Chapter 4: Motherhood Begins

It seemed like seconds after our jewish wedding and Charlene was already pregnant with our oldest, Yael. Baby Yayi as the new Mommy called her precious baby. Charlene would always tell Yali over the years that Yali changed her, made her who she was. A Mommy first and foremost.

Charlene never complained during her pregnancies of discomfort or morning sickness. She had it, but she was happy and grateful to be pregnant and wouldn’t complain about something so magical to her.

Motherhood was the dream and purpose of Charlene’s life, and she was amazing at it. She was created for it. Charlene was a natural and had this pure, unconflicted, animal-like, instinctual connection and relationship with her babies. 

I’ve come across many different mothers in my life, human and animal. Even have one myself. Some human mothers are just bad for a thousand different reasons (misery comes in many forms with many excuses, to paraphrase a well-known idea). Thank God most mothers love and cherish their children. But even the good ones usually have a layer of “human” that is not always in the mood, or just needs a break from their children. They need time for themselves, time away from their babies. A vacation, a massage, a bath, or just shopping at the mall.

Animal mothers are not like that. (Well some are. Yael had a hamster that ate her own babies, like some human mothers I’ve known). But most mammals and birds are focused 24 hours a day on being mothers to their babies; raising them, feeding them, protecting them, nurturing them, teaching them how to survive and relate to their world. No breaks, no resentment, no stress, no self-doubt or fear. Just constant focus on their babies and their role as mothers. 

This is the kind of mother Charlene was to our babies. Total devotion and focus. Her mother and sisters lived far away and weren’t around much to teach or help her. But Charlene always knew instinctively exactly how to care for our children without being taught or shown. How to nurse them, feed them, care for them when they were sick. 

And no babysitters. If she needed to do something or go somewhere her baby always went with her. Yael especially was practically an appendage.

Because I was so damaged and emotionally disconnected I didn’t share her deep involvement with the children or her loving perspective. In fact, her devotion to them made me jealous. I felt like a fifth wheel, involved peripherally, but not really necessary. 

Like I was watching a nature show of the bond between a mama bear and her cubs, where the papa bear did his job impregnating the mama bear and then went on with his life. In this case I was more like the executive producer of the show because unlike the papa bear I was paying to make it all happen for the mama bear and her babies. 

You would think my disconnection would get rid of my jealousy. But that’s not the way it worked for me. My emotional disconnection didn’t make me emotionless. Or weaken my emotions. The opposite. I experienced very deep and powerful feelings. But my damaged and self-destructive psyche and thought patterns just didn’t allow me to be happy and satisfied with my life, our life; to remain happily connected to my beautiful mate, and join her in a loving connection with our babies.

I didn’t accept my happy emotions, I was uncomfortable with them and ignored them. And so the emotional disconnection only ruined the good times and feelings, deadening me to them. Unfortunately, negative emotions fit right in with my psyche and resonated with the self-destructive and damaged path I was on. Those weren’t deadened at all. 

Charlene would often tell me to plug in, inviting me to feel the same way she did. To join her in the nest we had built. To recognize the miracle of life and be fully present with her and our babies.

She was so physically connected, in touch with her body and biology; her sensory perception was so high for all her senses, the net effect was almost extra-sensory. So having a baby and nursing were the most natural, and at the same time magical and Godly, parts of life to her. 

God’s greatest gift to His children is the ability to emulate Him and create life, and each life unleashes a whole new world of love, beauty, and connectedness. To think that I missed out on experiencing this because of my neglect, while simultaneously depriving Charlene and our children of my total presence, causing them needless pain is so sad and a bitter pill to swallow. 

And writing about those years of our life together when I was not in the Garden is very painful. Dredging up the ugly memories is a hard process. Looking back, I can’t seem to summon these memories as vividly as the ones from the good times. My purified, forward-seeing eyes have placed a veil over my backward seeing eyes, not identifying at all with how this person from the past acted.

But when I look back my emotions don’t follow my forward eyes. I am flooded with guilt and regret, even disgust at who I was. I feel dirty, and my soulmate is no longer here to purify me with her forgiveness. But I feel I have to crawl through the mud, even knowing I won’t be able to bathe afterward in the clean waters of my soulmate’s love. Because to share the light of our love and happiness I have to first share the darkness. That’s how the Creator did it and that’s how His creation works. 

