About Kthulah



Here’s my story in a nutshell:

Before I came to Israel, I was an unhappily married mother of one daughter, who is hearing impaired.  She’s so smart that she fooled us for awhile, and fooled the doctors even longer, into thinking that she could hear fully.

When she was almost 3 though, the jig was up when we forced the military doctors to look at her by going around them, to the state authorities.  Once they did the tympanogram, the Army had to do the rest.

So my first ex and I were still figuring out what to do with each other, and basically holding it together for my daughter’s sake, when I met my second husband online.  We started out as friends, but things grew closer.

Meanwhile my daughter was going to preschool and hating it because they wouldn’t let her or any of the other kids communicate using sign language.  I was having to force her to go to school every day, and it was not doing either of us any good.  I also noticed that she was becoming more and more withdrawn and saw me as the enemy for forcing her to go to that horrible place.

So my second husband, then friend, Shai told me about MICHA, a preschool and organzation for hearing impaired kids in Haifa.  With no reason left to stay in the U.S. I asked my first husband if it would be okay for us to try it out.  Steven, like me, would do anything for our daughter, so we took a chance and made it happen.
All her life, my daughter had never said an actual word, despite the sorry excuses for speech therapists in the U.S.  I mostly used American Sign Language and home signs with her…but within two weeks of going to preschool at the MICHA school, one morning she walked into my bedroom and said, “Boker tov!”  That means, “Good morning,” in Hebrew.

I was stunned.  I cried.  That’s when I decided to stay.  I called Steven to tell him, and he decided the same.

Because she was a special case, we could have stayed on a student visa, if the Ministry of Interior’s airport rep. hadn’t racial profiled us on arrival.  So after going in circles with them, basically stalling so she could at least finish that school year, we returned to the U.S. for awhile.

There, we were in Prince William county instead of Fairfax, and they had a different approach.  They understood that the old way wasn’t doing the kids any good, so they were trying new things.  Moon (my daughter)’s teacher this time around, was hearing impaired herself.  I was happy about the change, but they still had a ways to go before they were settled into a real plan.  By now, if they did what they were thinking of doing at the time, they are probably the best in the country.

Back then though, I was hoping to get back to Shai.  So the fact that MICHA was here was a draw, but it wasn’t as crucial as it had been…but I couldn’t ask Shai to give up everything he’d earned in his life to come live with me.  So Shai and I got married, despite our beliefs against making paperwork, and I moved to Israel.

After going in many more circles with the Ministry of Interior, Moon and I got our citizenship…and just as we thought things would settle down, Shai and I started having problems.   There comes a time in every man’s life when the hormones no longer fill the gap between what he can tolerate and what he really needs.  So I had to let him go to get his needs met.

It was a difficult transition, made even more difficult by the problematic dating scene here.  Ethnicity-religion is all important for most people, and if you aren’t a part of their particular group, you’re little more than a disposable tissue.    I was totally unprepared.

Shai and all of my close friends here totally do not care about anyone’s color or what religion their parents are.  They weren’t raised that way, and didn’t raise their kids that way.  Something was happening all around them that they noticed, but weren’t sure until seeing what I went through here, how deep and devastating it was.  Apparently, Hitler lost the battle, but won the war.  Israel has become an experiment in eugenics.

I’m a relative outsider, so I see things that many people living in the middle of it, don’t.  What I observe is disturbing, not only for me, but for Arab and Jewish women here as well.  Unlike in the U.S. where the majority believing that a skinny blonde is the best thing a woman can be, doesn’t reduce the population; here, that way of thinking does.  The standards of beauty in this, the Jewish homeland, are extremely anti semitic.

So in some ways, it is a good thing to be an outsider.  It is easy to find the few who would take me seriously here because they have to be exceptionally brave and phenomenally honorable.  If I were not an outsider, I might not notice someone was dating me because of social convenience, and not for love.

Aside of my romantic life being very weird, I have come to love this country in some ways.  The bad is very bad, but the good is very good.  There couldn’t be a MICHA in the U.S. at the time I left because the school system wasn’t ready to accept that being deaf does not in any way reduce someone’s intelligence.  Here, they understood that from the beginning of their school system being established.

The survivalist attitude permeates many areas of real Israeli life.  In fact, the eugenic, overly coddled, high sense of entitlement folks wallowing in a persecution complex about atrocities they never endured, are not the real Israel.  They’re parasites on the ass of the real Israelis who somehow keep this country running despite a corrupt government and apathetic majority.

It’s the real Israelis who make this a place worth calling home.