Deborah Danan
Adjusting to the new normal
Now, nearly 9 months after the October 7 attacks, we’ve settled into a routine. Schools in most of the country are operating, people are going out, life is continuing — but the reminders that life is anything but normal are everywhere, puncturing the facade: from posters of hostages on every tree to the almost daily news of the deaths of loved ones to the imminent threat of a new war on a different front.
But while even the most inconsequential event is cloaked in pain, I’m fully aware that my day-to-day as a mother is peachy compared to mothers in Gaza.
In the midst of it all, I find myself still torn between a duty to let my children know what’s happening around them — to allow them to grow thick-skinned, to build resiliency, and hopefully, to seek solutions — and the instinctual urge to shelter them, not just from rocket fire but from things I think children should never have to know.
The night of the rocket fire, my daughter and I lay in bed. I spoke to her about our Arab friends and neighbors and what it means for them to be straddling a precarious duality in which they are scared about their own well-being, as Israeli citizens under fire, as well as that of their people — sometimes even family members — under bombardment in Gaza.
I asked her to imagine that right now in Gaza, there was probably a girl of her age who may be scared for her life. And that maybe that girl has a cousin who lives right here, in our neighborhood.
My daughter’s capacity for both compassion for their plight and comprehension of what was happening right now, right here, to us, astonished me and continues to astonish me.