Becoming a mother while watching the genocide of children in Gaza

As I mother my own small children in the UK, I can’t help but think of mothers and children in Gaza.

Image Source: Emad El Byed on Unsplash

Like thousands of others worldwide, I have been watching the genocide in Gaza unfold over the last two years, literally live-streamed to us through civilians on the ground, from their phones to ours.

Watching the most horrific war crimes in real time has been both deeply surreal and gut-wrenching. No human being should have to endure what the citizens of Gaza have, no matter the age or gender, but as a new mother myself, it has been particularly awful to see small children killed in their thousands.

I am of Jewish heritage, with both sides of my lineage descending from refugees. I do not come from a religious family, so I struggled at first to claim this part of my identity. However, I have always been aware and proud of my heritage. I vividly remember learning about the Holocaust in primary school, looking through footage of Auschwitz and knowing that this was not just a historical ‘issue’ to me, but my heritage. I took hope from ‘never again’ as a child, who knew nothing about the suffering of Palestinians under occupation.

Flash forward to adulthood, and not only was I witnessing in real time people being murdered and starved, but we were also being told that to speak up against human suffering was to be antisemitic, because of the awful events of October 7^th. This feels like a conflation of vastly different issues to me, and I feel compelled to speak out in whatever ways I can, such as writing this article.

Perinatal depression or a normal response to bearing witness?

  Photo by Chris Yang on Unsplash

Within weeks of finding out I was pregnant with my second daughter, I was hit with a deep depression. I had suffered from low mood and anxiety throughout my first pregnancy, but the intensity this time felt all-encompassing and, at just two months pregnant, I went to the doctor asking for antidepressants. I picked up the prescription but kept putting off taking them each day with one excuse or another.

My eldest daughter was two years old when Israel’s deadly retaliation against Palestine began. She is now four. I can’t help thinking about the stark juxtapositions of experiences between her and the children of Palestine. In these two years, she has turned from a toddler to a school-aged child, having nurturing, educational experiences, making friends and starting to learn to read.  In Gaza, schools have been destroyed, and more than twenty thousand children have been killed.

In this time, I have also had another daughter who is now one. Each step of becoming a mother for the second time has been marked to me, knowing what the mothers and children in Gaza have been living through. When I was pregnant, exhausted and often struggling to walk with pelvic girdle pain, my mind was filled with images of pregnant women like me running from bombs and sleeping in tents. When I had an emergency C-section, I couldn’t help but think of the women forced to have caesareans without anaesthetic.

Each time my baby or toddler falls over and hurts themselves, reaching out for a cuddle, I think of the babies and toddlers whose mums and dads have been killed. ‘WCNSF - Wounded child, no surviving family’ is an acronym created in Gaza, because of the sheer volume of children in this position. When I breastfeed my baby, I think of the mothers whose milk has dried up due to malnutrition and stress and babies starving because Israeli forces are blocking baby formula from entering the border.

Deciding to take action

Photo of Sapphire giving a speech at a vigil as a member of Na’amod

One day, I had a frank heart-to-heart with my husband, which made me acknowledge I had been depressed before I found out I was pregnant. Clearly, the hormones had made the intensity of what I was feeling no longer manageable, but through many tearful conversations, I realised I had been feeling this way since the events of and following October 7^th.

On reflection, I had told myself, it was ridiculous to feel real feelings about something happening that is not directly related to my own life. People close to me told me ‘just don’t look’ – but I already knew, and the images and testaments I had seen and read wouldn’t just leave me. It felt like I was grieving: not people I knew, but real lives I had witnessed, livestreamed into my palm, being literally ripped apart. I knew that continuing to ignore or pretend I didn’t know or care was not going to help me; I needed to take action.

Once I accepted how angry I was, I looked for ways to put my anger into action.  Therefore, one cold, dark afternoon, I took the bus to Brighton and sat in someone’s living room among a group of other Jewish people, to start our ‘orientation’ for Na’amod, a group of British Jews against the occupation. We are all different ages and genders, all of us have distinct differences as well as shared overlaps, but that day I felt a deep sense of peace and connection, that this is where I am supposed to be.

Twenty months later, I am now one of the comms coordinators for this rapidly growing movement. Volunteering within the comms team is logistically practical, as there is so much that can be done online, after the kids are in bed. Moreover, it allows me to put my skills as a writer into something pragmatic and feel part of a collective.

Watching or even reading such depressing news constantly is deeply detrimental to our mental health, but volunteering is beneficial to our mental health.

We may not be able to click our fingers and stop the horrors of the world, but we do, not just those suffering, but ourselves watching them, a great disservice if we refuse to at least acknowledge these problems and validate our own feelings as members of shared humanity. If we can also find ways, however small, to take action, we can collectively make the world a better place, and feel better ourselves in the process.