Albany, NY

United States

12206

handwriting instruction/remediation

Handwriting Repair/Handwriting That Works

I survived serious and unusual abuses, which continue to leave their mark. Description below. This is substantially (meaning: with some inconsequential additions and deletions) something I originally wrote to e-mail to prospective therapists after I first contacted them and they scheduled me for an intake appointment. The ones who couldn't cope with what you're about to read — including, and especially, those who told me that the concatenation of events and influences described hereinunder Is Not Allowed ("Why can't you please just have a NORMAL problem? Couldn't you just be a drunk or a drug-abuser or child-abuser or spouse-beater like everyone else?"), or in other words Is Not Something They Have Studied, Or Are Prepared To Want To Know About (but they'd gladly take my money regardless) — were the ones I chose not to go back to: because Pshrinks Like Them had been among the reasons I wrote this in the first place ... Here goes ... I am a fifty-three-year-old woman (turning 54 next month) with several neurological disabilities — and I would have liked to have been reared as a human being. Instead, I was frequently informed (usually by my mother) that I was a “retarded, subhuman spectacle” — a “vegetable,” a “handicapped monstrosity,” a “travesty of a human being.” It was daily made plain to me (by Mom) that I was being reared purely out of my parents’ sense of duty, so as not to burden other people with my existence. It was likewise continually made clear to me that, whenever anyone played with me or tried to become acquainted with me, they did this purely out of an imposed sense of a duty to do so: for instance, because they were following a parent’s or teacher’s commands in order to avoid being punished for avoiding me. My disabilities (dyspraxia, dysgraphia, and severe Asperger’s among some others) are not physically visible. However, their effects on my behavior led to my being perceived as retarded despite a tested IQ above 150 on at least two professionally administered tests. (At no time, on any professionally administered test, did I test below 125 IQ. These tested overall IQs, in turn, were although scores on one to three of the subtests — depending on the test — were most often in the 80-90 range.) By that standard, at least — the objective standard of lacking some reasoning power — I am a handicapped human being. As such, how best can I undo the damage that has been done to my attitude and self-respect by my situation itself (my impairments, and my recognizing them) and by how I was reared (which was at least partly a consequence of what I was and am)? A complicating factor in my childhood — and contributory to much of the abuse I received — was that my parents had decided to send me to a school whose philosophy (insofar as they bothered to inform themselves about it) was one that they themselves deeply opposed and would not tolerate even having discussed in our house. Specifically: my parents, and for the most part my grandparents, were what is known as “non-religious Jews” — even, in most regards, anti-religious Jews — who nonetheless decided to send me to a religious Jewish private school. At home, though, my parents forbade even mentioning religion or anything that had to do with it — which meant that I could be, and was, punished and told I was a bad girl whenever I fully and truthfully answered my mother’s or father’s question: “What did you learn in school today?” (This question was asked of me whenever I came home from school. Silence, incomplete answers, and answered suspected of being incomplete, were punished equally with answers which gave the details for whose existence and mention I’d be punished and told I was lying “because nobody could believe anything so absurd was taught or practiced by anyone.”) Although my parents did at times break their own rules about what never to discuss, their exceptions to their own rules were so unpredictable and unstable that I could never discover what principle governed them. There may well have been no principle, just simple caprice, because my mother was very angry that I should ever want to find an explanation or a principle, let alone even have to look for an explanatory principle when — as she never tired of telling me — other people could simply absorb from the environment, subconsciously and automatically, whatever they needed to know about each other. She thought it was wrong and vicious and unnatural of me to need and want a way to make sense of things, and to have to seek this out, instead of just understanding naturally and automatically and wordlessly exactly when, and in what ever-changing context, when a family rule either could be broken, or must be broken, or might be broken by the adults although it remained binding on the children. For example, it was all right for my mother or father to ask me to describe a particular belief or practice that I was being taught at school, but it was all wrong for me to answer the question, or to answer