What words are left? Every day, children in Gaza are torn apart by taxpayer-funded bombs. And still we're expected to carry on with bathtime.
To be a mother amid genocide means playing with your children while a mother in Gaza stands over her child's shroud, or watches as their emaciated body withers away before her eyes. It means filling our shopping trolleys, opening the fridge, and finding abundance, while fathers there tie rocks to their children’s stomachs to quiet the hunger. We pick up stray Legos and scattered crumbs. They pick up bloodied limbs, gently placing what remains in plastic bags.
Like many mothers I know, I am consumed, mentally and physically, by my children. My days are spent making their food and then worrying about what I missed, making sure they get enough sleep, have clean clothes, and find ways to occupy their time. Since becoming a mother, I also feel a moral imperative to protect all children. As James Baldwin said, "the children are always ours."
As I tend to my own, I cannot ignore this: nearly 19,000 children have been murdered by Israel and its allies since October 2023. Gaza is the deadliest place on earth to be a child.
Where is the collective outrage? The rallying cries from platforms built around motherhood? The unequivocal criticism of Israel from those who have become synonymous with modern motherhood?
With a few exceptions, like Ms. Rachel, many of those who built their followings on motherhood have met with moment with silence at worst, and vague, non-specific statements about "children" and "famine" at best. They return to posting about sleep training or baby-led weaning, as if those things matter when classrooms of children in Gaza are being erased by Israel every single day.
The pages I once followed as a new mother, desperate for advice on everything from weaning to homeschooling, have remained almost uniformly silent on the genocide of a people whose population is half children.
There is an arrogant tendency in the privileged West to imagine that we are fundamentally different from those in whatever war-torn 'brown country' is in the headlines.
As though mothers there give birth resigned to the fact that all their children will be collateral damage. As though they don't bother with hopes and dreams because they know their children are disposable.
Parents in Gaza, like all parents, love and long for and obsess over their children. Every murdered child is an entire universe extinguished, an entire family left bereft. Why isn't that enough to stir outrage in those whose entire personas are built around children and parenting?
Of course, the reason is clear to anyone who cares to look. When Ukrainian children were at risk, there was a universal outpouring of solidarity and action. As a Muslim, Arab mother watching my peers in the UK unmoved by the mass murder of Gazan children in the tens of thousands, I help but think: we will never matter in the same way.
It is not lost on me that it is children who look like mine, who carry the names of my loved ones, who are being massacred with the world's consent. That the sight of babies called Mohammed and Reem, babies so much like my own, does not move the world as it would if they were Olivers and Alices. At a time of rising nationalism and resurgent Islamophobia in places like the UK, it maddens me to see the brutal reality laid bare. Our dead, even as children, will never stop the world from turning.
Mothering during a genocide means being consumed by an unmovable guilt and rage. How dare I let my mind circle around phonics or balanced meals while mothers in Gaza want only for their children to survive? How can I feel irritation at tantrums or too much screen time when parents in Palestine, after decades of occupation, are forced to watch their children reduced to pawns in a campaign to erase the people of Gaza?
And yet parenting small children is relentless. My heart may be on fire with anger at our government's complicity, and still nappies need changing, scraped knees need cleaning. It is paralysing, dystopian, to be engulfed in outrage while performing the mundanity of domestic life: preparing dinner as the news in the background carries the voice of a politician justifying Israel's "right to self-defence."
And every time I look at my own children, I see the dead children of Gaza.
All of this, of course, is not to cast ourselves as victims of Israel's genocide. It is the mothers, the fathers, and the children in Gaza who deserve our attention and outrage. But witnessing a genocide while being forced to carry on with everyday life is not normal.
It should not be normal. It is not normal to scroll through social media and see adverts for nappies and formula alongside the emaciated, battered bodies of children. And we should not treat it as such. It must awaken in us a rallying cry for justice and liberation.
Nadeine Asbali is a freelance writer and secondary school teacher based in London. She is the author of Veiled Threat: On Being Visibly Muslim in Britain
Follow her on X: @nadeinewrites
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