Ever since my parents have moved back to within a few blocks from me, I make it a point to visit them as often as I can. I must admit, I enjoy bouncing ideas off them and getting their opinion about what I should write about. These are pleasant evenings spent in their company and I treasure them.
So I was a little surprised last Wednesday when mom grabbed hold of me as soon as I entered and said, “There is something I must show you. I want you to write about it. It is very disturbing.”
“Whoa! Slow down! What happened?” I asked worried.
“This!” she said, pushing the newspaper into my hand and giving me the article to read. “Why are they doing this? Can’t they leave the babies alone? Why drag them into it?”
“I want you to write about this. It isn’t right. I know that they believe that the IS has been training kids as well but this is not the way to retaliate.”
“Just because you think somebody is evil, does that mean you have to be eviler?”
“Won’t that mean that it will just spiral downwards into being more and more evil till the only thing that is left is evil?”
“And what happens to the kids? Why aren’t their parents saying anything against this? Where are their mothers? Do they really want to send their kids to their deaths?”
“When will people realise that religion, no religion ever has been created by God, any God?”
“Can’t someone do something? Can’t someone put an end to this madness?” she cried finally ending her tirade.
I tried to calm her down and we had to admit that we were just two helpless mothers in a world gone mad with hatred. And as we wondered what we could do, I remembered the words of a poem by Israeli writer Prof. Ada Aharoni
How do you know
Peace is a woman?
I know, for I met her yesterday
on my winding way to the world’s fare.
She had such a sorrowful face
just like a golden flower faded
before her prime.
I asked her why she was so sad?
She told me her baby
was killed in Auschwitz,
her daughter in Hiroshima
and her sons in Vietnam, India, Pakistan,
Israel, Palestine, Lebanon,
Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur and Chechnya.
All the rest of her children, she said,
are on the nuclear
black-list of the dead,
all the rest, unless
the whole world understands –
that peace is a woman.
A thousand candles then lit
in her starry eyes, and I saw –
Peace is indeed a pregnant woman,
Peace is a mother.