Closing my eyes for the bad parts: A mother’s reflections a year after Oct. 7 - opinion

It wasn’t until my baby cried inconsolably the following night that the horror became real for me.

After leaving the bomb shelter the previous morning, Oct. 7, we watched looping footage of white pickup trucks full of terrorists. We learned there had been a massacre at a music festival. We heard a girl whisper on TV that her father had been taken hostage. But it all felt far away from me. It felt far away even later that day when my husband was called up for reserve duty, and then my brother.

But the following night, when I put Imri to bed without my husband, his cries were no longer those of a baby having trouble falling asleep but the high-pitched wails of an infant in distress. I picked him up, afraid he couldn’t breathe. He didn’t stop crying, and soon I was crying with him. It felt as though we were no longer standing by the crib in the dark room but were instead taken hostage in Gaza, where I had no way to protect him and no pacifiers.

When my husband, Yoav, called from reserve duty to tell me he wanted to be stationed where he was needed most and asked for my blessing before speaking with his commander, I was no longer at my desk chatting on the phone but a sobbing widow at his funeral, mourning his death and raising our son alone.

It was no longer news, no longer distant

Everything became immediate, not just close, but inside my body. It was happening to me. For days, my stomach felt twisted and tight; it was hard to breathe, and I knew I had to close my eyes – because if I looked, how could I continue to believe in humanity? If I looked, how could I be a good mother?

So, I limited my news intake to checking the headlines before taking Imri for a walk to see whether there had been rockets in the last couple of hours. I turned off the radio when the news came on, never watched TV, and avoided social media. I walked out of rooms when people were telling stories about what had happened, and I avoided looking at the smiling photographs on the hostage posters.

I built a wall around myself and my little family to protect us from the truth, but it climbed out of tunnels. Fear and anxiety blew up the border I had tried to create, plowing through it with pickup trucks and motorcycles.

A FEW days after Oct. 7, we drove to visit Yoav in the village he was guarding – the moshav he grew up in. At night, I paced back and forth in his parents’ yard because every time I closed my eyes, I could see the children, the babies, the blood.

The following day, Yoav and I went for a walk, with Imri in the stroller. The afternoon sun glittered through the leaves.

“Am I ever going to stop crying?” I asked Yoav. I’d made two shiva (mourning period) visits already – one for Adi Vital, a friend from the army who was murdered at home in front of her kids; and the other for a colleague’s brother, who was one of the first reservists to rush out to save people and one of the first to die. “Will it ever be different?” I asked.

Before he could answer, an armed man on the path in front of us told Yoav to check his phone.

“Hold the stroller,” Yoav ordered. I took the handlebars slowly, confused.

Yoav looked down at his phone and then at me. “Take Imri; go home to my parents’ and lock the door. There’s an infiltration alert. Still a few minutes away.”

Then he ran toward the gate of the moshav with his gun.

With no bones and no muscles, I somehow arrived at the house. I opened the flimsy front door and told his parents what Yoav had said. Then I announced that, despite his instructions, I was taking Imri to the bomb shelter – because anyone could knock down that door. And hiding upstairs wouldn’t work; I had already considered that; the window was too high to jump from or throw Imri out of.

I grabbed the canvas bag we’d prepared with formula and diapers and ran to the nearby miklat, the bomb shelter, with Imri in my arms and Yoav’s parents trailing behind. I imagined men dressed in black behind every tree. I bolted down the steps of the shelter, my heart pounding, and as soon as I sat down and placed Imri on my lap, I started to cry. I sobbed like a little girl, gasping for air, face drenched. If the terrorists were to enter, I imagined, we would all make a pile over Imri to protect him. Or I’d tell them they could rape me, as long as they didn’t touch him.

WHAT SEEMS like centuries ago, when we watched Fauda I would cover my eyes during some of the scary parts.

“It’s just a TV show,” Yoav kept telling me. “They’re actors. It’s ketchup, not blood.”

I kept my eyes closed until Yoav told me it was over. Although I knew it was just Netflix, the endless cycle of hatred, violence, and despair felt so close to home. I knew it wasn’t real but felt that it could have been.

I remember thinking, in those first few weeks after Oct. 7, that if a fraction of what had just happened appeared on the show, it would have been dismissed as unbelievable. Unreal!

ONLY WHEN Yoav came home from reserve duty in January and my own life started getting back in order did I join the weekly protests calling for a hostage deal. I came back broken and hopeless every time, but I wanted to be there and show the families that I cared. I wanted to change reality, and it was the best I could do.

The rest of the week, though, I tried to keep my eyes closed. I drowned myself in work. I took Imri to daycare and the playground and made him scrambled eggs and tehina. I went swimming, drank coffee, and saw friends. The distance felt important for my health and well-being.

Because those of us who aren’t dying are trying to lead as normal a life as possible. We want a routine. We want to be stressed over work emails and worry about traffic and groceries.

To live in this country, to smile in this country, requires some degree of denial. Some people have known it for years; I only learned it this year. You have to close your eyes if you want to survive.

BUT TODAY, a year later, I ask myself whether I’m still closing my eyes to protect myself. At what point does closing our eyes to the endless, daily suffering in Israel and Gaza become willful blindness? When am I, a mother, shielding my son from pain and evil, and when am I a complicit bystander? When am I closing my eyes because I care about us, and when am I closing my eyes because I don’t care about them?

A year later, I wonder: Am I closing my eyes for survival? Or is it just a feel-good way to stay away from the truth?

The truth that the hostages are still there. The truth that our government would sooner let them rot in tunnels than admit weakness.

The truth of all the dead babies and children in Gaza. The truth that no, they did not vote for Hamas.

The truth that young soldiers keep dying and that our prime minister will continue to let them die if it keeps him in power.

The truth that many of the surveillance soldiers who were burned alive or taken hostage were the same young women who warned about an upcoming attack, and were ignored.

The truth that so many people we’d considered our friends around the world believe that beheading babies is a “necessary means” and that Hamas isn’t a terrorist organization but a watermelon-themed freedom camp.

The truth that the Israel we love is not what it was.

The thoughts crawl up, and I shove them away. I try, over and over again, to close my eyes. But it doesn’t work.

Because still, a year later, whenever I hear a motorcycle rev up, I think it’s a siren. I see the hostages in some of my most intimate moments. When I walk into Imri’s room at night to check on him, a wave of fear washes over me because I know what can happen in that most delicate place of warm, soft baby breaths.

THE OTHER morning, I noticed new signs on the corner of the main street by our house, aptly named Azza (Gaza). Next to the “Bring Them Home Now” sign and the pictures of soldiers are black posters with photographs of young people killed on Oct. 7. On the bottom, in red letters, they read, “An eye for an eye.”

I sigh heavily and turn my gaze to focus on the traffic light. Perhaps it makes no difference whether I close my eyes or leave them open. Either way, eventually we’ll all be blind.  ■