth dry, not wanting to visualize the next part.
"It might have been spontaneous,” Seth told my left knee.
"Did you tell me about it? Afterwards? And I ... forgot?"
"I don't remember if I told you. Maybe not. There wasn't time. We wanted to leave."
"What do you mean, you 'wanted to leave', Seth?" Shani asked. "Give us a little background. Shlomit was in the car?"
"We were all in the car, going on some trip. Going away for the weekend. And Rafi didn't come out with everyone else, so I went in to get him. I found him up in his room."
"Having a seizure????" I cried, breathless. Now that I can visualize it, putting together Seth's reluctant facts with what I saw and felt during Rafi's Christmas eve seizure in the US, I'm having the same visceral reaction. My poor little Rafi! Even smaller than he was during the episode I saw. And I wasn't even there to hold him, that time!
"Was Rafi actually having the seizure when you went into his room, Seth, or did you see it start?" Shani asked, also trying to visualize the scenario.
"Uh ... I think he might have been having it."
"So what did you do?" I asked, feeling weak and breathless.
"I just waited. It didn't last long. Then we came down to the car."
"And you didn't ... mention it to me?"
"I told you, Shlomit! We wanted to get on the road!"
So, Seth sat eighteen inches away from me, in the passenger seat, for the next four hours, all the way to the Golan Heights - I can't think of any other place we would have been going - and he didn't find time to mention that our five year old son had just had an epileptic seizure????
I tried to turn the discussion over to the thinking part of my brain. Tried to get the feeling part not to butt in. "It just seems strange, Seth, that you didn't tell me. That we didn't discuss what we should do. So ... he was never checked? By a doctor? And ... if you could just happen to come upon him during the thirty seconds that he was having that seizure, didn't you wonder whether he has had others and we just never happened to see one? Or, wouldn't you ask me if he had had others that I ... forgot to tell you about?"
"There were no lasting effects, Shlomit. It was over and done with, so why discuss it into the ground. As you're doing, now, I might add."
"But, wait, Seth. The seizure Rafi had last year ... by the coat closet ... you had me take him to the doctor because you said that was the first spontaneous seizure. Where he hadn't stubbed a toe or hit his elbow. But, the first one, as far as you know, was also spontaneous."
"Shlomit!" Daggers look. "This … discussion … is … closed!"
So that's it. That's the official story. He just happened to go into Rafi's room during the half minute that his five-year-old was having an epileptic seizure, waited for it to end, and then we drove merrily up to Ruthi's.
To the bar mitzvah. It was the bar mitzvah weekend, wasn't it. That was the weekend when Seth got so upset at Eli for dancing with Rafi.
So Seth did know that it was serious. He did know that it might happen again. He did know it might be related to Rafi's having his little head bashed around so often. But none of that was as important to Seth as protecting himself from being implicated.
What's that quote from the father who torched his children: 'refused to take responsibility for the results of his actions.'
He died. The little boy. Eden. After what must have been an awful month of pain.
The children's mother has changed her name to Etti Eden-Tal in memory of her beautiful children.
I say castrate violent men. They have no right to be fathers.
Last night when he came out of the shower, Seth said, “You know, Shlomit, it’s not going to be as easy as you think to remarry after you’ve … dumped me.”
“What do you mean?” Remarry? Acquiring a different husband has not even crossed my mind. Well, if it crossed, it kept right on going.
“I mean, if you think you’ll just divorce me and right away meet someone who would marry a divorced woman with three children …”
I don’t know if his disgusted face was at the ‘divorced’, the ‘woman’ or at the three children.
“Seth, I don’t want a ‘second husband’, I don’t want to ‘remarry’, I don’t want a ‘divorce’.”
Seth rolled his eyes.
“I want to stay married to my one and only husband, for my whole life, till one of us dies and leaves the other feeling ripped in two. I want to raise my children in a solid two-parent family. Like the one in which I grew up. With both of their real parents. I want to stay married to the husband of my youth. With whom I … have a history. Who remembers each of my children’s first steps. First words. Who was there with me when I was young and innocent. Who matured along with me. Who remembers me from before I had bumps and wrinkles. Whom I chose while other men were still looking at me with interest. I want to be able to sit around when we’re old and say, ‘remember when’. As my parents do. I want my grandchildren to visit grandma-and-grampa.”
“Yeah, right, Shlomit. You’re doing a pretty good imitation of …”
“Seth, I want all of that desperately. But what we’ve had so far is not that.
“Let’s not get into this, Shlomit. I just wanted to point out that you can’t just throw away one husband and pick up the next and have everything be perfect.” He turned on the water and began brushing his teeth vigorously.
I guess you value something to the extent that you have worked for it. I’ve worked so hard all these years, that this family and marriage are important to me. The only kind of work Seth has ever done to keep this marriage together is just this type. Threatening that it would be worse for me and the children if I divorced him.
There was only once, in this whole marriage, when he honestly worried about …
Stupid. Stupid me. Since I wrote that dot-dot-dot five minutes ago, that ellipsis, that Morse code S for stupid, I’ve been calling myself ‘stupid’. Those three dots that imply that something else follows, along the same line, but I just haven’t written it yet.
