Divorced, Traditional Mother of Two with a Non-Jewish Boyfriend

	Reprinted with permission of JewZ.com

Call it luck. I have unearthed that rare beast, a single guy who loves my kids. In many ways, we're the perfect team. He's too slow in the kitchen to cook for starving children; I do high-speed gourmet. I can't draw; he's a professional artist. But I'm also an observant Jew, while Ted grew up Catholic.

Even so, my kids adore him right back. He tosses them in the air, plays all the "wild" games I refuse to. What impresses them most? As my son, Yerachmiel Meir (YM), told Ted admiringly, "You can eat squirrel if you want to!"--something YM can't do, due to kosher dietary laws.

Okay, so my children (Elisheva, 4 and YM, 5) lead insular lives. They go to Jewish schools. We share Shabbat (Sabbath) and holidays with family and friends. They say brachot (prayers), with a fluency that I-not raised religiously-secretly envy. Ted, a co-worker I've been dating for a year and a half, has been their first glimpse into an exotic world that contains non-Jews. YM announces to strangers, "Ted's Christian," like he's bragging.

As accepting as they are, the kids are puzzled; they wonder what he's doing here. I overheard YM saying to Elisheva, "You can't marry Ted; he's not Jewish!"

Once, I thought perhaps we could be a "mixed" family. Ted rarely attended church, so we'd only have to deal with seasonal "Christmas/Hanukkah" and "Passover/Easter" issues. And as puzzling as Judaism was to him, he admitted that it seemed good for my kids, and that it made sense to raise any future children in the same way. But as the months passed, I felt less and less satisfied. The relationship was blossoming, but I found myself wishing for more of a shared Jewish and spiritual connection.

Finally, I confronted the truth: I wanted a Jewish family. Or, rather, I needed Ted to join the Jewish family we already had. He'd been holding back, observing our rituals from a distance, like an anthropologist. Finally, I broke down and admitted to him that although his companionship meant so much to me, the picture of our future together could not be complete without one final piece: his neshama (soul).

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