it partially (because that was talking about a forbidden subject), or to not answer (because that was disobedience). My parents had chosen this school because the local public school was well known to encourage violence and other damage against anyone who was either smarter or duller than the average … and, as explained above, I am simultaneously BOTH. Further, the administrators of most of the private schools that had been available when Mom and Dad first went school-hunting had, apparently, made it clear that they did not believe their schools to be the right places for children with problems. In any case, when it was time for first grade, Mom and Dad sent me to a religious school (the only school left) without fully understanding that this WAS a religious school, because they were only incompletely aware that Judaism is, well, a RELIGION (among other things). They had assumed, given their own upbringing and acquaintanceships, that the “religion side” of Judaism must be pretty well extinct by now, and that it had left behind only a handful of “harmless cultural stuff” that they themselves knew a very little about: thinking that the “cultural stuff” was all there was. So they were very angry at me for answering — correctly — their inquiries on what I had learned in school that day. They swore I was making it all up. So when I persisted in my “lies and idiocies” (as they called my description of what I was being taught) instead of falsely agreeing under pressure that I had “obviously concocted all this craziness” on my own, they sent me to a therapist (the first of many) who had never heard of any of this stuff either. His job was to cure me of believing that I was being taught such things, although indeed I was being taught them — as I tried to document for him and for my parents, from my schoolbooks and other class materials, which they flatly refused to look at. For instance, my homework assignments in first grade included such tasks as persuading my parents to study and follow the rules of Judaism. (I was five-and-a-half at the time. I wasn’t good at getting my parents to change their way of life just because my teacher said so. For this failure, my teachers and classmates abused me, just as severely as my parents abused me for the mere attempt. This was in addition to my getting a low grade on such assignments, and then being punished at home for the crime of getting less than an “A” grade in anything.) So after two years, my parents took me from that school and enrolled me in one which had been set up for gifted children, and which was (at least in theory) willing to ignore psychological or other problems if the child scored sufficiently high on the IQ test required for admission. The guiding principle of THIS private school, though — insofar as it can be called a “principle” — was that nothing is to be considered definitely right or definitely wrong, or definite in any way, ever. (And they were quite definite on that! They were certainly definite on the “fact” that I was a “problem behavior case” for pointing out that contradiction!) This school (where I was until the end of the ninth grade) was also a place where assaults (including physical assaults) on the persons and property of at least some children were actively encouraged by the teachers, just as long as the attacker was considered (by the teacher or by a majority of classmates) to be a more welcome, likeable, or socially adept person than the target. When fights broke out in the classroom, the teacher would give the attacker some helpful tips on how to win, and the target would be punished far worse than the attacker: punished for fleeing, and also punished for defending him-or herself, and also for being suspected of having wanted to. I was, in every class I attended at both of these schools, the designated target or one of a few designated targets — as if it were an official title. In the second school, and to some extent in the previous school, the teacherly justifications for accepting and encouraging this included assertions that I was ideally fitted to be a target and to thereby raise the self-esteem and leadership motivation of my schoolmates: that I should be happy to provide this service to the majority, and that I was being inconsiderate if I disliked or tried to evade my opportunities to do so. For instance: When, very rarely, I managed to do something RIGHT in gym class, there was disappointment all around — because nobody had planned for this, and because it was called “unkind” of me to put the others in a position where they might have to go through the bother of finding and establishing a new target when the old one had been performing that function so very well already. That happened a little more often in the school where I stayed the longest, which was also the worst school as far as the abuses went (it was the better school academically, though). The consequences for me, of growing up in this way, can be imagined by anyone with a shred of intelligence. They include an immense fear of other people, and a feeling (which I have been unable