I’m remembering back four years, to our year in the US. I was organizing equipment for the camping trip that the children and I would take after we left Seth. Or, if Seth showed progress toward becoming a healthy husband and father, it would be the first trip of our renewed life all together, on a positive, constructive footing. Seth said, as he watched me sort cutlery, “Do you think you and the children will be safe by yourselves?”
I left my sorting and sat with him on the sofa. Clutching his hand as I was clutching at his words. At his uncharacteristic show of concern for our welfare.
But, just as that dot-dot-dot I wrote, above, getting close to the top of the screen, now, as I type, remains without the implied follow-up, so did his protective sentiment.
For four years, now, when I have reviewed the lack of progress, I have clutched at that statement. Reminding myself that deep down inside, he cares about us.
But his statement wasn’t an indication that he was worried about us, was it. It was a threat like the one he made last night – that things could be even worse for us if we left him. And I fell for it. To this day, he probably thinks that his threat worked. That I stayed with him because he scared me into it. He hasn’t a clue that I was focused, not on the potential dangers of the journey, but on his presumed display of concern.
Stupid, stupid, stupid! Dot-dot-dot.
My heart is still bruised from the story of the Tivoni children sacrificed on the altar of revenge, and now Tyler’s story comes to light.
Three years ago, Ronald's father died. He asked his girlfriend Amy to be with him in his bereavement. She was on a cruise and couldn't come. So he decided to get revenge. To put her into a position where she felt as sad and bereft as he felt about his father, and then when she turned to him for comfort, he would withhold it. Just as Amy had done to him.
So he married Amy a few months later, and a year after that she gave birth to their son. To Tyler.
And last week ... on Father's Day ... when Tyler was seven months old ... Ronald suffocated that little boy.
It was assumed that the baby had died of SIDS, and everyone commiserated with the young couple. Then after the funeral, Ronald told Amy that, in fact, he had killed their child to get back at her for not being with him when his father died.
And now, they're saying that the poor man's great sense of remorse, that led him to confess to his wife and then to the police, should be a mitigating factor in his trial.
But they're wrong. I know, because I have seen that same mechanism at work right here at home, haven't I. The long term, well thought out plan to exact revenge. But that revenge isn’t complete unless the victim knows all the clever details of the plot.
All those months that Amy lived with her husband were a farce. When they made love, it was part of Ronald’s plan to create a child for her to love, just so he could take that child away from her.
Remember Seth’s campaign to let me deal with Rafi’s dangerous pregnancy, totally on my own, because Seth considered that I had insulted him two years earlier?
Like Amy, I had no idea, all those months in between, that it was all part of a plan to exact revenge.
Of course, I'm exaggerating. Seth has never killed anybody. But ... he could have. At what point during that pregnancy would he have said, "Helping my pregnant wife is more important than my plot for revenge."
Would there have been such a point?
And last fall, when Seth did reveal that plot to me, I assumed, as they’re assuming about Ronald’s confession, that it was an admission of guilt. But it wasn’t in either case, was it. It was a boastful revelation of a successfully executed plan. Because if we never suspected, there would be no point to it all.
Seth hasn't killed anybody. But neither had Ronald, before that. And neither had Erez Tivoni.
OK. I'm going to bed.
Nope. A good night's sleep didn't make Tyler’s murder seem any less horrific.
The horror, for me, isn't that there could be men like this. With the world as large and varied as it is, it would be surprising if outrageous things like this never happened. The horror for me is that I immediately see the same patterns in my own husband.
Amy said that Ronald never seemed to bond with Tyler. That they seemed more like brothers. How often have I thought that about Seth. That he relates to the children more as a rivalrous sibling than as their father.
Did she suspect anything? I didn't suspect anything about the campaigns that Seth has revealed to me recently. And I'm pretty smart, and I read alot and think alot. But I could never have predicted this strange behavior that seems so logical to Seth. Any more than I can fathom this current campaign to make Rafi feel accepted, and make the other two feel rejected.
Amy knew that Ronald had taken out a $100,000 insurance policy on the baby. She might have asked why, but it's not likely that she would wonder if he meant to kill their child. We don’t delve into places we want to believe aren’t there.
Don’t test for an error condition you can’t handle.
Ronald succeeded with his plans for exactly the same reason that Avital and Edan's father could succeed with his. Normal people give the others the benefit of the doubt. Again and again and again. Not even for the benefit of the person we exonerate, but for ourselves. So that we can continue to believe that the world is a good, rational place. That the human race is basically decent.
When Edan and Avital’s father told the social worker that he wanted to be alone with his sweet children for just a few minutes, the social worker believed what she wanted to believe. That she was helping to facilitate normal healthy, heartwarming loving feelings and behavior of a father toward his children. She didn’t ask, “Are you sure you’re not planning to douse them with gasoline and set them on fire?” When Amy found her cute chubby baby dead in his crib, she didn’t ask Ronald, “You didn’t murder him or anything, right?”
