Marrying out

One of the most arrogant things I have done while living in the 'velt' -by which I mean outside the jewish community- is to marry out, in 2001. After my separation in '86 and divorce from J he remarried and his wife (who herself had been married at least 3x) educated him on the rules of divorce and told him to demand child support.
A man who never supported me (his father and the Rebbe's household fund, Simchas Shabbos V'Yontif and R's family supported us ) filed papers for child support. Because he refused to disclose his own income or details, it was initially thrown out of court without prejudice and she insisted he reapply.
He had held up my Get in order to obtain child support; I refused to listen to my lawyer who advised just take your divorce and forget the Get, because for me, I would still be considered married. I was earning less than $400 a month, a salary provided via work study at the college I was both working for and studying for my BA.
I rented a room my sister had abandoned to live in L.A. Each evening the same mouse walked to the middle of the room, sniffing the air, just sitting there. There was no way to cook and the fridge was a mini in an efficiency kitchen in the other room.
Living on $400 a month, attending college full time at night (18 credits) and working all day. Almost 7 years of this and in the middle of it he insists he needs child support. His father had bought him a HOUSE and a CAR and he needed child support.
He had even taken our oldest who was depressed at age 7 from the separation for evaluation and finagled SSI for him. He wasn't using it for counseling for the kids, he used it for bills.

The way I found out was our son "ran away" with one sister and went to stay with a neighbor. Months later the neighbor found out son was supposed to be getting SSI benefits. She went to Social Security to have his benefits forwarded to her address so she could buy him clothes and help pay for food. It raised a red flag and SS asked husband for an accounting of what the benefits had been used for since he was applying for child support.
He submitted (via lawyer's Discovery process of legal documents) checks for all kinds of nonsense to SS-haircuts, birthday cake, pizza dinners, gas, clothes for himself (!). SS would up telling him he had to repay the government almost $6,000. When the family court judge saw the documents, read thru his scribbled filings for support and heard my testimony he awarded him the minimum amount for each child because the law says custodial parents are entitled, now matter the circumstances and noted for the record that he should get a job.

$385 a month is not alot of child support, but when you're taking home $1,200 a month in NYC, its enormous. I was advised, by anyone I dared tell, to stop being stupid and learn how to play the game.
I had one of 2 choices. The first was get myself committed to a psych ward, declared incompetent to work etc. and I would be absolved from paying child support. The second was stop working on the books. This meant dont pay taxes, work for cash and basically hope you never get sick because you wont have medical insurance. This was before deadbeat dads were tracked and rounded up for non payment. This was when 'disappearing' was expected and done.

For me, choosing either of these meant that my decision to divorce and leave CH for an education to become self reliant from tzedakah, was incorrect. Since I believed my decision to BE correct, I had not choice but to pay for my freedom.
And pay I did until 2005, because the case was a tri-state mess with computer backlogs of almost 2 years between 3 states. We married in NYS, he filed in his parents state where he originally went and then moved to a third state when he remarried and would collect child support.
Although my actual payments ended in 2003, by the time the 3 states caught up with each other, they said I had to pay arrears because payments had been instituted 18 months after the court judgement.
Do you know I was so afraid of going to jail for not paying support I had mailed him personal checks during that initial period, because I hadn't heard from any child support agency how to send in payments. When the payment system was finally set up they weren't interested that I had started making payments directly to him, it didnt count because it wasn't recorded anywhere.

Basically the dream of getting an education and standing up, was spent trying to pay child support, support myself (I do not have a fancy lifestyle at all, no credit cards, no car etc) and now paying back college loans. I have nothing to show for the last 20 years except perhaps exactly what I started out to do, get an education and be self reliant. I did and I am. And I am alone.
When men hear 5 kids, they run. They run for many reasons, but mostly becuase any woman who could possibly "abandon" 5 children is not worthy of human companionship only ugly questions or sexual solicitation. They run because a woman in her late 30s who had 5 kids is pretty much used up.
I'm not exactly beautiful, maybe attractive, incapable of small talk and vapid eyelash fluttering men find attractive. I'm not capable of sex on demand, sex with strangers and sex for no reason other than there's nothing else to do. Sex is so powerful for me, so intimate in disclosure of self I have to trust and love someone, I have to be a wife.
That said, at the age I was divorced my social life was limited to school and work.

