Introduction
My Mother’s Story

Today is not turning out like I wanted. Yesterday did not, and I imagine tomorrow will not either. 

I dedicated this book to my mother because it was from her that I ?rst learned that life does not go as planned. It was from her that I learned that it is never too late, that there is always something more, something better. I have carried this lesson with me every day of my life. It has sustained me when my life has not gone as I wanted. It has helped me counsel others. It has helped me be a better me, a better daughter, wife, mother, rabbi. 

My mother was a small-town girl from London, Ohio. Her father died when she was eight. She was one of ?ve kids being raised by a single mother. All she ever wanted was to get out, and at ?fteen, she met my father. He was from the big city of Dayton and had everything she wanted: two parents, big house, family dinners. She thought she’d met her knight in shining armor. Things were ?nally on target to go as she’d planned. 

They married when she was nineteen. She was a mother of two by twenty- four. When they decided to move to Los Angeles and my father started to succeed in his own business, it was everything she’d ever dreamed of. 

But secretly, something did not feel right to her. It was what she’d thought she always wanted. Why wasn’t she happy and ful?lled? She and my father started to ?ght more and more. They argued about money, parenting, the business. The downward slope was slow at ?rst. He got angry at her and at the world. His personality seemed to change. What at ?rst had seemed ?ery and passionate started to feel scary and abusive. My father went into a deep depression. He abandoned the business and eventually refused to get out of bed. He literally lay there, expecting my mother to wait on him day and night. 

They had bills to pay, children in private school, a lifestyle to maintain; she had to go to work. What would she do? She had never balanced a checkbook. She had dated only one man, my father. Her sole job had been as a substitute teacher. 

A Nordstrom was opening in our neighborhood. With no experience, my mother talked her way into a job as a sales assistant. She was in her late thirties learning how to work a computer for the ?rst time. Within a year, she was promoted. The better her life at work got, the worse her home life became. My father grew more abusive. He demeaned her, insulted her, and even hit her. 

She couldn’t leave. Divorce was not part of the life story she had written for herself. My brother and I encouraged her to go. We lived in fear of our father. We never knew what would set him off. We were afraid of staying. Yet she was afraid of leaving. 

But she continued to excel at work. She had discovered her passion. She loved making people look on the outside like they felt on the inside. Within two years, she became a senior personal shopper. Because she knew that everyone is beautiful, everyone loved working with her. 

Four years into her new career, my mother became one of the leading salespeople in her company. Even though my father was continually tearing her down, she began to emerge and see that beauty was not only in others, it was within her. She began to ?nd her authentic self. She began to discover this beautiful, strong, con?dent woman within her. 

In her early forties, once my brother and I were in college, she ?nally left my father. She literally walked out the door with one suitcase and no money and headed to the neighbors’. She did not know where she was going or what would happen next. But she was not going back. As she was walking alone down the street, she thought, “This is not what I planned.” 

This life was not what my brother and I had planned either. At twenty and eighteen, we discovered that our father had incurred debt in our names. Not only were we on our own but we were being chased by the IRS. Every college semester when the bills were due, we prayed. We each found a way to survive. It was hard, but we were the lucky ones. What did we know? We were just starting out. 

My mother, on the other hand, was not. She spent the next ten years rebuilding her life. She moved into a small apartment on a tight budget. She threw herself into her work and into making a living. With each step she became more and more empowered. Instead of waiting for the next promotion, she asked for one and got it. She began to take charge of her own life. She began dating. She started a group for divorced women. She started working out. Even though everything was new and a little uncomfortable, she kept moving forward. 

She began to imagine her life as a successful, single career woman. A woman who discovered her inner strength and brought it to the world. She did not foresee where the plan would go next. So when she met Mort, a con?rmed bachelor, she did not pay much attention. He did not ?t into her new life plan. She had no intention of wasting time with someone who could not commit. 

They dated casually for years. Her life was full, she had made wonderful friends, she loved her job, and she was traveling in her free time. So when Mort proposed, she was afraid to say yes. It was another leap. Her life was good. But she had learned in all those years that, by taking a step, she could change her life. She leapt. 

When I officiated at their wedding, my mother wore my wedding dress. What I said then under the chuppah was that, at her ?rst wedding, she was waiting for someone to rescue her. But at this wedding, she had rescued herself. She had taught us all that, to live the life you want, you have to be willing to leap. You have to be willing to realize that your life is not scripted. The happy ending starts with you. 
 

We Plan, God Laughs?

We have all heard the Yiddish proverb “We plan, God laughs” (Mann traoch, Gott lŠuch), and every time we see on it on a bumper sticker, we laugh too because we know it is true. 

