Give yourself time. But time was exactly what she didn’t have! Thirty-five going on thirty-six! But so what? Women were having babies well into their forties, even fifties these days, she tried to comfort herself. And sometimes you even read in the newspapers about a sixty-year-old becoming a mother! Yeah, right. That was all she needed—to look like her baby’s grandmother; to have children when she had no strength left to raise them.

She didn’t want to have a second family, to have a baby in the house when Shaindele had already made Yaakov a grandfather, and Chasya was fifteen and Mordechai Shalom was having his bar mitzvah. She wanted to raise them as brothers and sisters; for them to play together and to be part of each other’s lives. And that could only happen if she had a baby soon, she thought.

But what about the economic situation? Having a baby wasn’t practical, she reasoned with herself. After all, it was going to take years for Yaakov to earn significantly more money, and she was going to have to cut back when she gave birth and had a little one to care for.

All that was true, but unconvincing. So what? Nothing she had ever done had been practical! And yet all of those impractical things had brought her so much joy: becoming a religious Jew when it was so easy to be a secular one with no restrictions, no don’ts—don’t eat this, don’t eat that, don’t watch television or go to movies. No nosy neighbors. No scanning the labels of food for exactly the right rabbinical endorsements. No dress code. No horrible wigs.

But anything worth having, she thought, was also worth the trouble of dealing with all the problems that came with it. The easy way had not brought her joy. All those orchestra tickets to the ballet at Lincoln Center and concerts at Carnegie Hall; all those movie tickets and cable subscriptions and Hermès bags had never brought her anywhere near the kind of happiness she had experienced in Boro Park with Yaakov and his children. It was the real life she had wanted and dreamed of, full of so many good and important things.

It was worth the effort.

She remembered the biblical passages in which the barren matriarch Rachel passionately declared to her husband, another Yaakov: “Bring me children, or I will die!” And his testy answer: “Am I God Who can open your womb?” And then there was Elkanah, the husband of Hannah in the book of Samuel, also a second wife, who writhed in agony for her childlessness under the pitiless taunting of her husband’s fecund other wife, Peninnah. “Am I not better to you than ten sons?” the clueless Elkanah tells Hannah, missing the point completely.