If it were only as simple as kissing a scraped knee

This is supposed to be a story about Lucas, who is outgrowing babyhood each morning, as I stretch the necks of hoodies to span his formidable head, tug the pants legs that don’t quite reach his ankles, toss his too-small sneakers into the giveaway pile, which seems to be growing as quickly as the boy. He asserts his independence with his fat clenched fist, with each No, Mama.

But as Lucas grows strong and capable, snatching the sunglasses from my face or kicking his sister under the table with surprising quickness, I can’t help but think of three-year-old Rahaf, the girl dancing in a video online, her foot missing from one leg, her leg missing from the knee down on the other, prostheses peeking out from her little red dress.

As Lucas bathes his face with chocolate ice cream, radiating the filthy glow of simple pleasure, I can’t help but think of Miriam, the eight-year-old girl that I saw in a photo who weighs less than my 20-month-old son. Bones just under the skin, stretched like a child-shaped tent, all angles, chocolate ice cream a far, far away memory.

I was going to write with humor and candor about Lucas suffering jetlag after we traveled to the States, how his inability to sleep reminded me of the days of his early infancy, how he had turned me into the MTV moonman, barely tethered to reality from outer space. How hearing him shout Wake up! at 3 am became the soundtrack to our asylum. How sleep deprivation had me searching for my phone while talking on it, throwing dirty socks in the trashcan and paper towels in the laundry, mapping sleep strategies on a page in a notebook I will lose until it turns up in the basement freezer next February.

I had originally written: Lucas is killing me.

But I am alive, as is Lucas. Loudly, joyfully so. I cannot write that Lucas is killing me, when I can’t get the UN report on the genocide in Gaza out of my head, can’t scrape my brain of the words of a 10-year-old boy wandering the city like a ghost, who told UN officials he can’t evacuate until he finds his dad’s body first.

In the face of horror, I have become a literalist. I have stopped saying Made me want to shoot myself or could have died. Because the bullets, and the starvation, and the amputation, is not metaphorical. The UN has reported that at least 10 kids a day are losing limbs in Gaza, their former home whose current superlative is having more child amputees per capita than any other place in the world. The report puts death toll of children at around 20,000 – UNICEF puts the death and serious injury toll – kids like Rahaf – at 50,000.

Lucas, bless his little ignorant heart, has become the touchpoint for all my fears in the world, even as I read my Daily Stoic, and pray my serenity prayer and do my yoga, and make my online charity donations, and email my representatives, and drink my sauv blanc like anybody trying to cling to their sanity in an insane world.

Lucas has ignited my bottomless maternal fear in a way Skye, my daughter, hasn’t. The feeling she awakened in me was awe – she is such a singular force. She came into the world kicking and screaming, trying us at every turn, a creature so powerful and relentless that I laughed at myself. I had always worried about having a little girl for fear of what the world would do to her – now, I see I was not worrying about the right thing. Skye seemed capable of handling herself – and anyone else in her way – since the beginning. She was born with her blue eyes open. The doctor said, as she delivered her, Elle regarde le ciel. She looks at the sky. As an infant, I experienced her as watchful and knowing. Some call such children “old souls.”

Lucas seems brand new. When I consider the possibility of past lives, I feel certain Lucas is on his first. He is amazed by his sister dancing, the appearance of a rainbow, the pop of a blueberry. Lucas is the one that pried open the terrified jack-in-the-box in my heart, the one that colored my life with a sort of desperate vigilance.

When we were on holiday in Scotland and Lucas was three months old, he was admitted into Edinburgh’s Royal Hospital for Children with an acute urinary tract infection that had progressed to his kidneys. For the four nights that he was held there, I slept on a fold out cot next to his bed. The lights always stayed on in the room, and I positioned the coat rack with my raincoat in front of his crib so that he would be nestled in shadow.

Sleeping on the cot reminded me of summer camp. I read in bed as he slept. I had a pile of snacks under the bed – chocolate, Doritos, a plastic carton of cherries. The Doritos triggered his Moro reflex – when I crunched them, his arms shot straight up in bed like a baby zombie. Ultimately, I didn’t allow myself to eat them while he was sleeping, an early but significant sacrifice.

At night, with my eyes closed, I could almost take myself out of the Edinburgh Royal Children’s Hospital, back to the bunk bed in a cabin tucked under an unruly magnolia tree in the Great Smoky Mountains. The static beeping of the machine charting his vitals could almost be mistaken for the chirping of crickets.

At first, I could not stop staring at Lucas’s fist, the top of it dotted with a constellation of purple and blue pinpricks, where they could not find a good vein for his cannula. I could not stop thinking that I shouldn’t have taken antibiotics when I was pregnant with him and got food poisoning in Bangkok. That I hadn’t given him enough milk on the road between my father-in-law and sister-in-law’s houses.  That I shouldn’t have left him in the car, sleeping, when Andrew and Skye and I went to visit Andrew’s mother’s grave.

In the hospital, by the blue light of the beeping machine, I talked myself back into sanity – surely the ghosts at the cemetery are not in the business of giving little boys UTIs.

