It's been a month since October 7th. One month, and 100 years. So many people have asked how we are. I'm so grateful.
Here's the truth: we are so very, very lucky, and so very, very Not Ok.
It feels absurd to complain.
We are incredibly lucky--that's all it is, to be sure. Luck.
Our kids are alive, and healthy, and don't know what happened a month ago, beyond "there were rockets and there is a war". We had a safe place to go, and a loving school for them to attend. Their camp counselors are the same ones who greet them after school each day. My son raked leaves with his uncle this weekend. When my daughter got a double ear infection, we got the care she needed. We are lucky. Beyond lucky, really.
And we are Not Ok.
If it weren't for those wonderful children, we would never have left our home. I've never in my life felt so Israeli, so foreign, in the city where I, my Dad, my grandparents, even my great-grandparents were born. The world goes on. I take my kids to trick-or-treat, all too aware that monsters are real, skeletons, far too present.
I cannot listen to the news in English, or even my favorite music in English. My heart beats in Hebrew. I change diapers, shuttle my kids around, make dinner again and again, but my mind is elsewhere.
Every time I bring my daughter to my breast and she eats, I think of them. The babies, trapped in Gaza. My friend's son, murdered in his home--the same friend who taught me to breastfeed my babies.
I think of the babies who were burned alive, who were murdered in ways too gruesome to consider. The mothers who were taken, who don't know where their babies are. The mothers of Gaza, held like prisoners by a terror organization that cares nothing for their lives.
I cannot cry, because I fear that if I do, I will never be able to stop.
I feel the way I did the day after my Dad died--like I barely know how to breathe, to walk, to do the never-ending laundry of a family of five. I am--we are--in mourning. The world shifted under us.
And none of this is ok.
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