What we learned at kindergarten today.

“So what happened at gan today? Did everyone like your new backpack?”

“Yep.”

“What did you eat for lunch?”

“שעועית”

“Beans? And?”

“Pasta.”

“Beans and pasta!”

“And shnitzel. Shnitzel shnitzel shnitzel.”

“What else happened in gan today?”

The thing about pretending everything is fine, that we have to keep acting ‘normal’ so the terrorists don’t win, is that when you do hear the air raid siren – aza’aka, or tzeva adom, code red – it means you’re at work. Your partner is at work. And your kids… your kids are in kindergarten.

“Hey – what else happened in gan today? A siren?”

“Yeah, a big siren.”

“What did you do?”

“We heard the siren and so we were running.”

“Running?”

“Yeah, running, so fast. The ganenet said to.”

Despite the relative lessening of rockets yesterday and today – that’s very relative – I think this morning I just… broke. It’s exhaustion. This is tiring. And I’m not even in the south. Every time the Galgalatz radio announcer has to interrupt a song to announce another red alert somewhere – sometimes 3 or 4 times during a song – I just can’t.

Who can?

“Let’s go home and have a special snack. Who wants a special snack?”

“Yay! And if we hear the siren, we run upstairs fast. And you don’t take your snack with you, just leave it on the table and run.”

My boy is three. My boy is Israeli. My boy and his peers are growing up like this.

There are millions of other boys and girls growing up like this… and worse. Here in this border, there on that border.

Who is going to fix this? Are we? For our kids? For their kids?

Who can?

 

Comments

2 responses to “What we learned at kindergarten today.”

  1. nubwaxer Avatar

    same thing on the other side, don’t try and fool us with this pathos.

  2. vickikb Avatar

    This is so sad. Thank you for writing it. It’s the little stories like this that need to be told, even more than the headlines, and the more little stories like this that emerge, the better.

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