Shachar does not tell his mother what is really on his mind, that he is worried about his father who has been called up for reserve duty in Lebanon, and about her because she leaves the bomb shelter at least once a day to fetch odds and ends from their apartment, and about the rats that share the bomb shelter with them.
How can Shachar’s mother tell him that everything will be fine when he sees her crying every time she gets off the phone with his father?
I have been thinking, as well, about the Christian mother in Lebanon, whose child’s name I do not know, who tries to calm her six-year-old son’s fear that he will not survive the night because Hizbullah militants are firing rockets at Israel from his family’s roof in what the United Nations Humanitarian Chief condemned as Hizbullah’s “cowardly blending among women and children.”
This boy doesn’t know that the way this militant is drawing Israeli fire to his family’s home is inhuman as well as a war crime, but he does know that he wishes he could still spend his afternoons playing soccer in a nearby field as he used to, and that he hopes Hizbullah will leave his village so that he will be able to start first grade in the fall.
As all these terrified mothers, and the hundreds of thousands of mothers like them, caress the heads of their terrified children, how they must hope that their children will not smell their fear and will go back to worrying about burglars, cockroaches, and math teachers.
As these mothers sit by their children late at night, how they must yearn for the days when their children’s fears would evaporate with the whispered promise of two scoops of mint chocolate chip ice cream with rainbow sprinkles and a short prayer with mom.