And guilt is part of that darkness. It’s not here for my benefit or to serve me. It’s here to deceive me, to bring me down, back to its world. So it lies. It magnifies all of the bad times we had and ugly things I’d done. It minimizes all of the good times we had and all the good things I did that Charlene appreciated and was grateful for.

Always providing for her and the children in every way. Making them feel safe. My kindness and generosity. Never fighting dirty, never trying to hurt her feelings (although I did it a lot, she always knew it was never deliberate). 

If an emotionally disconnected or cold, transactional person would view those years of ours as a movie they would call me a model husband. Because on the surface I was. I always provided, and wasn’t emotionally or physically abusive. I was loving and fun when I wasn’t pissed off  about something (although I was often pissed off). I was mostly around when I wasn’t working (although I was working almost all of the time). And beneath the surface, whatever Charlene didn’t know about wouldn’t hurt her. 

They would call me a model husband because that emotionally disconnected person lives in the same darkness I was living in back then. Hell. The place where family relationships are about duty not love. Where everything is a responsibility with no meaning or purpose, and little emotion attached. And in that dark world, I was not a bad guy. I was a good guy who handled his responsibilities. With some faults.

This is part of the reason Charlene only tried to leave me twice during those years. Because she knew me better than I knew myself and she understood the hell I was living in. That I wasn’t being mean or ugly to her. That I was a good man. I was just disconnected and living in darkness. And she hoped I’d reconnect and relate to her with love again. Rather than the way I was, as if our life together was boring homework, (an ironic name for sure). 

When I was back in the Garden and would ask her why she stayed during those years she would always say “I knew I would never have with anyone else what we had in the beginning, that intense connection, and I just hoped you’d find your way back to me”. And then she would tell me to forget the past, assure me it meant nothing anymore, and drown my regret in her love.

And while I knew that what she said was technically true, that she would never have with anyone else what we had, and that she hoped and acted daily to help me find my way back to her, I also knew the real reason she stayed. She didn’t want to deprive her children of a full-time, live-in father. 

She was willing to walk through fire for her babies, there was no suffering she wouldn’t undertake for their protection and well-being. Staying married to me was easy for the warrior mother that she was. She was emotionally aware enough, and balanced enough, to separate out her hurt at my behavior from what she understood was best for her babies.  

If a disconnected person saw me as a good husband, a connected, loving, aligned person looking at that same movie of our life would see every ugliness of mine. Because when one lives in light, every negative behavior, every negative thought shows up through that light as a dark stain. And those stains covered my soul as a thick, long coat. And now when I look back at myself with light-filled eyes, my guilt blinds me, making it hard for me to see past that coat to the soul beneath.

But looking back at Charlene in the same movie with those same light-filled eyes, I see her pure, clean, and beautiful soul, the mate and best part of my own, no stains, no thick, long coat. No coat, no covering at all. Mmmm…

I see the steadfast loyalty, positivity and love in all of her actions during those years shining through. I see the absence of bitterness, negativity or vengeance as starkly as Sherlock Holmes noticed the absence of the dog’s bark.

The day of redemption, of the Messiah, is soon coming, when our Father the King welcomes His Queen, the Divine Presence back from exile. Where She has been for two thousand years since the destruction of the Temple, due to Her and our sins and disloyalty. 

Just as the prophet describes our Mother Rachel crying to God to take her as an example of forbearance in a marriage; to overcome His jealousy as Rachel overcame her jealousy, and forgive His children, her children, us; so too Charlene, Shoshannah, my Queen, is now in heaven having rectified the Divine Presence’s historical sins of disloyalty by her own long-suffering example of steadfast loyalty and faithfulness, and of fully welcoming me home to the Garden and ending our exile from each other. 

Shoshannah is now crying to God for all of us that His Queen, the Divine Presence, has suffered enough and it’s time for the King to welcome Her home. Only Charlene’s not crying. That wasn’t her style. She’s bringing her Father, the King to the realization through a conversational process, asking questions gently. That was her style.

When I finally woke up from the hell of my decade long disconnected slumber, (nightmare), and realized what I had missed with Charlene, the early years of her first flowering as a mother, the pregnancies, births, nursing, I was desperate to somehow connect with her in that way and make up for it.

