War

We've had a couple of days of air sirens and explosions. 

Sometimes they're loud and close enough that we feel the building shake — that's when the Jordanian military is intercepting Iranian missiles and drones in our airspace. My husband was up in the middle of the night recently, filming explosions from our terrace. My daughter and I slept through it.

The sirens have two tones. One triple tone when there's a warning of something entering our airspace. One long, grating tone when it's all clear. I wish those were reversed. The all clear is really the much more disturbing one. But you get used to it — which is its own strange thing to reckon with.

Someone asked my daughter recently how she was doing with it all. She shrugged and said: I'm fine. It's normal.

And it is. That's just true. I heard myself start to say no kid should grow up thinking sirens are normal — and that's also true — but it didn't feel like the whole truth either. Both things exist at once. She's fine. It's normal. And normal here is not what normal looks like somewhere else.

She was seven when Hamas attacked on October 7, 2023, so she really doesn’t remember a time before the genocide on Gaza began. She’s safer than the kid in Gaza. Not as safe as the kid in Geneva. Safer than a brown immigrant kid in Minneapolis. Not as safe as a kid on the beach in New Zealand. 

A different kind of unsafe and safe as kids all over this world.  

We are physically safe. I want to be clear about that. The disruptions to us — the noise, the airspace shutdowns, the canceled flights, the low-grade nervous system dysregulation that hums underneath everything — are inconveniences. 

My husband was supposed to fly to Somalia this week. His flight was canceled — twice. 

We've been told to stay away from the American Embassy and any place that might draw demonstrations or violence against the US. 

My daughter’s school is open. The American school is closed.

I bought extra groceries today and packed a go bag. Got copies of our important documents and took out some extra cash. Filled the car with gas and messaged with friends.

“Are you leaving?”

“What have you heard?”

“Is your employer / embassy / security telling you anything new?”

“What’s the latest?”

This isn't contained the way it has been in the past. We genuinely don’t know what to do at this moment, at the next.

And the kids on either side of where these bombs are actually landing — not intercepted, not debris, but landing — are not writing blog posts about nervous system disruption. I try to keep that in perspective without using it to dismiss what's real for us.

So we're doing life as normal, as much as we can. 

Making homemade waffles with whipped cream and sprinkles for breakfast. Walks in the sunshine when the airspace is quiet. Work, school, activities, sleep, repeat.