My sister-in-law is 7. My husband is 27. People can’t control themselves when they hear this so they always ask, “Are they from the same father?” Sigh. Yes, yes, they are. Please ask me more because who doesn’t want to talk about their in-laws having sex?
From this people usually segue to “How many siblings do you have?” I usually roll my eyes and stare at the heavens at this point. It sounds like an easy, safe conversation topic but with me, there don’t seem to be many safe, easy conversation topics, you know.
So I do a dramatic pause and then I say. “There are 10 of us…give or take a few.”
Hearing this, people think I grew up in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish home where my mother gave birth every year for 10 years.
If they already know I converted to Judaism, they just assume my family was REALLY, REALLY Catholic.
Because what do ultra-Orthodox Jews and Catholics have in common?
A need to overpopulate the world.
The last time I asked my father to make a list of all my brothers and sisters, he came up two short. (No, really, I’m not making this stuff up.) So I know you’re wondering, how the heck did he lose two kids in one conversation?
Well, my father is your basic stereotype of a Latin lover. My father only thinks about women. Lots and lots and lots of women. On our last family vacation, Papi took me to meet his girlfriend. Sorry, girlfriends. I didn’t catch their names. Papi called them Girlfriend #1. Girlfriend #2. And Girlfriend #3. And no, not to their faces of course. Papi is smoother than that.
Papi knows women, he knows how to make them swoon. Except for the lady at the birth certificate office. When my father tried to pull birth certificates for all his kids, this lady gave him a dirty look, refused to give him the certificates claiming he had “clogged up the system.” Basically, she was not having any of his baby mama drama.
But I don’t blame my father. I blame my grandfather…who I only met once. But even then, I would have done anything for him. Anything. You see, he seduced me over a toy baby calf. My grandfather had seduced so many woman with so much less. Family folklore says that when Abuelo died, my father met all of Abuelo’s illegitimate children and baby mamas at the funeral.
So it’s true. My grandfather was hot. My father’s hot. My mother was hot, too. And just in case you wonder where my mother got it from, let me tell you about the time my grandmother asked me “So you know how sometimes you can have a kid but you’re not sure who the father is?”
No, no, Grandma, I don’t know. I think hotness skipped a generation.
Aliza Hausman is a Dominican-American Latina and Orthodox Jewish convert (Jewminicana for short!), freelance writer, blogger (at “Memoirs of a Jewminicana”) and speaker.
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{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
While I find this story fascinating, I don’t think you should put your family business out there like that. Please don’t take it the wrong way, I just think this is the kind of information that can be thrown not only in your face but your husband, future children and your other immediate family as well. While your father probably doesn’t care, maybe other family members would. The world can be a very small place.
My papi is not quite as successful with breeding as yours, Furthermore he stayed married to my mother while producing his 2 bastards, sorry, children out of wedlock.
But I can completely understand why Aliza would be upfront about the story. It’s a way of exorcising demons.
Great story Aliza! Jews are from so many different walks of life these days. We can all learn from each other, and from each other’s stories and backgrounds.
*sigh* Aliza is so awesome.
I once remarked to an Assistant Scoutmaster of my son’s Boy Scout troop that there was a fairly large age difference between his 15 and 9 year old sons. He chuckled and said he has children “once a decade”, and told me that he also has two grown children in their 30’s and 20’s. There may be more than one mother, but he didn’t mention it and I would never ask about something that personal if the information was not mentioned.
And then there was the time that I was talking about my friend from high school who had five children in five and a half years. The (Jewish) person I was talking to asked me “Is she Orthodox?” The answer is: No, she and her husband were raised as Catholics and joined an evangelical Christian church as adults. She says that large closely-spaced families are common in the rural area of Wisconsin where she lives.
I don’t think that it is a problem that Aliza writes about her families’ situations in public. If the information can somehow “be used against her” and her husband and future children, then trying to keep it secret would make things worse not better. Better to be open about it than let it get out and be spread through “lashon hara”.
NOT funny post