Yesterday I was watching some home video DVDs from those years that I had just found. There was Sruli, our second, (his childhood nickname based on his hebrew name, he now goes by his English name Miles), not yet strong enough to stand without holding on to the bars of his crib.

And he was standing on the floor, holding on to the bars for dear life, but looking to his side so desperately wanting to walk. Charlene was encouraging him in a way that I sadly don’t remember registering at the time because back then I didn’t have the eyes to see what I can now see so clearly.

The way her voice caressed him, the tone, the words, if you could hear pure maternal love that’s what it would sound like. So understanding, so accepting, so encouraging, so positive, so happy. Her words and tone magically moved as one with his micro expressions, fully anticipating him. Like she was emotionally dancing with him, (now I understand why I was jealous of the babies), always accepting and honoring his emotion in the moment, and then returning her encouragement, and acknowledgement the next moment. Always helping, loving, and positive. 

Her voice surrounded him, enveloped him even, in a cocoon of love and acceptance, always fully present; helping, encouraging, and positive. Not a hint of impatience, distraction, judgment, manipulation, negativity of any kind. 

I imagine the Israelites in the desert felt this way being surrounded by the Clouds of Glory. And while this human mother, a perfect manifestation of the Divine Presence, the divine feminine, lived in my house, and was raising our babies, I was out chasing shadows, conquering foreign lands that meant nothing in the darkest parts of Africa-America, (lot by lot in Newark, New Jersey).

Unfortunately, while I neglected the opportunity to connect to Charlene’s flowering as a mother in the early years, sadly I did have the opportunity to at least partly make it up to her (never to myself) in her final years. Fully connected to her final flowering as a human being and daughter of God.

Watching the video of Charlene and her baby Sruli and seeing with my own eyes the cocoon of love she had built for him, I realized I did the same for my baby Charlene these past few difficult years, and especially the last few months.

Never leaving her side in the hospital. Never. Complete presence and total focus; protecting her from all outside negativity, irritation or responsibility; handling lazy, incompetent and uncaring nurses, all medical logistics, paperwork, appointments. 

Taking care of anything and everything that might upset or bother her, building her a cocoon, (what Kabbalists call a “space”), where she could fully focus on her single task, keeping mentally and emotionally healthy, strong, and happy, to better fight her cancer battle.

I was so fully and constantly present at Charlene’s side that if a nurse would do something that bothered her, Charlene wouldn’t even say anything, she would just move her eyes towards me and immediately see I was already dealing with it. I anticipated her the way she anticipated Sruli in the video. We were dancing a very sad dance. Painful to remember and write about.

And I shined the highest intensity, pure positive energy at all times into this cocoon, like a fire blowing into a hot air balloon, never losing focus for a moment lest the cocoon begin to collapse.

Always bringing her things to make her happy, reading to her, watching with her, cheering her up, keeping her feeling safe and loved. Not only telling her, but showing her she was the most important thing in my world and that I was there for her totally and completely. And special prayers, unifying God’s name, as I was taught, to bring as much light as I possibly could into this cocoon for my precious baby Charlene.  

I was so focused on this cocoon that my gift to Charlene for her 60th birthday, on September 30, 2025, right before we found out the cancer came back for the third and final time, was a birthday card with a promise to never raise my voice at her in anger “from today to forever”. (Which I asked her to write because her handwriting was so much nicer than mine, although I did sign it myself). 

I was already extremely good at this non-task, hardly ever raising my voice at her even slightly. Let alone raising my voice loudly or screaming at her which I hadn’t done in years. Or cursing which I had never done. But one time shortly before her birthday I was a little heated without even realizing it and she said “Shalom the way you affect me even a slight elevating of your voice bothers me”. 

I hadn’t realized and I wanted her to know I understood how important it was to her and that it would never happen again so I made it her birthday present. (She never wanted anything material other than horse stuff and she already had all she wanted of that). And we placed the open card on a shelf in our bedroom so we both saw it every morning. 

Unfortunately it was too easy to keep this promise, God granted me so little time to honor it. I was hoping I would have to forever, but God decided that another seventy seven days would be enough. 

