But it was not only herself she was failing, she knew. Yaakov, too, expected to have more children. He was still young. By not getting pregnant immediately, she felt—in the unreasonable and impatient way women often feel about pregnancy—that her body, which had always served her so well, and which she had always nurtured and cherished—was dealing her an unspeakable betrayal. It did not help that she lived in a place brimming with pregnant women pushing baby carriages with toddlers trailing after them. In the fecundity of Boro Park, she felt like an outcast, cursed and punished for some unforgivable sin.

Having herself checked out medically had only made it worse, for they had found nothing physically wrong, which meant that they could do nothing to help her. When she tried to talk to Yaakov about it, as sympathetic as he was, he seemed a bit impatient. “Have faith, my Leah-le. Wait.” Easy to say if you already had five children!

Wait. It was what everyone counseled her.

Why was it that she could not? Why was it she was so anxious? Was it because the minute you got pregnant, all the laws of separation magically vanished for nine glorious months? Or because Yaakov had already proven his fertility with another woman, and thus the only possible place fault could be laid was at her own feet? Or was it the sad reality that these children whom she loved so much would never truly be hers, that—in the end—she was no more than a glorified babysitter?

She rejected this shattering idea furiously. She loved all of her stepchildren like a mother, she told herself, including Shaindele and even the two older boys she saw so infrequently. As for the two little ones, Chasya and Mordechai Shalom, her Icy and Cheeky, she knew how precious she was to them and they to her. Perhaps because of that, she mourned with excessive zeal all the time she had missed out on in their lives.

How lovely it would have been to have known Chasya when she was a week old, a month old! To watch her give her first smile, grow her first tooth, take her first step. She had been denied all that and couldn’t help but envy the woman who had gotten to spend every second with them, the woman Chasya still searched for. She wanted that for herself, to be part of a child’s life from the very moment they were born.

How terrible it would be to never hold a child in your womb and hear its heart beat against yours, an experience that had no substitute in the life of a woman. The happier it made her to be a beloved wife and mother, the more she longed to deepen and expand that matchless experience with a child of her own, someone who would join them together forever.