no easy way for observant dads to limit family size
Hasidic Women Feel Pressure for Children, But Fathers Fret About Providing
No Easy Way for Observant Dads To Limit Family Size
I remember what it was like for me. I was 21, married for two-and-a-half years, and a student at the kolel — yeshiva for married men — in our Hasidic village in Rockland County, N.Y. Our second child had just arrived, 16 months after our first. Rent was overdue. We’d maxed out our credit at the supermarket, the fish market and the butcher. A seemingly endless list of expenses was weighing us down.
It all seemed so sudden, and no one had told me that $430 a month — the amount of my monthly kolel stipend — would not suffice for a growing family.
I remember the panic, anxiety and depression that followed for a long time after, as another and yet another bundle of joy arrived. Each child was a blessing, of course. But how was I going to provide for so many blessings?
My wife sympathized, but it wasn’t her job to figure out the finances. She made the babies and cared for them. Paying for it was my job — except I had no idea how it was done.
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The one thing that no one mentioned: birth control. I didn’t know the thing even existed.
Once, back when my then-wife and I were expecting our first child, I overheard an acquaintance say that in Boro Park — a comparatively liberal Hasidic community in Brooklyn — people had fewer children than in other places. Eight instead of 12, the person said. I was baffled, but too embarrassed to ask the question burning in my mind: How do they do it?
Eventually I learned about birth control the way I learned about most of life: on the Internet.
Even then, it was still not an option. I quickly learned that yes, birth control existed, but no, it was not permitted. Or permitted only under special circumstances. Or permitted only by certain rabbis, and our rabbi was not one of them.
I was ready to disregard the prohibition, to “cut out the middleman,” as the saying goes, and use contraceptives without rabbinic permission. My wife, however, wouldn’t hear of it.
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After our fourth child I tried again to reason with her, to no avail. She cried that she would feel naked if she wasn’t either pregnant or pushing a baby stroller. “People will look at me funny,” she said. I sympathized. Who wants to be looked at funny?
After our fifth, I used the nuclear option. We wouldn’t have sex unless we settled the matter.
And so my wife agreed for me to ask a rabbi outside of our own community, who, I had heard, granted permission easily.
http://m.forward.com/articles/173533/hasidic-women-feel-pressure-for-children-but-fathe
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