Mood Swings
'This will not happen to us, right mom?'
By
Shaden Shehab
I was glued to the television screen one day watching Iraqi war footage when my seven-year-old and five-year-old daughters made me realise that their political orientation was in the make. And that I was affecting it.
On the first two days of the war against Iraq, the girls were not happy. They had two simple, legitimate reasons: they could not watch their favourite television programmes because my husband and I were watching the news all the time and were not greatly attentive to their needs. "Shhhhh..." was the answer they received whenever they sought our attention or tried to out-talk the news. We were glued to our seats in front of the television, not aware of their misery. They are still too young to understand such horrors -- and how can we explain what is really going on? We shouldn't shock them, my husband and I convinced each other.
But eventually their curious minds began working.
"What are you watching? Did something happen?", my older daughter Merna asked impatiently. Before I answered, Mirette tried to show that she understood more than her older sister. "Israelis are killing Palestinians and I hate them," she said. More than a year ago, I had told the girls the "tale" of Palestine and Israel in a brief way so that they would understand it. Now, I had to briefly update them on the latest miseries, the "tale" of the US and Iraq.
From that moment on, they would show interest for a few minutes and watch the news, showering me with questions. Is this too much for their innocent minds to absorb? Will this make them strong and rebellious or scared and passive? Would the impression that the Arabs are weak and victimised stick in their minds? Regardless, I decided that shielding them from the horrors of the world would not help. It was not up to me, really. The children are exposed to all sorts of information from their peers, at school, at the club and elsewhere. Lying to them or blocking information is not an option for today's children.
I soon decided that they could watch the war footage only of sounds of bombardment and scenes of smoke in order to grasp what war means but that they should not watch horrific scenes. "This will not happen to us in Egypt, right mom?" Mirette looked for assurance. "Of course not," I had to say. "Don't we have oil?" Merna asked. "It is bedtime" -- I escaped.
Merna was invited to her friend's birthday party at a funfair and I thought I should also take Mirette, leave my selfishness aside and make up for the attention I had not given them in the past few days. They had great fun, while I was eager to find out the latest news of the war. Towards the end of the celebration, the birthday girl's mother gathered the youngsters and I assumed it was game time. "We will not have a birthday cake. There are Iraqi children suffering and many do not have food to eat. We have to feel for them." The children listened attentively but soon ran for the rides. Yet hungry Merna retorted, "If we don't eat the cake, will they find food to eat?" The question alarmed me for a moment. Is she growing up to be apathetic and selfish? I tried explaining the concept of sharing and feeling for others, but she had another solution. "We won the war with Israel on the 6th of October because we have a big strong army. Why don't we help the Iraqis?"
The Americans are striking Iraq. The United States is strong. Iraq is weak. The United States wants Iraq's oil. This is how Merna summed it up when she was asked in her school to write an Arabic composition about the war. But she still asked me, "Why is oil so important?"
As I found time to help Merna with her homework, Mirette was keeping herself busy with drawing. "Look what I drew," she told me proudly. It was a drawing of what looked like a monster and little, miserable human beings. Recognising my bewildered gaze, she explained, "This is an Israeli and those are the Iraqis." Her little mind insists that Israel is the "villain". The United States was not on her vocabulary list of enemies. Not yet.