to change or vanquish) that I am indeed subhuman and should be rejected by anyone I admire, anyone worth dealing with. This feeling persists despite what I rationally consider to be productive adult achievement in the personal and professional realms. (For instance, although I was unable to write legibly by hand until age 24 when I was in graduate school, at that age I designed and pursued a course of self-remediation which allowed my handwriting to become very legible and rapid — soon thereafter, I founded a handwriting instruction/remediation business which has clients worldwide. Yet, with all that, I have been unable to revise or extinguish the feelings that I felt as a schoolgirl when my mother shouted that I was a disgusting specimen of botched humanity, and when my teachers informed the class that I must be cheating instead of actually trying to learn, because “nobody who writes like that could really have the least spark of” the intelligence or motivation” that I “merely seemed to show” in other ways. (The teacher decided that I must have somehow cheated during the class spelling bee, because nobody who “scribbles like an ape in human form” could possibly have been smart enough to remember how to spell any of the words given, let alone all of them. Therefore, at the suggestion of several of the better-liked children who’d done almost as well, the points I had earned by winning the bee — one point per word — were removed from my record and distributed among those “better-performing” children who’d made the suggestion and who had come in second, third, and fourth.) I am certain that events like this — the mindless hell of my childhood — have irremediably excised or stunted a great many of my own potential capacities (such as they are, or ever were). However, I hope I can be proven wrong. And therefore I wonder — and here again, I hope I can be proven wrong — whether indeed, as a result of surviving all this, I have thereby become a mental and emotional monstrosity despite my best efforts to grow into anything else. Have the mental and emotional circumstances described above — the conditions of my existence, when I was growing up — been indeed enough to make me truly what my mother so often called me falsely in her anger: a blot on humankind? A missing link? A failed, degraded not-quite-human? If I was none of those things when I was treated as being all of them — have I unwittingly _become_ those things, against the best of my will and effort to grow otherwise, because of such treatment? I was, after all, incompetent to vanquish or prevent such treatment and its consequences — that is likely to say something about me. A better, stronger person could have come out of this better. If I had been more intelligent and otherwise competent, I would simply have succeeded with one or more of my childhood attempts to sneak out of a damaging home or school and locate and enter a non-toxic environment on my own — sneaking into it, and taking whatever consequences came my way. Or, if indeed no better home or school could be found and entered, it is nobody’s fault but my own that I lacked whatever intelligence and other competence would have been adequate to at least persuade my parents, teachers, and other people to treat me at least somewhat more rationally. Since I could not even manage that ... if I were indeed an intelligent and adequate human, the very least that I should have managed — if not then, then certainly now in adulthood after literally decades of trying — would have been to get my emotions in line with what I know to be true. Since I have signally failed to get my feelings (of intrinsic inferiority, inadequacy, being subhuman, and so forth) into line with the factual data and reasoning which demonstrate that (and how) such feelings are based on errors — that failure itself is adequate proof of my inadequacy. An adequate, competent, intelligent person WOULD have succeeded by now: not merely in refusing to act on feelings which the facts contradict (which is all I have managed so far), but in correcting the erroneous feelings themselves. So — How can I “undamage” myself? And what should I have done (as a child) to prevent being damaged by the actions and events described above? Although Mom has finally renounced her earlier beliefs about me, this decision of hers was just a few years ago, so it does not magically undo what she did for decades previously on the basis of those beliefs. (She holds that against me, still. Now that that she changed her mind, she figures I should be retroactively undamaged by what she eventually stopped saying and doing.) Even her sincerely held commitment to do better — which she is doing her best to act on — does not remove the effects of her past actions. (And my father, siblings, etc., are of course a whole different story: equally complex.) What insights do I need on the best way for me to overcome the consequences of improper, toxic rearing, and to gain — or, if possible, retain from the beginning– a correct mental state despite it all? Just for the sake of completeness — five bits of