Gail Hareven: The Confessions of Noa Weber

Sandy from Seattle abandoned four children and her husband for a certain clown, a real honest-to-goodness clown who put on a performance at her son’s seventh birthday party, and who now thinks he’s doing her a favor when he agrees to see her once every few months. Debra from Dallas got out of jail a year ago after making a childish attempt to poison her alcoholic’s wife. Terry from Toronto jams up the mailbox, the fax machine, and the telephones of her lying ex with endless hysterical messages, and he’s about to sue her for the damage she’s caused his business, but all the silly cow can think about is what it’ll be like to see him in court and how exactly he’ll look at her there.

Sandy from Seattle, Debra from Dallas, Betty from Boston, what imbecilic names they choose for themselves. As if they’ve entered a contest for Miss World, and are about to be called onstage in their bathing suits. And now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome dopey Debra from Dallas, senile Sandy from Seattle, and number fifteen on our list, brainless Betty from Boston. Here they are, our gorgeous girls, stepping up one after the other in the nakedness of their cute little souls.

Women who love too much are supposed to regret the fact that they were so dependent and so addicted, to regret it profoundly and to apologize profusely. As far as regret is concerned, I don’t know: but apologizing is another matter, and if anyone asked my opinion I would say that most of the group doesn’t need to apologize to anyone. Not as a matter of any urgency at any rate. Somebody screwed these screw-ups, most of them got beaten and betrayed, insulted and humiliated by the scum they fell in love with, and nevertheless they gave them their hearts and souls, and quite often their property too. So you can despise them for it, it’s definitely possible to despise them, but apologize? Let their lousy men apologize first. And let them change the whole system before anything else.

From what I’ve come to understand, a woman joins the group when in general terms the whole love-thing begins to seem unprofitable to her. She reaches this understanding a little late in the day, but in the last analysis that’s what it’s all about: the cost exceeds the gain, the balance of energy is upset, the psychic economy is on the verge of bankruptcy. That’s the way they talk on the site. So is it any wonder, girls, that most of our members come from the strongholds of capitalism? And is it any wonder that nearly all these Protestant ladies with hemorrhoids in their souls talk about “investing in a relationship,” about “profit” and “waste” and “loss”? Okay, I don’t object. I think in these terms too, at least once a day.

When I enter the forum, I identify myself by my pseudonym, say hi to everyone, and then sit in my corner in Jerusalem. The women who love too much allow me to sit in silence while they give me the benefit of their experience, which is certainly very kind and gracious of them. The women in LAA permit me to watch the proceedings from my corner and grow in strength, until such time as I am able to move myself and my fingers and come forward with the whole sad story of my addiction. Debra from Dallas, Sandy from Seattle, Ursula from Utrecht, Terry from Toronto, Chelsea from Charleston, Beatrice from Bern, all the regulars sit patiently on their hemorrhoids and wait for me to admit at last that, yes, I too am suffering from the same progressive disease, and I too am powerless over love, and that only a power greater than myself can restore me to sanity. But I have no intention of giving them this satisfaction and confessing on the Internet.

Because the fact is, dear friends, that there may be “brothers-in-arms” but there are no “sisters-in-love,” and my devotion to Alek doesn’t give rise in me to any consciousness of sisterly solidarity. Certainly not with dopey Debra or senile Sandy. Eternally sudden, self-absorbed, ardent, and grandiosely megalomaniac, the monster of love sees itself as unique and alone in the cosmos, and Noa Weber doesn’t have even a drop of empathy for the romantic folly of her fellows.

I remember that, when my daughter was still small and I had already begun to love her, I was overwhelmed by a powerful feeling of solidarity with other mothers of small children, whoever they may be. Mothers in the park. Mothers at the nursery. Mothers everywhere. In nineteen seventy-five or — six, I would sit and gnaw at my fingernails in front of those black and white images televised from Vietnam, then in the dark go into the room where Hagar was sleeping on her stomach with her bum in the air and listen to her breathing, covering her head with the palm of my hand.

But maternal love is one thing and romantic love is another, and all I can say is that romantic love certainly doesn’t fan the flame of humanism in me.

CONFESSING

A few times I almost confessed to the girls in LAA. “Forgive me, sisters, for I have sinned.”

“How have you sinned, sister?”

“I’ve distorted, I’ve lied, I’ve pretended to be someone I’m not. I’ve lived like a slave and an idolator in secret, while boasting of a freedom I didn’t possess. For almost thirty years one feeling has served me as a justification for a lack of feeling. I loved something I should have loathed, and I didn’t love what was worthy of being loved enough.”

Women who love too much aren’t very interested in metaphysical sins of this nature. Squandering their child’s college-savings fund, throwing acid at the legal wife, abandoning their bodies to violence, self-imprisonment, subsidizing their man’s drug habit by prostitution, catatonic depression, drunk driving, these are the kinds of practical sins that preoccupy them, and in comparison to them my sins of thought and feeling turn white as snow. Well, maybe not quite white, but you could certainly say they pale in comparison.

It’s not the fact that I have no sensational sins that prevents me from confessing to the group. The problem is the language. They are all guilty of “co-dependency,” they all want to free themselves of “harmful relationships” and make themselves fit for “meaningful relationships.” They are all trying “to develop their spiritual aspect,” to “grow emotionally,” “to be in touch with their feelings”—whatever the hell that means — and all of them without exception believe in the liberating effect of archaeology. As a consequence of this belief they carry out energetic excavations in their family history, and on bad nights I definitely find their stories gripping. Senile Sandy from Seattle, for example, had an alcoholic father and an alcoholic grandfather, which in her opinion and that of the group explains the “co-dependency” she has with her clown. Brainless Betty from Boston has no history of alcoholism in the family, but she had a neglectful mother who to this day is still a compulsive overeater. And it’s certainly touching to read how little Betty used to hide the bread in hopes of saving something for her school sandwich from her mother’s nightly kitchen raids. Except that according to Betty’s and the rest of the group’s logic, a mother who loves food sentences her daughter to a lifetime of compulsive love, and at that point I stop being touched and begin to laugh.

On a number of occasions I was tempted to make the girls happy and join the party at last by cooking up some sort of terminal explanation for my case. An eloquent etiology of my disease. Ready? Yes, they’re all ready. So what happened to me, girls, is that my father was hardly ever at home, my heroic father was in the army with men and other women, he was with other women a lot, and I never had a real home either, because the first eight years of my life I spent in the children’s house on a kibbutz. Allow me to confine myself for a moment to the story of the kibbutz.