When Seth agreed to having a third child, I didn’t ask, “You’re not just agreeing to this so you can treat me badly during the pregnancy to get back at me for something I might have said years ago to offend you, right?” When he stopped hitting the children, it didn’t even cross my mind to ask if he had hurt one of them seriously.
These men – Etti’s husband and Amy’s husband … and mine - can live on two levels with little apparent discomfort.
Like batting three children around all weekend and then going off to work to be the great white physicist.
Seth just left for work. I should go wake up the children.
There's an expression in Hebrew - 'full gas in neutral'. A great way to describe a mad scurrying that accomplishes nothing - the accelerator's on the floor, but you're not in gear.
I guess that would describe my wild panicky thoughts since Seth slammed the front door on his way out. Whipping around crazily, taking me nowhere, fast.
I was sitting here staring at the things I had written about Tyler, my fingers and brain too limp to write more, when Seth came clattering down stairs, grabbed his hat and was headed for the front door. Then, I guess he saw the misery on my face, and he snapped, "I know what you want."
I just looked up at him stupidly. Trying to tune in with the part of me that wasn't wiped out from contemplating little Tyler.
OK. Concentrate. Seth was saying he knows what I want. What I want from the grocery store on his way home? What I want for Tyler and Amy and all mothers and children everywhere? What I want from him, in this half-decade-long standoff of ours?
If it had been one of the children who passed by and saw me glum and dejected and said, "Ima, I know what you want!" I would be smiling, cheered up already because I would know the type of proposition that awaited me. "A big hug!" Eli would volunteer. "One of my special backrubs!" Leora would offer. "Twenty kisses!" Rafi would propose.
But Seth was seething with anger.
"You do?" I asked stupidly.
"Yes, I do, Shlomit. I know exactly what would make you happy. I know what you're waiting for."
"You do?" repeated the stupid part of my brain.
"You're just hoping I'll do something really awful."
"What do you mean?"
"To the kids. Hurt them really badly or something."
"What are you saying, Seth?" I was fully awake, now. Fully tuned in to what he was saying, but I seemed to be in the same nightmare world from which I had just dragged my thoughts. Where creepy men do creepy things to their children.
"You would love an excuse to leave me, wouldn't you. Well, I'm not going to comply, for your information. You can just keep waiting!"
He turned and was gone.
Does he really not realize that a mother puts her child's welfare ahead of absolutely everything else?
How can I live with this man for a quarter of a century without gaining any understanding of his thoughts?
I have to leave Seth, don't I. And now. Not 'if this', or 'if that'. If the talks with Shani don't work out. If he stops going to Batia. If I happen to notice a nice apartment for sale at a good price. If one of the children says somethng scary. If he ... if he does something really awful.
This morning I found myself staring at a blue plastic bottle cap, on the palm of my hand, knowing that it was something I was supposed to be dealing with, but not being able to dredge up what or how or why.
Usually, I can make the children's snacks in auto-mode. And the juice is the easiest. Line up three bottles and three caps, make up a pitcher of juice, fill the bottles one two three, cap them and I'm done. I can do juice bottles even before the caffeine has hit my blood stream. I often fill the juice bottles while I'm pondering the sandwich filling choices. While I put the snacks together, I can be singing or thinking about work or about something that happened the day before, or something I'll be doing that day. I can muse over what I'll wear. I can do snacks in background mode while all this foreground thinking is going on.
But I must be thinking about Edan and Avital and Tyler – and ELioRafi - with all of my brain.
I can't type. I'm fixing at least one typo per word. I can't talk. I stutter or I can't think of words or I find the wrong word popping out. Something incongruous that makes me giggle drunkenly. The part of me that usually takes care of all of that is pondering endangered children.
I can't keep my mind on what I'm doing. I can't get a pen and the sick fund directory and my day book and Rafi's ID number and the phone and me all in the same place at the same time so I can call to make his appointment. I go to get the directory, bring it back to the phone, and realize I've carried off the pen and left it on the bookshelves. I get it, and can't find Rafi's magnetic card that was just there in my hand. I find it in my pocket after searching ineffectually in places it couldn't possibly be. By that time I've absent-mindedly stuck my day book back in my pack – or in the refrigerator.
Absent minded. Exactly. My mind is not here, it's someplace else.
OK. I'm capable of generous helpings of absent mindedness any day of the week. Any mother or manager of any other complex system can be excused lapses in keeping it all together.
But since I read about Tyler, I'm as absent minded as ... as other times when I've had larger-than-life things to ponder. When Seth was nose-diving into his first depression and it felt as though my world was collapsing. I found myself, then, sitting at work staring, unseeing, at the screen of my terminal, or out the window. When I was in that hopeless situation of having to protect Rafi-in-utero and care for sick little Eli and worry about Seth's mental state, all at the same time. When my husband was attacking my children and I knew that I was the one who had to do something, but I didn't have a clue as to what.
This kind of pondering isn't really thinking.
If there's internalized dialog at all, with this kind of emotional processing, it's just, "Oh, oh, oh!" or "Why?" or "Please!"
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Copyright 2020 Shlomit Weber
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