Resilience and Rattling Windows
14 hours and 46 minutes. That is how much time we’ve spent in the bomb shelter so far over the last three and a half weeks. And I feel guilty even saying it out loud, knowing there are countless families who have spent 30+ hours in their bomb shelters over the same period. But I can only speak to the reality within our own four walls.
We are in our 4th week of this war. Our 4th week of running in and out of our bomb shelter at all hours of the day and night. Our 4th week of no school, where I’ve had to go out and buy another iPad to accommodate having four kids in simultaneous Zooms. The initial surge of adrenaline and familial camaraderie has faded, replaced by the weary friction of a family stuck together for just too long. We did not leave our neighborhood for the entire first week of the war. Since then we’ve gone out on excursions here and there, but every outing is subconsciously planned to be within 90 seconds of a bomb shelter at all times. My 14-year-old son got back into his jogs, he changed his 10k route to go through urban areas – always within 90 seconds of a bomb shelter. The first time he went out, I asked him to share his live location with me while he was out, [cue teenage eyeroll: “Mommy, you don’t have to be so paranoid!”] We have to go to the bomb shelter on most days. We feel ballistic missiles exploding overhead, thundering across the sky, rattling the windows at all hours of every single day and night. It really doesn’t feel excessively “paranoid” to want to know where my child is. A small part of me worries about him while he’s outside of my safety bubble, but a part of me is also proud of him. Proud that he’s not letting this stop him from living his best life. Talk about building resilience.
After one especially loud thundering explosion outside (which must have been further away than it sounded, as we didn’t get advance warning or a siren), my 5-year-old daughter walks over to me, “Was there a warning before that? Or was it just missile interceptors?” Since when did “missile interceptor” become part of a normal 5-year-old vocabulary? Every night I tuck my girls into bed and wish them a good night “Good night, I’ll see you…….when I see you…” Maybe it will be in the morning? Maybe it will be at 1am? Or 4am? There’s no telling.
I look around and I know we’re going to be OK. I see my kids on their Zooms, and scoping their walks, jogs, and bike rides around bomb shelter proximity, and I realize how quickly the extraordinary becomes ordinary. Just another era we’ll tell our grandkids about, up there with the eras of Blockbuster, MapQuest, and COVID. But as I look around our safety bubble, I can’t shake a growing sense of isolation.
Iran is not a small backyard enemy of Israel, it is a global frontline enemy. The current Iranian regime is a self proclaimed enemy of Western civilization, America in particular. They have stated their motives and intent countless times, and now they’ve proven that half of Europe is within their missile range too. It feels like a red flag that much of the world is choosing to ignore. I don’t know if Iran was on the brink of developing nuclear weapons. I don’t know if intense force is the right way to handle this. I am no geopolitical expert. It is naive to think we could rely solely on diplomacy to settle this. Diplomacy only works when everyone is playing by the same rule book. We are facing the enemy head-on, on behalf of hundreds of millions of civilians around the world, but we’re the only ones paying the price with our very lives. And it’s a price we’re willing to pay.
