Everyone can use the extra hand, but you beat me to it, and now I’m drowning

Tirtza: How could you take away my only chance for help this year?

Aviva: Shiffy agreed to come to me… and I need the help too badly to give it up.

Tirtza

Summer heat, vacation schedule, bored kids running wild while I tried cooking for Shabbos = supper in the park.

I packed up food and drinks, cleaned faces, changed Yoni’s diaper, grabbed a granola bar for myself, and 20 minutes later, we were heading to the only shady bench in the nearby park.

Of course, it was full already. I perched on the edge of the next bench over, let the kids run off to find their friends, and craned my head to tune in to the conversation.

“…never do this! My seminary girl took the kids out every week while I made Shabbos,” a woman I vaguely recognized was saying.

“You’re so lucky you had a seminary girl coming,” my friend Shevi said. “I nearly got one last year, but she backed out at the last minute.”

“How do you even get one?” Libby, another neighbor, asked with some interest. “I wish I had extra help on Thursdays. What do I do, call the seminaries?”

“It’s really hard,” the first woman told her. “It’s much easier if you know a girl coming and she requests to go to you.”

I leaned forward. “They have these rules, though. You have to have three kids to qualify. I know because my friend has these crazy difficult pregnancies, like she literally can’t get out of bed for months, but when she asked a girl to come, the seminary didn’t let because she only had one other kid.”

“This three-kid business makes no sense,” a woman with a curly fall said bluntly. “There are women with one kid who aren’t coping and women with seven who are managing just fine. There are all sorts of reasons why someone might need extra help, and I know some seminaries will make exceptions because of that.”

“Really? I know someone who tried really hard to get help, she was going through treatment and she had one child, a boy with autism or something, he was really difficult, like she couldn’t leave him for a second. And the seminary turned her down because they only send to bigger families. Can you imagine?”

“Maybe she didn’t explain the situation,” someone chimed in. “I think a lot of places have some system where they look into the circumstances if someone needs the help….”

“But besides all that, it’s getting harder and harder to be approved by the seminaries; they’re much stricter about the families they send to these days,” the woman with the curly fall said decisively.

“When I was in seminary, we all went to these Israeli kollel families with ten kids in a two-bedroom apartment,” Shevi said.

“You know what drives me crazy?” It was the woman with the curly fall again; she seemed to have a lot to say on the subject. “The seminaries send their girls to these Israeli families with a ton of kids, where the mother has five teenage girls to help, and they have their whole extended family as a support system, but they won’t send to American young couples who have no family and really need the help.”

“Some do, some don’t,” Libby said diplomatically. “Lots of Americans do have cleaning help and financial support. But the ones who don’t….”

“Come on, which young mother can’t do with an extra pair of hands on a Thursday night?” I said. “I’m so excited that my sister-in-law is coming to seminary this year. I wouldn’t have been able to get a chesed girl otherwise. But they make exceptions for family.”

Shiffy’s seminary allowed the girls to do chesed by their siblings, even if they didn’t meet the general criteria. And I did need the help. Besides, even though no one knew yet, there was a third baby on the way, and I was only going to need it more.

“That’s amazing. I had a sister here two years ago, it’s the best,” Shevi said.

“I know!” I was excited for Shiffy to come. It was always fun to have another family member in Israel. And if she could double up as best aunt/Thursday afternoon chesed girl, what could be better?