Kafoi Tov

I would love to catch up with you soon! her text said. 

I would love to also, I typed back, but the kids have the croup. 

Her response: Such tzaros by akaros! 

Huh? 

It took me a full day to decipher that phrase. Did she mean—

Oh no she didn't.

"I wasn't complaining!" I ranted to a laughing Han. "I was just making a statement! 'The kids are sick'! That's it! I wasn't saying 'Oh woe is me that I ever became a mother because I haven't slept in a week because a wheezing toddler was crying all night'!"

It became Han's catchphrase for a week, every time I made statement about the kids. "Such tzaros by akaros!" 

The annoying thing it is rhymingly catchy. 

Contemplating this phrase a bit more, I realized further my insult. 

When one marries at a, er, "elderly" age, there's this concept that one's marriage is quite simply, a miracle. A neis. Heck, your anniversary should be a codified holiday, up there with Chanukah and Purim. The impossible happened! The oil lasted for 8 days and that beyond hope spinster wed! 

If someone married at 20 and had five kids and she simply stated, "My kids are sick," no one would respond, "Such tzaros by akaros." Her marriage and children aren't miraculous. It was perfectly natural. So it's understandable if it feels like a bit much, after all. 

With the passage of time, I thought my . . . bitterness over my single experience had faded. I'm busy now with not sleeping due to a child's foot in my kidney and freaking out how to get him to eat more than Cheerios. 

Yet then a dodgeball gets hurled at my head and *ow* I'm back.   

My personal takeaway from my single decade plus was that all marriages are bashert; some are simply on a different timeline. Others don't see it that way. It's that if you're single by a certain age, chances for marrying at all plummets down to negative zero. 

Even now, married for nearly eight years, someone feels the need to remind me: you were such a helpless case that you should be on your knees every day thanking God that you're married and you have children. 

Don't get me wrong. I'm grateful. Of course I am! But I would like to be treated like anyone else who's married and has a family: that when you slept four hours—nonconsecutive—because the kids took turns waking up and wailing, that someone says, "Oy, that sounds rough!" instead of "Shut your mouth, you ingrate!"