Another cause of my disconnectedness with our children early on was because of the guilt I felt about not being there for my two older daughters from my first marriage. At the time Yael was born, Rox (Rachel) and Tzip (Tziporah) were 8 and 6 years old. When they were babies I was quite involved in their lives. But when their mother and I separated my involvement plummeted for various reasons, some my fault and some not. 

Because guilt was one of the emotions immune to my shell of emotional disconnectedness, penetrating at will, it was one of the dominant feelings I had in the beginning years with Yael. By the time Sruli was born I had been neglecting all three equally, Rox, Tzip and Yael, so the guilt over my abandonment of Rox and Tzip had dissipated. But the neglect continued.

Charlene had first met Rox and Tzip after our Disney marriage, a little over two years before, and they loved her. And she loved them. 

I remember the first time she met them, two and a half years earlier, in the parking lot of a supermarket right next door to the barn in West Orange. I had gone to Brooklyn to pick them up. Charlene and I both pulled into the supermarket parking lot and popped out of our cars. Charlene had just come from the barn and was dressed in her horse attire, jeans and paddock boots. Rox and Tzip were 6 and 4 and dressed identically, like two little Madelines. And they were now staring wide-eyed at this exotic jeans clad creature with horse poop on her boots.

A giant smile lit up Charlene’s face, like a sunburst, and she bent down and exclaimed “ooh kittens, so cute”. And that’s all it took. They immediately gravitated to her, just wanting to be next to her. I wanted to give them ice cream but Charlene insisted we feed them lunch and take care of them properly, like parents. And that’s when she took over my parenting job with them.

Charlene was a far better parent to Rox and Tzip than I was. They loved her like a mother and she treated them and felt about them as if they were her own children always. With love and consideration and concern. Always making sure they were properly fed, and taken care of and happy. 

We bought them horse breeches, (pants), and paddock boots, and Charlene started taking them to the barn with her on Sundays. They cleaned her horse and his stall with her and she gave them pony rides. And they played with our dogs, Gedolah, a great dane, and Ketanah, a chihuahua. Every Sunday was one giant dog and pony show. And they loved every minute of it.

We moved around a bit during Charlene’s pregnancy with Yael. After our secular marriage I had bought a house in West Orange near the main shul that needed a lot of work. A foreclosure, (the mortgage business I was in was just to facilitate my primary business, “house-flipping”). And we moved into it as-is. After Charlene’s conversion when she moved back in with me we decided it was time to fix it up. We moved out and I gutted it down to the exterior walls. I ripped out even the beams because there was termite damage. I had gotten a really good deal…

I should have rented a decent place to live while we did the work. In fact, I never should have bought that foreclosure house for our family to begin with. I should have properly and honorably housed my wife in a comfortable way with a respectable house to begin with and then again during the construction. But that’s not what I did. 

Instead we moved to various houses that I or partners of mine had bought out of foreclosure, and were in the process of selling. Not inner city, Newark, East Orange, Irvington, Jersey City, where I did most of my business, (I wasn’t that crazy). But nice towns like Livingston and Short Hills. 

Charlene was a trooper and never complained that I was treating her like a vagrant moving from house to house without even furniture. These houses were basically vacant and empty and we were crashing there. She was so supportive and easygoing, and didn’t want to be a burden or an unnecessary expense while I was building my business. She saw herself as my partner in life, that we were in it together and that she would do whatever it took for us, and be happy while doing it.

But the reality is her easygoing nature and insistence on seeing only good intentions in me just made it easy for me to take advantage of her. I had money for anything and everything that was important to me. Just not for this. 

Because I was emotionally involved with my business, not with my family. My work was my life. Building a business empire, just like my father, my hero did while I was growing up. I was in awe of him and he was my example of who and what to be. Building an empire was my life’s passion and the overriding goal of my hellish existence. Because even hell has an aspirational promised land and this empire was my promised land. 

I was a house-flipper before it became popular. In fact I think I made it popular. My office and business in general was a wild and free-wheeling, three ring circus and everyone that witnessed it or was caught up in it would say it should be a reality show. 

For example, once, early on in our marriage, before Charlene was Jewish and I was not observant, I took her on a Saturday to see a foreclosure in Cedar Grove, another nice, not inner city town. Actually she took me because although I wasn’t observant I didn’t drive on the Sabbath, especially since I had a built-in Shabbat Goy that could drive instead of me. 

