Zoe Strickman... a TATTY

I have some exciting news. I am a tatty!

The baby is a boy. He was born May 19th, 2007 (2 Sivan), on my Hebrew (and English) birthday. He weighs 7 pounds, 10 ounces, and he is 20 inches long. He has beautiful brown eyes, and a cute little round head. He is totally interactive, and he loves to cuddle and sleep in our arms.

The day before the baby was born, I heard my wife tell the baby, "tomorrow is a good day to come." The following morning, she is totally excited telling me knock knock jokes ("...knock knock. Who's there? Baby Strickman is coming today!") Half awake, I couldn't tell if she was kidding or not. When it occurred to me that she was serious, we got ready, hopped in the car, and drove to the hospital.

The whole day was taken up saying Tehillim (psalms). Specifically, I learned that the Lubavicher Rebbe in wrote in the beginning of Sefer Toldos Admur Maharash that,

"According to the instructions issued by the Tzemach Tzedek to his sons during the birth of the Rebbe Maharash, the following chapters of Tehillim are recited: 1, 2, 3, 4, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 33, 47, 86, 90, 91, 92, 93, 104, 112, and 113 to the end."

So I spent the whole day by my wife's side, catering to her every need. Every moment I had free, I read the book of Tehillim, and I focused on those chapters, along with chapters 20, 23, 30 [my chapter], 27 [her chapter], and 106 [the Rebbe's chapter]. I said so much Tehillim that day I thought my head was going to explode. I did so fervently because my Rabbi said, "Zoe, you should say Tehillim all the way until after the baby is born because the words you say can affect your wife's health and the health of the baby. So, you can never say too much tehillim." Later, when my baby was handed to me, I felt that the whole experience was worth it.

Since the birth on Friday, I spent Shabbos at the hospital so that I can be there with my wife. The baby is adorable. Tonight since shabbos ended, I came back to the apartment, and I spent the evening setting up furniture, strollers, etc. My wife and my newborn son come home from the hospital tomorrow afternoon.

Niddah During Pregnancy REVERSED!

After the last post, a man named Moshe wrote me this comment to my last post. B'kitzur, my 9-month pregnant wife had a medical exam, and during the exam, she was cut down in her area by the doctor. She felt pain when it happened, and later found blood on the toilet paper when she urinated.

That night as soon as it happened, I called the town Rabbi and told him the details, and he told me there was a presumption that since the blood came from that area, she is Niddah. However, after Moshe's comment which came to me by e-mail on Friday right before Shabbos, I went back to the Rabbi with his letter.

After hearing what we had to say (me and the letter), the Rabbi and I went back and forth asking and answering questions about the size of the stain of blood, the color, etc. After mentioning that she felt the pain when the cut happened, he exclaimed, "She felt pain when she was cut??? That changes the whole situation!!" Apparently I left this small detail out in our previous conversations.

A few minutes later, the Rabbi called me up and told me that the fact that she felt pain changed the whole situation. That, on top of the fact that she is pregnant and is not supposed to have a period -- AND the fact that the stain was NOT on a white cloth, but on a piece of toilet paper -- AND the fact that she didn't stick the toilet paper inside which would have created a question of whether the toilet paper was a bedika -- but rather, she just dabbed the toilet paper on the surface -- the presumption of Niddah had been broken and we had created enough coolas [doubts] by all these factors combined to safely say that my wife was not a Niddah.

This story alone is enough to justify to anyone why blogging is valuable to me and to my marriage. Sometimes I just don't know the answers and by having you review my stories and my issues when they arise, your objective opinions have helped find a valuable solution. This has happened over and over during the course of the past few years. In this case, it helped break a presumption of something as serious as Niddah.

Had Moshe not written that letter to me through his comment on my blog, my wife and I would have counted five days, after the fifth day, she would have done a hefsek tahara, and she would have had to check herself with a bedika cloth [a cloth used to check for blood] for seven clean days before she would have immersed in a mikveh. All this would have had to been done before I would have been allowed to have any physical contact - even a touch on the shoulder - with her.

Also, the difficult thing was that since the baby is so close to being due, chances are that by the time this whole Tahara [purity] cleansing process would have been finished, my wife would have already have gone into labor, and having a baby makes the wife Niddah for a six-week period before she goes to the mikveh. So if you add six-weeks to the two-weeks (give or take) it would have taken to make her Tahara again, that would have been a long time that I couldn't touch or have any physical contact with my wife. Thank you Moshe.

On a mystical side note, my rabbi mentioned that it is a Segula [a sort of mystical blessing that is brought down by a particular physical action done during a particular time] for pregnant women to go to the mikveh. When they do this, they bring down blessings for the other women going to the mikveh after them to have a child. So with this occurance, my Rabbi told me that my wife should go to the mikveh [and jokingly added "a few times"] so that she could help other women have children from this potential disaster. My wife heard this and said that she would be willing to do this, especially the night she would have gone to the mikveh had she been a Niddah, because perhaps there is a woman who would have gone afterwards that was having trouble having a child.

-Zoe

Niddah During Pregnancy from Medical Checkup

Okay, onto the exciting part of the evening.

My wife is expecting our first child next month, which means that she is in her 9th month of our pregnancy.

Tonight her doctor did a test to see whether she ever had strep throat, because if she did, she might pass that to the baby during labor and birth which could be dangerous to the baby.

However, when she was doing the procedure, my wife felt a bit of pressure because the doctor cut my wife inside her vaginal area. Later, my wife was urinating, and after checking the toilet paper, she saw blood. "Houston, we have a problem," she said.

