23 october 2006
Mothers Grieve in Parallel Worlds
By Kris Berggren
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Though I ought to be shocked by yet another explosion in Baghdad or Beirut, the truth is, the news usually registers with a flicker of disgust and despair; then I move on. I suppose it’s overload—I can’t really fathom what this incremental body count means. Many days it’s all I can do to read past the headlines, which gives me something in common with George Bush. Although if I were the White House resident, I’d never admit it, even on Fox News.
I don’t avoid the stories because I can’t grasp the complexities of Sunni-Shiite enmity or the history of Israeli-Palestinian ill will. I avoid them because I don’t need more evidence that such hatred thrives in human marrow. But sometimes my mother’s heart is forced to count the terrible cost people around the world are paying for the folly of a few. A few weeks ago the lightning rod for my attention was a photo of a Lebanese mother tearfully hugging her son and daughter, perhaps ages 10 and 14, as she sent them off to safe refuge. A couple of months ago, it was a radio report caught while driving for household errands.
I’d been at the local grocery. List in hand, I grabbed a newspaper flyer flagging the deals of the week. I compared prices and brands, read labels for nutritional content, doing what women do every day everywhere in the world, culling local markets, searching out the right ingredients for the best price, to make sure our families’ meals are the best they can be.
I pressed the ends of melons, searched out organic peppers and strawberries, guessed at which avocados will be ready for salad today and which I can leave out to ripen for a few days. I eavesdropped on a younger mom with her daughter, maybe 5 years old, chatting happily and picking out fruit together, and I remembered bringing my youngest along, making a fun event of it, using the opportunity for her to identify the red apple or the yellow bananas, to pick out three lemons or put back two oranges, letting her pick out a special box of cereal. I feel pretty good about life on those days, you know, as part of the cosmic flow of things.
Not much later I tuned into public radio news, as I often do while driving to do errands. Yet this time as I listened I felt a weight, a sick feeling in my heart. The reporter’s even voice belied the awful news I heard. The car bomb had exploded at a market, and most of the dead were women and children.
I knew exactly what those women were doing at the moment of their deaths. As if in parallel universes, they’d been carefully choosing food for their families. Making the best of the resources they had. Hoping for a deal, a pleasing bargain. I still feel sick to imagine the instantaneous transformation of this mundane happiness to carnage, keening, a sense of being cursed.
My middle child, 14, recently researched nuclear war for a paper on contemporary social issues. She read accounts of the horrors of Hiroshima: the burning flesh falling off of people, the ones who vanished without a trace, the ones who suffered radiation sickness years afterwards. Mothers carrying infants, stopped in their tracks. Children orphaned, wandering. She, too, wonders how people can do this to one another.
“We are all in this thing called humanity together,” jotted my daughter on a Post-It note that she placed on a cupboard we use for messages. “Everyone here today deserves to be alive tomorrow.”
At dinner last night my children wondered if we could move to another country for a year. They joke almost morbidly that the world won’t be around in a few more years if we continue on the same track we currently are on. They’re no dummies. They read the newspaper and know that there’s posturing around nuclear weapons in Iran, that there isn’t really an end in sight to the war in Iraq, which our government wages with feeble cause. Veterans and their families will probably send me nasty e-mails: The reality is that service to one’s country may be honorable, but to send troops into service of such a misguided cause as the premise that Iraq was connected to Sept. 11 is a tragic misappropriation of soldiers’ honor. My kids are young and idealistic, imagining another country where people value peace and tolerance above illusions of patriotism and honor.
But my son says he won’t go anywhere in 2008. That year, Nov. 3, he will turn 18, he’s already figured, just before Election Day. That would be too important to miss, he says, adding that nuclear war will surely happen if another president of the same mindset as our current president is elected then. I wish I could argue with him.
Kris Berggren is a columnist for The National Catholic Reporter and writes “Teens and Tweens” for Minnesota Parent. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband and three kids. |