A foreclosure broker I worked with had called me about it and gave me the address. He said they still hadn’t cleaned it out from the former occupant’s stuff, it was that fresh. I didn’t need the broker to show me the house. I had all the bank and broker master keys and lockbox combinations to get into any foreclosure in my “home range”, and just in case one might have a lock that I didn’t have the key to, I had a whole break-in kit in my trunk, including giant bolt cutters and crowbars.

We drove to the house, it was really nice, and in a beautiful neighborhood near the reservoir. And one of my keys worked (what do you know) so we went in to check it out. The house was still full of stuff strewn all over the place. They even had horse stuff. I picked up a saddle and started walking towards Charlene in the living room to show it to her when a cop walked in. He said a neighbor had called that someone had broken in. (Nice neighborhoods had one drawback, nosy neighbors).

I didn’t break stride, kept walking with the saddle on my arm towards Charlene as if I owned the house, (and the saddle), while saying hi to the cop. He asked who I was and what we were doing in the house. He didn’t think we were thieves, two nicely dressed (white) people driving a Lexus (with a key scratch across the side courtesy of the Bouncing Czech during one of his stalking episodes). I told the cop I worked with the real estate broker who had asked me to come check on the house. He accepted the story but wanted to see some identification.

I didn’t want to give him my driver license because I knew there were probably multiple arrest warrants for me from multiple towns. I owned a lot of vacant, under construction houses in the inner city and getting tickets from the city for dirty sidewalks was a daily occurence and a big revenue generator for these cities. They would stick the tickets in the mailbox instead of mailing them to the registered office of the owner of the house, which was my company. We never collected the mail of these houses so I never knew about these tickets. Looking back, this would have been an extremely simple problem to solve. Empty the mailboxes once a week. 

These tickets always required a court appearance to answer for the ticket. But I never showed up because I didn’t even know the tickets existed. At which point a bench warrant would be issued for not showing up to court. So at any given time it would be common for me to have a few open warrants each, from multiple cities like Newark, East Orange and Irvington.

So I said to Charlene, “hey baby can you give him your license, I left my wallet at home because you were driving”. She answered me “no, it’s in the glove compartment. Don’t you remember putting it in there”? (I had put it there because it was the Sabbath and I didn’t want to be carrying when I left the car…I was Talmudically technical in how I broke God’s rules). And I say “no baby you’re confused, that was a different time”. We go back and forth this way a couple of times, all the while I’m trying to get her attention with my eyes to stop saying this before the cop notices something weird going on. It seemed like forever but she finally got it and said okay and gave him her license. 

Afterward she asked me why I didn’t want to show the cop my license and I told her about the probable warrants. I thought she would get a kick out of how brazen and cool I was with the cop, the straight-up ballsy chutzpa, breaking into a house while having open warrants, but obviously she wasn’t happy about it at all. But this story, one from the early years of house-flipping, is very indicative of my mindset and the wild and crazy years yet to come in that business.

Once she was deep in the middle of her pregnancy we couldn’t live without furniture anymore and we moved into a business partner’s basement guestroom. What a toxic guy. Charlene and I would lie in bed together in the morning cringing, listening to the morning routine going on upstairs. Kids getting ready for school, dad getting ready for work. The loud and hateful, screaming and cursing, utterly vulgar, to the point of “F you you piece of S”!; dad at mom, mom at dad, parents at kids, even the two kids, both under 12, at the parents. Charlene would actually cover her head with the blanket.

Charlene once went to the supermarket to grab a few things together with the wife and children who also happened to be going. And the mother taught her children to shoplift, telling them to stick things on the rack under the shopping cart and she wouldn’t pay for those items. And if they caught her she’d say she forgot about those items. And laughing with her kids about it afterward in the parking lot. In front of Charlene, completely unashamed. That was the last straw for Charlene. Even she had her limit and now insisted we get out of that house.

We ended up renting the nice carriage house of another business partner, our last stop before going back to our own house, and where we brought our new baby, Baby Yayi, home to. 

But before bringing Baby Yayi home from St. Barnabas Hospital in Livingston, we made a quick stop at the Short Hills Mall. Because I was unprepared and hadn’t even bought a car seat, or anything else Charlene or the baby would need. And Charlene just rolled with it, literally, because we put her in a wheelchair so she wouldn’t have to walk too much in the mall.