We all have plans.With each stage of life, we imagined who we would be when we “arrived.” But when we got there, things were not quite in place. Life did not turn out like we expected. In fact, at times life seemed to take another direction entirely. For a lot of us, it felt like we failed. We did not measure up. We are not who we thought we would be. Life is not turning out like we planned. 

I remember my ?rst plan. It was the Cinderella plan. I was going to become a beautiful princess.Then one day my fair and handsome prince would save me from my regular existence.We would fall in love with one magical kiss and live happily ever after. At the time the details were foggy, but the plan was in place. As I matured, the elements of fantasy disappeared, but the dream remained. One day I would fall in love with a wonderful man, get married, have 2.5 children, a house, a dog, and live happily ever after. I never thought about what would happen if the plan did not go as planned.What if I did not meet the prince? What if the prince was really a frog? What if I could not have children? What if housing prices were too high? What if I was allergic to dogs? What if I discovered that this plan was not for me after all? What would happen if this plan didn’t work? My fantasies were not necessarily based in reality. 

I have learned this lesson over and over.When I was sixteen, my family spent a week white- water rafting. On the ?rst day I fell madly in love with our guide. He was a teen’s dream: a cool, tall, tan nature man. I wanted to spend the rest of my life on that raft trip, camping, cooking, and sleeping under the stars. It all seemed perfect on the ?rst day. He could quote Thoreau. He could make elaborate dinners on a camping stove. He could lead me around the world on a boat. By the third day I learned he knew only one quotation by Thoreau. Chili was his masterpiece. I get seasick on boats. The smaller the boat, the more severe the illness. By the end, covered in bug bites, exhausted from the experience, starving for the city, a hot meal, and my comforter, I’d realized nature life was not all I had imagined it to be.

Just last week I got stuck in the trap again. Before I got married, I had fantasies of Shabbat dinner at our home. We would sit down perfectly dressed at a beautifully set table with ?owers, with candles, with the aroma of a gourmet meal wafting through the house. As a mother of three small children, I have found out that if we can all manage to sit together at the table for ?ve minutes, it is a miracle. We use paper plates because glass shatters. We use plastic tablecloths because wine stains. The candles can never be on the table because my children are little pyromaniacs. And our favorite smell is pizza. So when a Shabbat dinner goes especially wrong, like ours did just last week, it can seem symbolic of something much bigger. Is my marriage in trouble? Do we have “problem” children? You would have thought that in adulthood (having realized that dogs give me hives and apartment rent in Los Angeles surpasses that of most castles) I would have let go of my improbable fantasies and root myself in reality. Even though “I knew,” I still got angry. It felt like God was laughing at me. He was making a mockery out of my life. If God and I both knew that Cinderella was not real, why was I still waiting for my “happily ever after”? 

Happily Ever After?

It never occurred to me that God might be waiting for his “happily ever after” too. God too may feel that some of his plans have not gone as he wanted and that we were laughing at him. It all started with Adam and Eve. They had only one rule, and they broke it. Cain killed Abel. The Israelites begged to return to Egypt. Moses broke the ?rst set of the Ten Commandments. God plans, we laugh. 

Sometimes literally. Sarah was ninety and Abraham was one hundred when God promised them a son. He said to Abraham, “I will give a son through her [Sarah], I will bless her and she shall give rise to nations.” Abraham had no doubt. Like all men, he imagined he would be virile until he was a thousand. He was overjoyed. He laughed out of sheer happiness. 

Sarah, on the other hand, was more realistic. She knew the odds of getting pregnant at ninety were zero. Just the thought of carrying a child at her age made her laugh. But her laughter was not the same as Abe’s. She laughed mockingly at herself, her husband, and at God. She said, “After I have withered shall I again have delicate skin? And my husband is old!” She was not about to run out and decorate the baby’s nursery. God was angry. Sarah was laughing at him. No one had ever laughed at God. But of course she was laughing at him; all women would have, his plan was ridiculous. But God, angry or not, “remembered” her. God gave Sarah and Abraham a son in their old age. God commanded them to name him Isaac, meaning “laughter.”

God has a sense of humor. With the birth of Isaac, God claimed the true meaning of laughter. Laughter was possibility, not mockery. Laughter came to represent joy, creation, love, faith, and passion. The tradition teaches that on the day Isaac was born there was so much of this new laughter in the world that women who had previously been barren gave birth. 

People who had been sick were healed. On that day, the day of Isaac’s birth, the world was ?lled with true joy. It was ?lled with laughter. 

Excerpted from We Plan, God Laughs © Copyright 2012 by Sherre Hirsch. Reprinted with permission by Doubleday. All rights reserved.