I was introduced to 2-3 men by 'friends' but it seemed no one in the secular world married unless your resume showed you wealthy, well connected or extraordinarily gorgeous...you could sleep with anyone but marriage? why?
By the time I was in my late 40s I felt time slipping away, if I didnt grab any opportunity to marry it would never happen. My mother suddenly decided to come live with me and parked herself in my 2 rooms. She showed up after shipping 12 boxes of her things without prior warning. UPS just dumped 12 boxes with my landlord one day and a social worker in her apt complex called a week later saying she was depressed and refused to live in her senior apartment anymore.
This, from a woman who couldnt imagine how in the world anyone could live in Brooklyn. I called my sister in L.A., she refused to come in, to talk to mother, to get involved. She said "I can't take her and I dont think you should do it either." Was there a choice?
Imagine being so poor, old, sick (breast cancer) and feeling so desperate to have to go back on your disdain for living in a place like Brooklyn where your daughter 'ran away from life to be religious.' Imagine agreeing to settling into 2 rooms while your daughter pays child support and lives pretty much hand to mouth...yet there was no way to say no.

But I didnt want to die an old lonely woman taking care of a mother who never liked me. When the opportunity presented itself, meeting my 2nd husband, presented only as someone who would translate my word into arabic, he jumped to propose and I refused at first, then accepted. I traveled to Egypt, met his family, he had just lost his own mother to a disease and there were no sisters. The fact that his father had married 7 times should have told me that women were a commodity for trading rather than valued. But no, I saw myself as the woman who would help a family of men who needed a woman among them. The woman who would 'save' just one family from poverty with an opportunity, how arrogant is that? How one can become deaf in times of desperation. I had davened fiercely for a spouse and when one finally appeared, I assumed this was a gift.

No matter he wasn't jewish, I had already been outside the community 15 years, did it really matter to Hashem? My kids were initially happy, they said, that I was going to marry, even to a muslim. My daughters were happy I wasn't going to be alone, they said. Two of my daughters met him. IN Egypt my daughter who had made aliyah, emailed me in dire straits, asking for money. We went to a bank in cairo and wired her funds in Israel, putting all of us in possible jeopardy.

I seemed accepted by people I met in Egypt. I went to the mosque, tried to pray, read the quran and found passages that seemed to address jews specifically. EVeryone was so happy to see husband having a chance to escape from his own poverty and hopelessness, especially me. No matter how hungry or poor I was, nothing compared to the suffering and filth I found there. If nothing else, even if Love was not the primary reason for marrying, it seemed that the marriage would finally give me companionship and give him an opportunity to make a future not only for himself, but for his young son and his brothers who I understood would eventually want to come here also. In short, it was like building a new family again.

But once he got here, things changed almost immediately. I dont know if his plan was to talk one way and act another or he was advised on what to do and how to do it.
But once on U.S. soil, he made it clear that as his sponsor I was expected me to support him for at least the 5 years until citizenship. The statements of "I'll do any kind of work I can find" melted to "I can't do this or that becuase it would shame my family if they ever knew I:
a) drove a cab b) worked any manual work c) worked in a deli d) went to college at my age.
Even Egyptians he spoke with as family friends told him how lucky he was and not to squander the opportunity in his hands, go to school, treasure your wife and good luck.
Then he began insisting he needed to see doctors because his sinuses were always stuffed and he had a chronic cough that no OTC meds stopped. The embassy had passed on his physical so I assumed he was healthy. But it turns out, the embassy didnt even look at anything as long as a valid sponsor filed valid documents, he was free to go. He was sick and needed very expensive treatment. Thank g-d for insurance. However, the 'jewish doctors' I had werent suitable and made him nervous...he had to find an egyptian doctors and did. In the end he had to return to the specialists, all jewish, becuase every arab he saw kept changing his diagnosis and saying he did, then didnt need meds, he was and wasn't sick.

