As parents now for over 30 years, The Wife and I generally know what to say to our four kids.
It comes with the territory. Four kids and more than three decades of parenting encompassing all types of life events and mini-crises – school challenges, relationship matters, and health issues – pretty much prepare you for all eventualities.
There isn’t much that could surprise us now, and in most cases, when faced with any parenting issue – and parenting continues even after the kids leave the house –we don’t have to reinvent the wheel and can fall back on the tried methods and strategies we have used in the past.
But this war with Hamas has thrown us for a loop.
IT’S NOT the first time we’ve had a son fighting in Gaza. The Lad, our oldest, was there during his regular service in 2008-2009 during Operation Cast Lead.
But that was only one kid for a relatively short period. Now we have three sons and a son-in-law inside Gaza for much longer stints. That brings anxiety and worry up to an atomic level. It also creates a situation where we don’t always know what to say or do for them, their wives, or their kids.
It’s a new experience; frankly, I’m getting old and not as good at dealing with new experiences as I once was.
For instance, what do you say when your daughter-in-law calls, in tears, to report that her husband, the son we know as Skippy, was with a team that terrorists ambushed in Shejaia? He’s all right, thank God, but the team leader, a good friend, was shot in the chest and fell, dying on my son.
What do you say when she relates that her six-year-old boy, your first grandson, hears her cry and tells her in the morning not to worry, that he and his brothers – aged four and almost two – will take care of her?
What do you say to your son when he comes out of Gaza for a short while so that he can attend the funeral of his fallen comrade and – on the same day – the funeral of someone else from his unit killed in the same battle? Do you try to open him up? Get him to talk? Or leave him alone?
I don’t know; I have no experience with this, no northern star to guide me. They say parents learn how to parent from watching their parents. Well, these are not exactly the problems my parents had to deal with while raising me and my sister in Denver.
So, I’m winging it
And just as I was winging it with one kid, a second one called an hour later. How to handle it when your daughter phones – she, the mother of two children – also in tears? Hers are tears of concern for her husband, fighting in southern Gaza. They are also just tears of weariness, the fatigue of coping alone with two little girls, aged two and one, for nearly three months.
Again, that’s not something The Wife and I ever dealt with. Yes – I, too, was in the reserves, and The Wife had to deal with our kids on her own when I went into the army for a month every year as a combat medic.
But I was never called up for this long, and the only war I was in was the First Gulf War, where I hunkered down near Haifa waiting for Scud missiles to fall in my area of responsibility (they never did).
The Wife had a lot on her plate alone with the kids but did not have the concern of her husband engaged in face-to-face combat with a brutal enemy. She did not have to play that scenario over in her head – or struggle mightily to keep it from creeping in.
OR WHAT do you tell another son, ferrying in and out of Gaza as part of a team responsible for evacuating the wounded, who said he wants to transfer to a unit that is doing more actual fighting?
I hear his frustration and think, “Wow, this is one apple that fell far from the tree.” I hear his desire for more significant duty and think of my father, who served in the US Air Force during the Korean War as a clerk typist stationed in Long Beach, California. His favorite line of all time was “When the enemy came, I backspaced.”
Not my son. With the enemy here, he wants to hit the forward tab key and catapult into the thick of the action.
So how do we handle that? Do we encourage him? Discourage him? Try to get his wife to talk him out of it?
Or what do you say when the oldest, who you’ve not talked to for more than two weeks, finally calls and greets you with his signature “Whaaaat!,” says all is good, and then lets slip that two of his friends with whom he has served for some 15 years – but who were with another team at the time – were wounded in a firefight in Khan Yunis.
The Lad is in a unit that lets us periodically get letters to him. I write for a living. According to Grammarly, I’ve written some 2.3 million words in the last two and a half years. Yet I always struggle with the few hundred words of these letters.
I don’t want to be too mushy, for fear of sounding maudlin – or too mundane, for fear of eliciting this kind of reaction from him: “You think I care right now in Gaza that you finally fixed your kitchen floor?”
How much do we pile on about how much we love him, are proud of him, and how a pair of his great-grandparents – murdered by the Nazis – could never have dreamed that one day their great-grandson would be part of an army in a Jewish state fighting the new Nazis.
So I search for the golden medium and put a little of everything into the letter: a little mush, a little of the mundane, a little obnoxiousness (my default mode), a little of the pride, and a little love. Then I hope that when he reads it, he won’t get too annoyed.
We’re trying.
When the kids call, I have no sage parental wisdom to impart about their experiences because I have never been there or done any of that. All I can do is listen, say it all must be very hard, and that someday – hopefully very soon – this too shall pass.