Good Read Made By Hand

Logic told her there wasn’t time to do the project the way she wanted. Tova mirvis decided not to listen.

SURELY AN E-VITE would have been easier. But I was transfixed by the array of card stock and the delicate sheets of shimmering, speckled, and floral-printed paper displayed in the stationery store. My son’s bar mitzvah was a few months away, and an idea had seized me: I needed to make 200 invitations by hand.

The practical side of me stepped up first in protest: so much unnecessary work. Why do this? And then, not far behind, the critical side: You don’t know how to do this.

These were valid points. As a mother of three and a novelist, I had little time to spare. I didn’t think of myself as the artsy type, at least not the kind that used paper, glue, and paint. With my children, I could do projects that were fun and messy, projects you would hang on the fridge. But not something that would come close to looking perfect.

There was another reason that an unnecessary project wasn’t a good idea right now.

Until recently, I’d had what appeared to be an orderly life—married for 17 years with three children and a house in a tight-knit community. I’d gotten engaged when I was 22, to my first serious boyfriend, after just a few months of dating. The story we told ourselves of our courtship was of an innocent, young love: no struggles, no complications. We were perfect for each other, we’d believed.

Yet over the years that version of our marriage had ceased to match the way I actually felt. Quietly, I harbored the concern that my husband and I couldn’t navigate any difficult issue together. The growing differences between us, my discontent and loneliness—these issues needed to be kept out of sight for fear of unraveling the story we were intent on upholding. I thought of myself as the kind of person who would stay in her marriage no matter what. I didn’t know what a person who would upend her life looked like, but I was certain she didn’t look like me.