He met an egyptian selling on the street. Because the man was egyptian for sure he knew more than his american wife, about anything, but especially about life in the U.S. This man told him because he spoke english so well, to go work as an interpreter. And so he did, without any training, credentials or security checks, an agency in NYC hired him to translate SS, medicaid and ASC cases. When he wasn't out 2-3 a couple hours once or twice each week, he was online in chat rooms or talking to freinds and family in egypt.
I think I mentioned previously my nights were spent trying to sleep listening to the tap tap of the keyboard with the silent TV glare and computer screen on all night until 5am for 3 years. When I woke from hearing strange female sounds during the night, I was told I was dreaming, but it was to see either porn or a woman who turned out to be someone he would visit 2x in New Mexico. A woman with 2 kids with no shame who stayed up showing him herself on a webcam while his wife slept so she could work the next day and support him.

There aren't enough words, time or even energy left in me to understand the amount of lies I was told and believed to have a MAN in my life. During the Lebanon war last summer he finally showed himself for the antisemite he really was. He sat on the bed glued to the TV waiting for Hezbollah to destroy Israel, sure there was a secret plan about to take effect on behalf of the arab world that would finally obliterate israel.
All the problems in the world were due to Israels existence, not only in the middle east you see, but all over the world, zionists controlled everything, even his life in 2 rooms in brooklyn. Everything that happened to everyone that one might label BAD, was due to the existence of jews. Not the original people of the book, sanctioned as "real jews" in the quran, those jews dont exist anymore, the jews of modern times are all fake and the religion changed, the holocaust never happened, maybe some jews were killed but no one can stand them anyway, they bring this kind of hate on themselves...do you know any other group of people hated like jews? of course not, so there must be a reason why the world hates jews...right?
Days into hours of this hate. Then demanding I make a choice, no more fence sitting trying to LOVE everyone, trying to get along with everyone, wanting peace for everyone.

I dont write these words now out of self pity, I dont write because I have nothing else to write about, I'm writing because if only one jewish woman or man reads my words, you must know I lived with and among muslims and arabs. I lived among the double face and forked tongues. I heard repeatedly about the religion of "peace" and how the people of The Book are accepted. The hate and antisemitism was never directed at me personally, it was broad and blind. It was total and unexpected and unrepentent.
It was a lesson I needed and will never ever need again.
Love is not blind and when it is, one should run from it. There is no luxury of romantic love when you are a Jew in which you can afford to squander your life on a goy for a spouse who sooner or later will throw in your face the words "jew" as an epithet. The word is used to define how worthless you are seen.
I was hit by this man, he was removed by the court and 2 O.P. because he refused to divorce and refused to leave. Its great having a stupid wife who works all day while you play:-) But none of the violence compared to the mental abuse and spiritual rape I allowed myself to endure for the sake of being married to drek.

Meir Kahane was murdered, not by a mad man but by a simple muslim, who like all muslims thought he would go to heaven for his jihad to meet his maker and his 72 unblemished brides for all eternity after ridding the world of one more jew. Arabs are learning, at least the more educated ones, that if you talk nice and speak softly to the dumb jews who just want some peace and quiet, that the truth of the hate preached, written and lived by will all be pushed aside. We see how Carter bought it, Pelosi is buying it and countless other blind liberals, like my former self, continue to buy it.

Of all Kahane's admonitions to the klal, the one we must begin to take seriously, if we want to continue to exist, is separation and a complete ban on intermarriage. The bracha we say each morning about tzitzis, is not meant only for physical separation. I dont know how you enforce that especially in a time when jewish leadership is nowhere to be found and something as profound as kabbalah is being shared with goyim!

I saw my own father shut away from his entire family for marrying my mother and instead of heeding this law, thought melding myself into the velt was the solution to feeling like an exile.

A life spent on lessons...I come to read kabbalah bowed and humble, but its a door only to ComingHome, one I am trying to reopen, after becoming perhaps more prepared spiritually from years of trying to survive.