Before I went to sleep each night, I would put my finger into his fist and feel the force of his tiny hand, to reassure me that, despite the bruises, he was still strong.

Then, I would walk. As I shuffled in slipper socks down the halls of the hospital, I passed oncology, haematology, radiology, psychiatrics, and the Sanctuary. The different departments flashed by with the possibility of each future path leading to one of them.

I remember standing outside of the pediatric oncology hospice unit, staring at the sign for several minutes one night, letting the gravity of it wash over me, until a man walked out and held the door for me, and I stepped away in embarrassment, a voyeur visiting a dark planet, caught.

The Sanctuary was a non-denominational worship space. At its center was a tree made from dried branches, adorned with notes, many torn from brown paper bags that I recognized from the Marks & Spencer in the hospital. I read many of them, but one stayed with me, written in blue crayon: Love you big dog, hope you will be home for Christmas. Love, little dog

You don’t have to be a believer to feel the presence of God in such a place.

I thought about God a lot over the four days at the hospital, prayed in Lucas’s room, in line at M&S with a sandwich, at the Sanctuary. I always felt guilty and naive– the idea that my prayers about my baby’s UTI would be the ones that rose to the top, as I imagined the torrent of prayers floating up from the children’s hospital to heaven like a column of smoke. It seemed like God might need some help with sorting them, and I’ve always like the idea of the trinity. The idea that a being could exist as three things at once appeals to my greed. Greed for time, administrative support, different lives, different ways of manifesting in the world. Ah, the possibilities.

While in the hospital, I read voraciously. My reading was only interrupted by young nurses who intermittently checked Lucas’s vitals, changed his IV, cooed and told him how handsome he was. Otherwise, uninterrupted time spread out in front of me, with only pages to turn. Newspapers, books of poetry, things that yielded comfortably to interruption.

It was there that I came across a poem by Sarah Russell that starts off: “If I had three lives; I’d marry you in two,” and sometimes I think like this: If I were a trinity, I’d choose my husband and children in two. But what of the third parallel? The other life I’d be living if I hadn’t met my husband, hadn’t had my children, hadn’t moved 5,000 miles away to Switzerland, hadn’t taken a responsible job in a large office building with air conditioning and a pleasant view of the French Alps.

When life as a mother gets too “real,” elbow deep in bodily fluids and commitments, I imagine myself wearing a white swimsuit, cutting my arms through the clear Caribbean water, coming up for breath and finding myself alone, utterly alone in the ocean, and it washes over me as a welcome diversion. I can nearly cheat time and the rigidity of all those decisions I made along the way that have set me on this course.

Sometimes I bargain. Maybe I would keep our dog in my alternate existence, loping along the beach and occasionally giving me some inward flash of the family I forewent. But in truth, once a person has children, there is no going back. They never cease to be a parent, even if the children die. The carefree woman in the white swimsuit will never exist again, even if I am alone for ten minutes or forty years.

And that is perhaps why the children of Gaza haunt me in a way earlier tragedies didn’t, from Somalia to Sandy Hook. When I became a mother, I began to see all children as though they were my own. My own children’s faces appear in the war zones of my mind, their small hands overturning the rubble to find me.

The thing is, the road not taken is just that – the unknown. We don’t know if it would feel better or truer or far, far worse. If my life had two paths, one path would lead the way it did: to Lucas being discharged with an improving urinary tract infection, a bottle of antibiotics, and the knowledge that he has a small, weak right kidney. And there is another, invisible path. A path that could have led to him getting sicker, and it getting worse, and tests that didn’t turn out how we hoped, and a reckoning every parent fears. At Edinburgh Children’s Hospital, there are children that don’t leave.

Six days ago, it was reported that Israeli forces attacked Al-Rantisi, a children’s hospital in Gaza. I imagine this reckoning for the parents of Gaza. What could I have done? How could I have saved them? Endless analysis is woven into the fabric of parenthood. I read it recently in the words of a Palestinian doctor: I have so much guilt, because I’m the reason we stayed. We had a chance to leave Gaza, one year ago. But I refused. Because I love my people. I love my patients, so I chose to stay. But I regret all of it. My children had the right to live their life.

But parents do not have a crystal ball; we have limited information and instinct. We have, like the doctor, a desire to save everyone, at the risk of losing so much. We can’t save all the children. And in truth, we can’t even guarantee the safety of our own. The lie we all tell our children is that they will always be safe with us. I whispered it to my daughter tonight when she said she was afraid of the dark. But it’s not true. Not even in Switzerland.

Sometimes, when Lucas falls asleep on my chest, I experience a nearly paralytic fear that he will someday be taken from me. I must breathe deeply, smell his head and rub my face against his wispy hair, and tell myself: But he is here right now.

And in truth, something will happen to Lucas, is happening to Lucas, even in the best-case scenario: he will grow up. This Lucas, the baby, will soon be gone. He is disappearing every morning.

But in his place, God willing, there will be a little boy, and someday a big boy and someday a man. It is the path for him that I pray for, but not one that every child grows up to walk.

If you would like to help Palestinian children, you can donate to PCRF or UNICEF State of Palestine or another reputable charity.