Normally, religious women who are in a Tahara [ritual purity] state don't look at what comes out of them from that area because if it is blood, then she might be in a state of Niddah [ritual impurity]. The presumption is that if blood comes from the vagina, then regardless of whether it came from the vaginal walls or the uterus, she is Niddah. Pregnant women as a general rule do not get their period, therefore they do not enter the state of Niddah. However, after my wife bled from her cut, the situation was different.

We called the local rabbi and my mashpia, and after a few phone calls, my wife and I understood the situation: she is now 9 months pregnant and is in a state of Niddah. So now we have to wait 5 days, and then she does a Hefsek Tahara, where she begins counting 7 clean days using a bedika cloth. After counting 7 clean days, she goes to the mikveh [ritual bath]... or by then the delivery room.

The interesting thing about the timing of this is that the laws of family purity (Taharas HaMishpacha) help a couple bond and become closer through their physical distance from each other. By not being permitted to sleep in the same bed, to cuddle, or even to be intimate, the couple becomes sensitized to each other and as a result, they become closer. By not being able to touch, when they are allowed to touch again, the feelings get heightened and more exciting.

Our situation is that my wife got pregnant immediately after our wedding, so after our first time being separated after the wedding, we never had to count days of cleanliness, and we never had to separate for purposes of Taharas HaMishpacha more than once. Thus, intimacy became the norm and being able to touch each other whenever we wanted lost some of it's forbidden pleasure. Thank G-d now, right before the baby is born when my wife will have entered a Niddah state upon the baby's birth and we will have had to be separate for six weeks, after she goes through this cycle of becoming Tahara, we will IY"H have around a week and a half to be together physically before she gives birth to our first child.

A "Document Review" Paycheck

It has been almost a month since my last post because my life has been pretty ordinary until tonight. My days have been spent contacting patent law firms and intellectual property law firms across the United States with emphasis in the Colorado, New York, New Jersey, District of Columbia, and Minnesota states.

Additionally, I have been putting in around 12 hours daily posting my resume to job sites and e-mailing recruiters and networking.

Last week for the first time, I had a quick 25 hour job at a document review firm in Denver where I had the chance to sit in front of the computer and review documents for a second request from the Department of Justice. Basically, that entailed looking through thousands of documents and checking ["tagging"] them as to whether or not they apply to the case at hand.

This is my life. The jist of it is that since my wife will be losing most (75%) of her paycheck in a few weeks because she is going to be having our first child and going on maternity leave, I feel that the quickest way to replace her income is through these temporary document review recruiters. Unfortunately, while a patent attorney makes close to six figures, I have an interview on Tuesday to meet with a recruiter about a document review project in another state (a 1.5 hour drive, plus traffic) which pays $25/hr. This amounts to roughly $1000/wk working 40 hours per week which will be slightly higher than what my wife is currently making. The tough thing to grasp is that the average document review project pays between $35/hr to $40/hr. At least this will be a paycheck.

Ultrasounds and our doctor suggesting an abortion with 12 weeks to go in the pregnancy.

It is Feburary 25th, 3:45am, and I cannot sleep. I just spent the last twenty minutes playing with my wife's belly which contains our highly-reactive kicking baby. I think the activity was too much for my wonderful sleeping wife, who consequently just kicked me out of the bed.

Our kicking baby is the subject of this blog entry, as he or she has caused my wife and I quite a scare.

The Rebbe was highly against having ultrasounds "just for fun," or "just for whatever." His reasoning was that we shouldn't disturb the growing process of the baby unless there was a significant reason to do so [especially in such a lawsuit-oriented society]. The Rebbe was against routine ultrasounds and unnecessary testing, especially since in normal circumstances, we Jews do not believe in abortion, and thus it does nobody any good to peer into the womb unless there is something that could be fixed as a result of having the information from the ultrasound.

Anyway, after having two ultrasounds and after tracking the progress of our unborn child for almost the past two months, the doctor on Friday morning suggested that we get an abortion because there is a possibility that something is wrong. I want to point out that we are late in the third trimester and we have a smart, reactive, and playful child in the womb, and the doctor suggested that while it is illegal in our State to perform an abortion at this point of the pregnancy, there are certain States that we could travel to where we could receive an abortion.

I'll tell you right upfront, while my wife and I didn't even look at each other when this was suggested, later we shared how we were both horrified at the suggestion of an abortion, especially because nothing is deformed or missing and because the organs are all in good health and are in proportional shape. The problem that the doctors were seeing is that our unborn child is not growing at the rate they feel he or she should be growing, so while the doctors think that this might vaguely point to a genetic trisomy problem, it seems that for the time being, my little "mini me" is indeed mini.

Anyway, all this in the wake of me passing the patent bar exam and finally being finished with all my schooling has led to quite a bit of stress and concern for the health of our unborn child.

After speaking to my mashpia today about the situation, he agreed with my wife that since there is nothing for certain wrong with our child, and since further monitoring with ultrasounds cannot change the genetics of our child, nor can further ultrasounds induce its growth to fall back into normal levels, it is probably best that instead of having bi-weekly ultrasounds to monitor the child's growth and dampen the pregnancy with worries and concerns, that we should let nature take its course and allow the pregnancy to proceed without bothering the baby repeatedly since in this case, there is nothing that can or would be done to change the genetics, the health, or the size of the baby by peering into the womb through yet another ultrasound checkup.