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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
Religious differences, debilitating illnesses, runaway brides who stop running: More tales from the front lines of marriage.
Feb 18, 2004 | Intermarriage blues
When I met Denise (not her real name), we were a couple of pot-addled college kids looking for an identity other than the ones we were given at birth. She was born a Methodist but wouldn't be caught dead in a church unless someone was getting married or buried. The last act of blatant Judaism I myself had committed was my bar mitzvah, and from there it was a steep downhill slope into pre-Leninist Marxism.
I had always favored non-Jewish women, and Denise was as WASP-y as it got. Religion? We didn't need no stinkin' religion! We had friends. We had weed. And best of all, we had each other. Nothing else mattered.
We were young when we tied the knot in a one-minute, 57-second "ceremony," in front of a justice of the peace in a de-sanctified church in a historic district near downtown Dallas (the reception, on the other hand, lasted five hours). I was 22, she had just turned 23, and we were both still undergraduates. The first years were indeed idyllic. Money was tight, but so were we, and we knew our love would conquer all. So what if her parents, who'd grown up dirt poor in the woods of Georgia, were looking at me funny and asking me questions about Judaism I didn't want to go into? We weren't living under their roof, and besides, it wasn't them I'd married, it was Denise.
As far as my side of the family was concerned -- actually, there was no "my side of the family." My family had splintered and blown away to the far ends of the earth when I was just a kid, so all I had left was my dad, who didn't care whom I married as long as I was happy. He loved Denise, Denise loved him, and all was right with the world. So what went wrong? What went wrong was Christmas.
Denise loved Christmas. Not because of the Jesus thing, but because it brought back warm memories of her childhood, of sitting in bathrobes by the fire with Mom, Dad and Big Sister, exchanging gifts, and getting sloshed on mimosas by noon. But for me, Christmas evoked feelings that were just the opposite of warm and fuzzy.
I'd spent my elementary school years -- the mid- to late 1960s -- as the only Jewish kid in a small bedroom community halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth. The neighborhood where I lived (my entire world, in other words) was overwhelmingly Southern Baptist, and while my friends' parents tolerated me for most of the year, something about Christmas made them lose their cool. They pitied me for my "outsider" status during such a festive occasion, and more important, they feared for the fate of my immortal soul. Offers to bring me to their churches abounded, and I have no doubt that these people made them with the best of intentions. When those offers were politely rebuffed, however, that's when the mood changed.
Phone calls to my buddies went unreturned. On the playground I found myself, if not shunned, then barely tolerated by the same kids I'd been whooping it up with as recently as Thanksgiving. Finally, one kid confided to me that his folks really didn't want him hanging around with a Jew who had no desire to be saved. I certainly felt like an outcast at the time, and as I came to learn of the Holocaust, and the impact it had not just on my culture but also my own ancestors, I came to feel downright paranoid.
So years later, when Denise's little plastic Christmas tree went up the corner of our apartment, it was not Peace and Goodwill Toward Men that came to mind, but rather, "Pick up the penny, Jewboy!" Suddenly, my sweet, lovely Denise came through no fault of her own to represent a culture that had made my life -- and that of my ancestors -- miserable. As I lay in bed at night, watching through the bedroom doorway the glint of moonlight on the little glass balls hanging from that fake tree, I would ask myself, Is that the wind I hear, or is that my dead relatives whispering, shonda (scandal)? I thought about putting up a menorah or something, just to counteract the bad juju of the Christmas tree, but decided that to do so would be to sell out my atheistic convictions (yes, I was a pompous ass in my 20s).
As time (and Christmases) went by, I lived with it, but not well. And when the time came around to start thinking about having children, it all came bubbling up to the surface. If my kid was going to get Jesus forced on him at school as I had been, I'd like him or her to at least find safe haven under his own roof, thank you very much. Suddenly, all things gentile seemed hideous: the emotional repression, the nonsensical traditions, those annoying Christmas carols! Already tough to be around, I became an even bigger prick. My own atheism be damned, I wanted the kid enrolled in Jewish private school, because (and to this day, this may be the most obnoxious sentence I have ever uttered), "I'll be damned if I'm raising any fuckin' Christians!"
There was of course no kid because Denise soon packed her bags and left me. My first relationship following the divorce was with a Russian woman who, although technically Jewish, was raised under Soviet rule, and therefore was about as religious as I was. Even better, her fiery temper was the polar opposite of Denise's bland WASP-y demeanor. I came close to marrying this perfect woman before I realized that she was a complete shrew.
There is no resolution to this story, no easy answer, because (and maybe this is it) it's not them, it's me. Can a conflicted, agnostic Jew find happiness on either side of the fence? Who knows? Perhaps I'll find a nice Buddhist. Yeah, Buddhists are kinda hot...
-- Jim
