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?
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