Joy And
Fear: A Mother’s Lot In Gaza
By Nesma
Seyam
February 19, 2017 "Information
Clearing House" - "EI"
-
The doctor
studied the test results, raised her head and
smiled.
“Pregnant,” she said. “Congratulations, you are
pregnant!”
All I
could muster in response was: “Why?”
Joy,
excitement and fear knotted inside me. My
husband and I would soon have a baby, filling
our life with love and noise.
But a
storm of questions raged in my head. I
immediately began to fear that Israel would bomb
us again.
How
would we run away if that happened? How would we
survive?
The author
with her daughter. (Image courtesy of Nesma
Seyam)
I was
scared and nervous. The memories of all the wars
I had lived through came alive and overpowered
me.
Terror
Even
though I am a media worker, I try to avoid
watching the news when Israel is bombing us, to
spare myself the sight of shredded bodies, of
mothers weeping for their sons.
When
Israel bombed Gaza in November 2012, the
television showed a mother running right and
left in a hospital after she saw the bodies of
three of her children, looking for the fourth,
asking everyone around her if they knew where
the child was.
Is this
what it means to be a mother in Gaza?
Two
years later, during Israel’s 51-day onslaught in
the summer of 2014, most of my family, including
my sister and her four children, slept on the
floor of the living room on the western side of
our apartment.
The
eastern side of the home is situated above an
apartment which belonged to a man who was wanted
by Israel. My bedroom was located on that side
of the apartment.
I slept
in it throughout the war, even though it was
directly above a likely target. I was never
afraid, because I believed that I would not hear
or feel the missile that would end up killing
me.
One
night, the shelling and bombings intensified
terribly, and my mother insisted that I sleep in
the living room with everyone else. She rejected
my efforts to convince her that the missile has
no intellectual capacity to recognize that it is
approaching our living room and change its path.
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As we
sat in silence, my sister Walaa started to
frantically separate her children on opposite
sides of our home.
Her
entire body shaking with fear, she said, “I’ll
put one girl and one boy on my right and the
other boy and girl on my left. If they bomb one
side of the apartment, then two of them will
likely survive. I don’t want all of them to die
at once.”
It took
me a while to process what she had said. I
forced a smile while tears gathered in my eyes.
Slowly, I slid under my sheets, pretending to
sleep, and cried all night.
My ears
were alert throughout the night. Walaa didn’t
sleep as her eldest daughter, Shahd, who was 6
years old at the time, kept waking up,
frightened, and would run to the corridor. Walaa
would bring her back, calm her down and put her
back to sleep again.
Alive but not
unharmed
We were
not bombed in the end. But that does not mean we
were unharmed.
Two
years have now passed. I’ve since gotten married
and gave birth to a beautiful and healthy baby
girl with black hair and two deep dimples on her
cheeks. She’s 6 months old now.
I am
happy I am a mother and I love my daughter
beyond words. But I am also afraid. I can’t bear
the thought that because I am a Palestinian in
Gaza, I may have to guess where in our home my
baby is least likely to be killed.
Whenever I hear a loud sound, I run to my child
and hug her. Every night I hear thunder, I bend
over and cover her to try and protect her.
The
havoc the last war wrought on my soul is
immense, the sound of the bombing and shelling
traumatize me to this day.
I carry
my baby daughter with me everywhere, to meetings
with officials and notables, not caring what
they think of it, not caring when I hear her
crying on the audio recordings when I am
transcribing my interviews.
The
only thing I care about is that she is with me,
and whatever our fate, we will receive it
together.
Nesma Seyam is an interpreter, journalist and
fixer based in Gaza. Twitter:
@Nesma_Seyam