random trauma in my life ... /1/ In kindergarten, though things weren't terrible, I wasn't well-liked either. One problem was that The other kids (and the teacher) didn't like me using words that four-year-olds generally don't know. (I don't mean swear-words, but simply words that one hasn't ordinarily acquired by age four: "successive,," for instance, and anything else for which there is no exact synonym in four-year-old talk.) A related trouble happened when I asked why there was a discrepancy between the way that the names of the months were abbreviated on the kindergarten's wall-calendar poster (all as three-letter no-periods capitalized abbreviations, such as "SEP" and "OCT") and the way that the teacher-and-owner of the place (Mrs. Harriet Bloomberg, elderly then, and thus doubtless now long dead) abbreviated them when writing the date on the classroom blackboard (right next to that poster), which she did in a much more commonly seen manner ("Sept" and "Oct." and so forth). As she had never looked closely at what she put on her wall (many teachers don't, because people in general often just don't look closely at graphics of any sort), she not only didn't even look at the wall-poster when I asked about it, she denied that "September" was EVER abbreviated with just three letters, let alone ever abbreviated without a period: "Don't make up stories — there is no such thing as writing it with just three letters, NOBODY does that! So, if you really think you see it that way, there is DEFINITELY something wrong with your eyes and you MUST try hard to see things CORRECTLY, until you DO see them correctly. Isn't that right, children?" "[Chorus of the other children's united voices:] "YEEEEEESSSSS, Mrs. Bloomberg ... So, after I tried and failed in all efforts to even get her to LOOK where I was pointing (the other kids were a lost cause in this regard, because I already knew they didn't know how to read anyway], I gritted my teeth and, dutifully, trustingly TRIED with all my might (for some days at least; more likely for weeks or longer) — to make my eyes see what she said they should: and to this day I despise myself for it. I feel like the littlest sell-out. /2/ Another big problem involved the summer day-camp that the kindergarten ran for its students. I'd missed the first few days of camp, owing to chicken-pox, and arrived to find that (over those first few days), I'd missed all sorts of activities that everyone else had been in: notably, everyone had been given (mounted on the back of each child's chair in the kindergarten camp building's main room) an outlined version of his/her name to color in, during an hour which had been set aside for just that activity. Since I'd missed out, my chair's sign remained the white-on-white-with-black-outlines of any other unused coloring-page — the other kids, as they walked past it, took to stage-whispering my name as they walked by, in audible counterpart of its bleached existence — and so it remained all through the end of camp, despite my repeated pleas that I be allowed to take some time from any of the other scheduled activities to color it in. (This could not be done during each day's ten minutes or so of coloring-time, as each day we were given specific things to color: the name-cards had been the first day's coloring project, and I hadn't been there, and I couldn't go back and make it up except by skipping whatever coloring I was NOW being given to do,) /3/ The third thing I'll mention is a bit from the day I was being enrolled in the Jewish private school. My parents and I were in the office of the principal (whose death, some ten years ago, I was glad to hear of), on whose walls hung his various diplomas. (I knew what a diploma was, because Mommy and Daddy had theirs proudly hung on a hallway wall at home). On one of the diplomas, under his name, were the words "honoris causa" — which I had never before encountered (I didn't even know what language they were), but it was certainly possible for a literate six-year-old to guess that this very probably meant "because of honor" in whatever language it was. I was REALLY impressed, of course, because I figured that this must be something like getting a medal or a knighthood (which was correct, because of course this is what's written or printed on honorary degrees), so at some point during this meeting I asked him what the "honoris causa" was for: what had he done to get it? (I figured that, whatever it was, it would have been something terrific, so I wanted to know. What I did not know at the time, or for some decades thereafter, was that — as fairly often with honorary degrees — his had been conferred soon after he had made a rather substantial donation to the college granting it. /4/ Although this next bit is yet another Hebrew school thing, it's rather different because it's something I didn't learn about until I was thirty and dating Andrew [now my husband], who'd grown up in the same neighborhood, and who had in fact attended the same school for a while (though we were never classmates, as he is over a decade older than I am. As