Israel, Lebanon, and kids

One mother, who is residing in Haifa, has a blog 'from a war zone'. I understand that this is the area of Israel where the daily grunt of Arab-Israeli conflict doesn' touch as much as elsewhere, but that now feels the heat of the conflict with Lebanon.

Recently she wrote about how she talks (or doesn't talk, as you will see), to her children about the war. I translated it to English:


***
I wanted to start with a quote from an article that I have read a couple of months ago/ Apparently, some Jewish people, who themselves have been born after the WWII, but whose parents lived through the Holocaust, were diagnosed with PTSD – and it was related to that war that they have never seen.

As hard it is for our children now, and whatever they’ll remember from this few weeks will depend, first of all, on us parents. Whether we are ready to shield them from the war, or if we are leaving them next to us, to feel all that we are feeling.
Of course where you live is important – it hard not to feel the war in Nahariyya. Yet it is not a deal braker – one can continue living in Haifa, or be afraid for your life in Ramat-Gan. IMO if a child in Tel-Aviv is playing sirens and rockets, or asks whether his grandmother in Haifa is still alive, this means first of all that his [arents didn’t protect him from the war, even if at the first sound of bombs they evacuated into the center of the country from Haifa.

I don’t agree that emotional stress also has positive sides to it. I think that peaseful life amd spending time with family and other children include enough emotionally challenging moments. Because of this, our fears of war and heavy thoughts should not get to out children. This is hard, and sometimes very hard. This means that you speak calmly and continue with a story when a ‘boom’ goes over your heads; you don’t discuss what’s happening in front of your kids. You tell them ’all is well, no one is hurt, you can go out into the hallway’ as you take out from your ear an earphone, from which you have been listening to news about a direct hit into a residential house in your town.

But – one minute after the siren life goes on, with dolls, games of hide-and-seek, bubbles, and going into the shelter(miklat), children say, ‘Mama, go on with the story’.

WE don’t have a TV in the house. If we did, we wouldn’t have watched it during the first days in front of the kids. Now, as they say, there is only a running text at the bottom of the screen, and they no longer show anything.

My children know next to nothing about this war. They don’t know the name of the country from which they are bombing us – but they know that it is far from here, and that our army will defend us. They know that the planes are roaring in the sky because they are flying to protect us. They know that our Army has almost hit The Big Bad Guy, and most likely soon will get him.

The magic word, especially during the first days, is ‘just in case’. No, the rocket will not hit our apartment – we are going downstairs just in case, because everybody is told to do this when a siren goes on. Of course everything will be fine with us all, and you are sleeping in the living room because that’s what everyone is told to do, just in case – and it is fun to sleep here, isn’t it?

When children go to sleep, I rearrange their shoes and slippers so that, when they get up, they could quickly dress on their own. ‘What if you want to go in our room, and can’t find your slippers?’

And a few more words about living town. First of all, I really do not want to make refugees out of my children. I understand people who live and take their children from Haifa to visit someone – friends or aquaintances – or go to a resort or a camp at the sea. It is harder for me to understand those who run or urgently evacuate from Haifa. Again, I understand that is worse in Tsfat or Nagariyya, and from there, perhaps, it is necessary to run, and perhaps than there is no time to think how to explain the departure to a child. It is not like that in Haifa. And I believe firmly that for the children the departure can and should be presented as a visit, and not as a desire to run away from bombings.

Second – returning to the subject of emotional stress – I am not sure that it is easier for a child, evacuated quickly without parents, than it is to my kids that are now dancing in the living room. I actually think that it is worse for a scared child. And people who ‘left Haifa in such a rush that they left everything behind’, probably, don’t have it easy either. Not because they don’t have their stuff , but because of fear, clutching their minds and hearts.

I should probably clarify – I understand very well that bombs are dangerous. We go down into the shelter ten to twenty ties a day, I do get scared when a ‘boom’ goes on up above; and when I leave the house for any reason, I scan the street to note which building I can run into if anything, and where the north is.

But this fear is in my head, and not those of my children. Because I know how to live with it and manage it, but my kids don’t.
***

She later commented:


I don’t think that one should shelter children from reality. But if this reality will disappear anyway, and pretty soon – does the child have to know about it, if we can get along without that? I think this is the rub. And you know, even if my children have been hearing sirens for 2 weeks, I hope that after a day of silence this war will be a history for them, something to read about or to listen to, and not a personal emotional experience.

***


Notice how valid and sound coping strategies are mixed with absolutely impossible mindwarping. As in 'THEY are bombing us', and not the other way around.

The actual death count illustrates quite a different picture .

The mindwarping is also being imparted to the kids through powerful archetypes (Big Bad Guys vs the army of defenders) and open ideology.

As much as I can relate to her anguish and the desire to do the best thing, it BEATS ME that she HAS NO CONCEPT that kids in LEBANON have no luxury of having their inner emotional landscape protected, or 'pretty soon' viewing this war as a 'history'.

Also I think there is a glimpse on how the average Israelis view the war, and what they actually KNOW about it (not much, or so it seems).