Better Than Fiction

Back in Jerusalem.

My close friends sent responses which were literally overflowing with sarcastic giggles after I dashed of an email with the following remarks:

"I have discovered that I give off some sort of strange, Semitic mojo when it comes to men here. Better put: I am a magnet for extremely forward, late-20's Jewish guys who are all here for the summer to meet the woman that they are going to bring home to their mother. Currently, I find myself juggling a quasi-serious "situationship" with a future Jewish-American gynecologist named "Chaim". Chaim has not only asked me to marry him within the two weeks of making my acquaintance, but he seems to think that I am going to be a fantastic mother--not only to "our" yet to be born children (who, like us, will all possess good, Jewish names)--but to his already extant 10-year-old girlchild and 8-year-old boychild. Thoughts, anyone?"

Ah, my JJB, otherwise known as "Chaim"...

Yes, yes, it quickly came to the fore that, at 28 years old, my JJB was not only a child himself, but he had two children of his own. Any rational person would ask, "What happened to the mother of these little people?". The mother, he told me, god rest her soul, was dead. With prodding, he elaborated that she passed rather suddenly of undiagnosed ovarian cancer, leaving him with two magnificant children.

It goes without saying that I found this story immediately traumatizing. It also goes without saying, that, while he was off doing our laundry one afternoon, I took the time to fully assimilate all of the information he laid out for me. He was a 28-year-old, single father, from an extremely wealthy and supportive Jewish-American family. He was in medical school, and he hoped to one day open his own birthing clinic. He loved women, and he was very active in a local battered women's shelter back home. Because he needed help with the children, he had a very-involved nanny, who was well-paid and heavily-invested in not only his children's lives, but his life as well.

Somehow, he wanted to bring me into this. Somehow, he had himself convinced that we could all live happily ever after: Me, Him, Two Children of a Dead Woman, and The Nanny.

And this was just the tip of the iceberg.