Every time I go online, I feel as though my heart is breaking. I know I am not alone in this. The death, trauma, and injury of innocent children is being beamed onto our screens in real time, and I cannot look away. The images of women howling and clutching and kissing the wrapped bodies of their sons and daughters haunt me long after I’ve put my device away. My heartbreak is nothing compared to what these parents in Gaza and Israel have endured, but I am a mother, and I see my son’s face in all of their faces, I see his little body in all of their bodies.
I could have said “As a mother…” then, but I didn’t. It is an obnoxious phrase, and not one that I have ever used to my knowledge, though I am sure I’m guilty of engaging in the thinking behind it. The cult of motherhood is strong, and if it seemed like a cult before I had a child, you could say I am now a signed-up member, having devoted much of my creative work to parenthood since having my baby. Yet while the experience of motherhood has been utterly transformative, I am troubled by much of the discourse around it. The idea that, having been pregnant and given birth, mothers have access to heretofore untapped wells of empathy is a strong societal assumption, and one that comes to the fore at times of war. In expressing their horror, parents, particularly mothers, can act as though they’re the only people who feel stricken by the pain of children.
The writer Amy Key, whose work I so admire, put it beautifully in a recent Substack essay: “The idea I would need a child of my own to feel an acute sorrow at children and babies being killed is incredibly insulting. I don’t need kids to feel protective of them. I don’t need kids to want to put my arms around children who suffer.” Before I had my child, I felt exactly the same way about “as a mother.” As Key goes on to say, “If you’re reading this and you are a parent, and feel yourself wanting to say, but I was altered by parenthood, I believe you. But your individual experience does not get to limit or diminish my own humanity. That’s a failure of your imagination, not mine.”
It’s a good choice of word, imagination, because ultimately that is what many of us are doing when we bear witness to trauma. We imagine how it must feel to be in such a desperate situation, and that act of imagining can foster solidarity between people. Yet there are those who don’t care to imagine, or, to use Key’s word, fail to imagine—and that includes parents. If becoming a mother or father gives you a shortcut to empathy, how come so many people with their own children can live with killing and maiming other people’s?
We know that not all parents are good, or kind, and yet the shine of “goodness” that parenthood brings, with all the societal approval that that status confers, is easy to bask in. At the same time, parenthood does, of course, alter us, and there is an increasing body of scientific knowledge underpinning that fact. Lucy Jones’s valuable book Matrescence: On the Metamorphosis of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Motherhood highlights the many neurological, physiological, and hormonal changes that motherhood brings. While motherhood is put on a pedestal, many aspects of the experience are still marginalized, which is why it can be such a radicalizing socio-political life change. This is something that we have to be able to talk about, even though at times it can risk sounding hurtful to people without children.
I agree with the writer Daisy Johnson’s concern that “we are moving in a direction in which it is not possible to admit that becoming a parent can completely decimate and obliterate the person you were before… Any other major life event is allowed and expected to transform us, why shouldn’t this one?” I would never assume that I feel more empathy than a childless or childfree person—who am I to make assumptions about anyone’s inner emotional life and responses? What I can say is that I personally am more sensitive to the pain of children now than I was before I had a child. It isn’t that I didn’t care before, but now it feels almost physically unbearable to bear witness, though bear witness I feel I must. Perhaps it was a failure of my imagination before, or perhaps, as a friend says, it’s something to do with the body: “It’s the visceral thing for me. You don’t have to be a biological mother to feel it, I’m sure,” she says, “[just someone who] spend[s] all day, every day, looking after a defenseless person that you have such a bodily attachment to.”
Something I’ve been wondering for a while now is the extent to which one can claim motherhood as an identity, and how motherhood intersects with identity politics more broadly. Is it controversial for my friend who was raised Muslim to say that the children whose faces she is seeing in Gaza look like the faces of her niece and nephew, and that this compounds the horror for her? Familiarity naturally encourages empathy, after all. My colleague Sirin Kale emphasizes this when she says that “I think it’s just the familiarity of those little bodies… the way their parents carry them is how I carry my son. I think that the worst feeling in the world must be not being able to protect your children from harm, and so in a way you’re imaginatively connecting with the anguish of the parents more than the children. And of course the fact the children look like my child ethnically makes the imaginative leap easier to make.”
It was in the run-up to another war when Tony Benn asked Parliament, “Don’t Arab and Iraqi women weep when their children die?” Since then, technology has changed the way that we imagine, and empathize. In the space of a generation, we have gone from being able to switch off the news and turn our faces away to being confronted by the real-time suffering of people and their children half a world away, in our Instagram Stories, all mixed in with our friends and our friends’ kids and all that stuff of life that we take so much for granted. They are us, we are them.
I suppose what I am saying is that it is almost impossible, now, to choose not to be confronted by the humanity of those being bombarded, though heaven knows many are trying. I am not religious, but the saying “There but for the grace of God go I” has been on my mind a lot, because it could be you, or I, in this terrible situation, and it is only by accident of birth that it isn’t. Parents can and should have solidarity with other parents, and anything that makes the plight of victims of war more visible is to be encouraged. But as a human, I think that we all have a duty not to turn away, whether we have our own babies or not. There are children that need our protection, and they are being failed at their moment of greatest need, when it is the collective duty of humanity to keep them safe.