Ruchama ben Yosef: Singing My Way Through Infertility
[Originally posted in 2012]
When Ruchama ben Yosef, the oldest of 11 children, got married at the age of 19, it did not even occur to her that she might be infertile. But less than a year after she married, she was told by doctors that she would be unable to conceive without medical intervention.
Ruchama told Dikla Gal-Ed of Hallel Magazine, “I was 21 years old, only married for a year and a half, but that feminine place, deep there within my womb, awoke when I married and [even more] with the knowledge that something was wrong. There are women who are married ten years and the desire for a child doesn’t awaken within them. For every woman, this desire awakens at a different point of their lives, but for me this happened early on… And then I had to go through the very unpleasant part of testing and locating the problem….”
In a diary Ruchama kept during that period in which she described the pain she endured throughout the testing and fertility treatments, one day she wrote, “I am full of holes. I am dripping from all of these holes.”…
“There were difficult painful moments,” Ruchama says, “But I went to the treatments with joy. I knew that in the end they would bring me a child. Therefore, I decided I would simply be happy about it. I understood that my child would have a great soul, and therefore many people had to help to bring him into the world, and that made me happy….”
When, after five and half years of marriage, Ruchama heard from a nurse that her third IVF treatment had been successful, she remembers, “My whole body started shaking. I started crying hysterically and I passed the phone over to my husband. That was a moment that I will never forget for my whole life.”
Ruchama with her son Eli’oz who will be turning 2 this Chanukah. Mazal tov!
{Update from 2022, more recently Ruchama had another baby b”H]