I learned from Andrew and from his parents — and as, in fact, been an open secret among his parents' generation in that neighborhood — Andrew's great-aunt Ada had in her youth been the mistress of a then-very-youthful rabbi (Harry Halpern) who was concurrently employed at the local synagogue, whose private school he founded (the school was in fact re-named after him decades later, when he retired) and who in his old age was still the synagogue's rabbi (and of course also a "leading light" on the school's board and in its committees) during, and long after, the years I was there. (He had, by then, long ago put Ada aside — my biggest memories of him are that his sermons were mostly re-used from year to year, and had been written so long before their delivery that /a/ their originally white note-paper was very visibly yellowed, and /b/ many of the matters addressed as "current concerns" were blatantly no longer so: e.g., one sermon he delivered in 1969 mentioned the Korean War as "ongoing": another, in 1968, castigated young men in their twenties for "following the ridiculous new fashion of joining fraternal orders in droves — the Masons, the Elks, and all such distractions afflicting modern youth": as you know, and as I knew even then, such activities were not a young man's fad even in my own childhood: the people still involved in such things averaged almost as old as the rabbi. It is as if he had gotten mentally stuck somewhere hovering around mid-century, if not earlier at times.) /5/ An elementary school trauma NOT at the Jewish school was at the next school I attended, an incredibly Politically Correctitudinous place, in October 1970: a month after I had started there in third grade. The teacher was one of several throughout the country who were, right then, trying out a sort of experiment or rôle-playing game which was meant to teach children not to be bigots. My teacher (Elaine Watts) had recently learned about this game. at a conference, from its inventor: a third-grade teacher in another state, named Jane Elliott (with whom I, too, decades later also had some personal contact, under circumstances described below). Anyway, Ms. Watts (yes, she was one of the early adopters of the title "Ms.") had been trained by her colleague in something called "The 'Brown Eyes, Blue Eyes' Game" which was meant to teach us all about prejudice by first telling us as scientific fact — for a week or two — that blue-eyed people were a superior race (smarter, cleaner, braver, better-behaved, more alert, beautiful, smelled nicer, and all the rest of it) and revising classroom procedures accordingly (blue-eyed children getting to be first in line for recess, and all imaginable other sorts of special favors and extra perks and help, academically and otherwise, while brown-eyes like me were pariahs: the two green-eyed kids were counted among the brown-eyes, simply in order to make the numbers of the two castes roughly equal) — then, of course (as Ms. Watts told us on Friday afternoon after a week of this grade-school Hitlerism), for the NEXT week the tables would be turned and the BROWN-eyed kids were to be the masters, the blue-eyes the underling pariahs) ... that's how it was SUPPOSED to be done, by the protocol for this exercise, BUT ... when Friday afternoon came, and Ms. Watts announced: "Actually, I've made a mistake: it turns out that BROWN-eyed people are the better type of human; of course, I probably made that mistake because I have blue eyes, which explains why I had to study for years and years before they would let me teach even little third-graders" ... when Ms. Watts announced the turn-around (which we'd all been expecting anyway, as we all had been told in advance that this whole set-up WAS an experiment to teach us about bigotry and its consequences), most of the class (blue-eyed and brown-eyed both) said they were "not gonna keep playing, because we are NOT gonna take having HER be one of the good guys! If you do this [give her 'perks' when it's the turn of brown-eyed kids to be the top dogs] , we are NOT gonna cooperate with your experiment any more!" The "popular girls'" clique, especially — all of whom happened to have blue eyes (and all of whom had ALREADY despised me thoroughly from the moment I arrived at the school ) — swore that, IF I were granted a turn at privilege, they would disrupt, not only the experiment, but the classroom and all teaching therein, if I were to be given privileges or favor of any sort. "NO WAY are you putting her above us, at our school!" (They were all very conscious — and made sure that I, too, never forgot — that I was there on a hefty scholarship, and that my parents therefore paid far less of our teacher's salary than was paid by the parents of the "popular clique" kids.) So ... what did Mrs. Watts do, for the sake of the instructional game? She decided that, come Monday, for the rest of the experiment I'd be an "Honorary Blue-Eyes": so that the game, and all we were presumed to learn therefrom, might go on. I am sure my classmates learned SOMETHING from having my own interests sacrificed for (as I was expressly told) the sake of theirs. however, I have excellent reason to believe that what they learned was not the lesson intended. Throughout the rest of my time at the school — grades 3 through 9 — and much later during conversations/correspondence with some of them (once Facebook made it easy to find old classmates & re-introduce myself), it was plain every day that the lessons they'd learned (or that they'd already had well in hand, which the experiment simply reinforced: /a/ the ancient joys of bigotry and peer pressure, /b/ that the less numerous may be sacrificed to the more numerous, in the name of the greater good of the greatest number. (Ms. Watts, and other teachers and staff there, never tired of explaining to me that I should actually feel honored to have "the opportunity to help out the other students' psychological and emotional growth, by being the student they can gain so much from. You are just one person, they are a greater number, and fairness is when the greatest number benefits," etc., etc., etc.) and /c/ for at least some classmates, a corresponding dread that, when I continued to be bullied by the teacher and classmates ("in the name of the greater good") throughout the months and years AFTER the experiment, any classmate of mine might well become the next victim if s/he ever protested or sought to counter the way they had to watch me being treated by teachers and others. ("You've got to be carefully taught ... to hate," runs a Broadway show tune: as I see it, this is unfortunately a lesson far more easily and quickly learned than the SOUTH PACIFIC lyricists imagined.) Decades later, here's how I came into contact with the experiment's deviser, Jane Elliott. She had just appeared on OPRAH (where Mom and I saw her tell how she had eventually from third-grade teaching into a new and full-time career— still continuing, asvI write this — of doing a version of "Brown Eyes, Blue Eyes" as sensitivity training at colleges and in the workplace). So Mom (to her credit, for once) wanted to find and SCREAM at this woman for devising something whose observable after-effects on me had been a direct contributory cause for the school's referring me to yet another therapist. I called Oprah's studio next morning when they opened for business, got Jane Elliott's phone-number and had her on the phone with Mom and me within twenty minutes ... Jane listened to my story (from me and from Mom) and stated unequivocally that /a/ the exercise should NOT have been sacrificially distorted and conceptually mangled as it had glaringly been in my case (accommodating a group's cherished bigotry is no way to teach group-members to wish to end it!), and that /b/ if Jane had been the one in charge (doing this exercise in a school, workplace, or anywhere else), she would have looked beforehand at the extant interpersonal dynamics — and, therefore, would NOT have done, or recommended, or enabled doing, her exercise (or anything similar) in a classroom where "pariah status" would have to be assigned to a newcomer to the group, let alone to the group's SOLE NEWCOMER, let alone to anyone who was ALREADY the group's chosen and approved pariah/scapegoat/target/etc. Other notes: /a/ I've survived several attempted rapes (no successful rapes) — in late teens and in adulthood. (The most recent was when I was 29, during a professional conference on a Russian cruise ship, by a drunken sailor whom I was able to escape by running upstairs because he was on a landing below me. The earliest — and silliest — was also with a drunk: when I was 16 and had been, unusually, invited to a high school New Year's Eve party. The guy was SO drunk that he couldn't even co-ordinate his movements well enough to do what he was obviously trying very hard to to do — namely, to coordinate his arms and hands well enough to grope the girls who were present: he was alternating between conspicuously unsuccessful efforts to rape someone & conspicuously successful efforts to puke voluminously on the carpet: so the host put him to bed, and I left for home (as even having to ride the NYC subway from Manhattan to Brooklyn alone at 10:30 PM on New Year's Eve was a somewhat less creepy prospect than spending one more instant at that party). /b/ Should you need further details on the rest of the rape attempts (which were more upsetting and less funny), I am reasonably willing to share "war stories." However, even the most upsetting of them were nowhere near as bad — in any of their short- OR long-term effects on me — as literally ANYthing else I've already told you of. Worse than all of them, in fact, has been the response of at least some therapists and other "helping profession" types when I tell them about having all of these sorts of things in my life on top of what can now be identified as severe Asperger's (later reclassified under "autism spectrum condition": "Why couldn't you just have a few NORMAL problems instead, such as drug abuse or alcohol abuse or OTHER stuff we bloody well know about? If you HAD to have a religiously traumatized background, for instance, couldn't it be one of the REGULAR kinds, like being born to a couple of cultists or something?" Some said that they managed support groups/therapy groups which I did not qualify for because my problems were too numerous, too varied, too atypical, and/or too small (e.g., I was ineligible for sex-abuse survivors' groups because I'd not been "successfully" raped. (One therapist — who had a group specifically for survivors of clergy sex-abuse — said she'd admit me IF the group members all felt willing to admit a survivor of "only" _attempted_ rape, but the members unanimously turned me down because their rapes had all gone beyond the "mere" attempt, and theirs had all happened far more than once, so they "didn't feel I would fit" in their group. /c/ When I moved out of home for good, married and was free to try out Judaism (which my husband hoped I could love), as I'd looked forward to (simply because I'm the kind of person who believes in doing her homework assignments AS SOON AS she is actually allowed to and is able to), I was chagrined to find that I COULD NOT AND CANNOT get through ritual: e.g., resolving to light Shabbat candles left me just starting at them and crying loudly, unable to light them or do anything else that pertains to the ritual I was trying to perform. (So, very early in our marriage, I had to Just Say No to ritual after ritual that I had HOPED I could do and could mean something by: "Better that — " as I said to Andrew [my husband] — "than that we have kids who grow up thinking that Shabbat means 'The Day When Mommy Freaks Out." This was before Andy and I proved mutually infertile.) /d/ In case you're wondering if I ever took any of this to non-pshrink types: yes, abundantly and in variety: including, among others, rabbis of every conceivable flavor and mixture and wavelength across the Judeo-spectrum (including some Zen rabbis and such-like, too). Most ignored me, as if I were not present (though I was in the office by appointment, or was on the phone by appointment.) One fell out of his chair. The nicest thing any of them ever said about this was that "This is nothing anybody needs to hear about." A rung lower than that was the one who said to me (in the present of my husband) that I would someday get over this if we had children, because [a standard riposte nowadays] "our temple has a Family Education program once the kids are old enough for pre-school, to teach the parents to have a Jewish life and culture along with their children who are learning this as children" — spoken by a rabbi who KNEW, at the time, that my husband and I had turned out to be mutually infertile and had just spent LOTS of money [with our respective parents helping out] on round after round of failed IVF/ICSY treatments (using up the dough that we might otherwise have spent on seeking adoption, legal or otherwise, which was his next suggestion, even though he already also knew some of the medical/neurological reasons that would make adoption agencies VERY unlikely to give an up-check to a couple, especially at our ages — I was then in my forties, Andrew in his fifties. In either case, neither of us cared to be told that the ticket out of my problems was to have a child and enroll it in a particular kindergarten which would concurrently enroll us in an adult version of the same.) And I won't even discuss the one who asked me to consider if the reason Andy and I had failed at having children was that I, in the end, had failed to manage full adherence to Judaism. He said that he wouldn't speculate on whether that was Divine Intevention or just a messed-up psychological state on my part — but either way, he told me, I HAD to snap out of it or I was just a hypocrite.) Usually, when I've shared the above,, or any part of it, it has been to ask for help — at least, help in getting it publicly known and accepted that This Stuff Was Done (and is still being done, to my personal knowledge and observation). My purpose in sharing it with you is also in hopes that it may help in understanding me, and thereby possibly fit into your work. somehow, somewhere. To me, it means much to see someone who is NOT me, out there telling such a tale, and caring about getting it heard, and getting it heard by ANYone (or by some critical mass of "anyones": tiny, maybe, but enough to put it on the map SOMEwhere and get it named. I want it to pass, sooner or later, whatever cultural "tipping point" it must pass, by enough repetitions (however many "enough" may be) to eventually get publicly comprehended. [I am old enough to remember when it was almost impossible to discuss, say, sexual harassment intelligibly and usefully — beyond telling stories of particular instances, and having these discounted — because "sexual harassment" was, as yet, not a term or an identified concept.] Parts of it were printed on a friend's blog in 2016 (links on request), but I think the whole matter deserves wider understanding. With over seven billion people on this planet, I can hardly be the only person who was ever in a situation, or concatenation of situations, like mine.