Still Life in Wartime

Twilight from our window feels deceptively still. The world outside this glass is bleeding, and yet here, the sky turns gold and lavender as if nothing is wrong. We wait. We watch. We hold our breath. This beauty doesn’t comfort anymore - it accuses. How can the sun set so peacefully when homes are falling, when children are buried under names we can’t pronounce fast enough?

Life has paused. Every plan, every dream, every “tomorrow” is now just after the war ends. Even this soft pink glow feels heavy.

Wrote the following as I watched the sun set…

Still Life in Wartime

From our bedroom window,
the sky performs its nightly grace,
rose and lilac, silk and flame,
as if no child lies in rubble’s embrace.

The sea exhales a quiet breeze,
the streetlights blink in amber rows,
but peace is just a hollow shell
when somewhere else the shrapnel grows.

We call this calm but calm is false,
a holding breath, a tightened chest.
The sunset doesn’t heal the wound,
it only makes the grief compress.

So let the twilight keep its show
we’ll sit and wait, too tense to weep.
This beauty now is just a pause
between this nightmare, dark and deep.

~ Ishi

Pieced Together and Pulled Apart

If this war wasn't happening, right now I would be surrounded by chaos of the best kind.

Suitcases would be half-open on the bed, stacks of clothes waiting to be folded. Lists would be scribbled on scraps of paper - gifts for them, the things I've been collecting for months, the clothes they've grown into since we last met.

Because this is the thing about a family stretched across continents: every trip home is a reckoning with time. Children grow in the spaces between visits. You carry the memory of them, but you also carry the fear that you won't recognize the new shape of them, and worse that they might have outgrown you.

We would be in the midst of packing for our annual trip back home.

Home. The word is complicated for people like us.

Back home, my two boys wait for me. They are with their father, my ex-husband, and we share this geography of separation in our own way. He and I don't share a life anymore, but we share the impossible task of raising children across oceans. We share the phone calls on birthdays. The coordination of school holidays. The careful negotiations of who gets which weeks.

My husband here, who is also stranded in this nightmare beside me, he understands this pain from his own side. He has two daughters back in India too, living with their mother. So our home here is built from two people who carry the same ache: the ache of loving children you cannot reach.

We are a family pieced together from the fragments of others. And somehow, despite everything, it works. We understand each other's silences. We know when the other is staring at their phone, wondering if it's too late to call. We make space for the missing.

Now this seems like a distant dream. The packing, the planning, the anticipation. Our present plays out like a long nightmare. You know that feeling? When you're in a dark tunnel with no light at the end of it? When you walk and walk and walk, and the darkness only thickens?

That's where we are.

If I missed my children a lot before this, now I miss them even more. But the missing has changed shape. It's sharper now. Edged with something I never had to name before.

Before, missing them came with comfort tucked inside it. The comfort of knowing they were just a flight away. That in a few hours, I could close the distance. That the miles were inconvenient, yes, but also surmountable. The world made sense that way. Separations were temporary, reunions were certain.

That comfort has been snatched away.

For no fault of ours.

And that is an incredibly frustrating and helpless feeling. To want something as fundamental as your child's embrace and to have it rendered impossible by forces so vast and impersonal you can't even find a single face to direct your anger toward.

My boys. His girls. Four young people growing up on the other side of the world, and we are here, stranded, while a war we have nothing to do with decides our fate.

There is anger too. So much anger.

At being at the receiving end of a conflict that isn't ours at all. At being collateral damage in someone else's war. At watching our lives get rearranged by decisions we had no part in making. At the sheer, senseless injustice of it.

My daughter is here with us, and I am grateful for that every single day. But gratitude doesn't cancel grief. It just means you hold two things at once: thankfulness for who is beside you, and longing for who isn't.

I try to distract myself. Some days that works better than others.

I find myself thinking about the things I want to do once this whole situation improves. Small things, mostly. The first time I see my boys. Will the younger one have grown taller? Will the older one still roll his eyes when I hug him too long? The sound of their voices in the same room, not filtered through a crackling phone line. The way they argue over food. The mess they leave behind.

I think about my husband's daughters too. The girls who are mine in the way that matters, the way that is chosen, not given. I think about all of us together someday. A complicated, blended, beautiful mess of a family, finally in the same place.

I catalog these moments like precious supplies. I store them away for the journey.

And I have to keep that hope in me alive. Not because I'm naive about how long this might last. Not because I don't see the darkness. But because hope is the only thing that makes the tunnel survivable. It's not the light at the end, not yet. But it's the match I strike in the dark, over and over, to remind myself that light exists.

That we existed before this nightmare. That we will exist after it.

That my boys are still there, growing up whether I'm watching or not. That his girls are still there, becoming who they will become. That one day, a flight away will be possible again.

That home is still home, even when you can't reach it.

I hold onto that.

What else is there to hold onto but hope?

To everyone else out there separated from children by borders, by conflict, by circumstances beyond your control - I see you. I feel you. We hold this impossible space together.

Living in the Calm Before the Next Siren

The sky is clear today. Blue and ordinary, like skies should be. I made my morning cup of tea without milk, helped my daughter log into her online class, answered texts, did all the normal things that normal people do in a normal life. From the outside, everything looks fine. Functional. Even pleasant. 

But I am exhausted in a way that sleep cannot fix. 

I am learning that war does not only happen on battlefields. It does not only happen in explosions and smoke and collapsing buildings. War also happens in the quiet spaces between alerts, in the minutes before the phone screams, in the hours after you finally put it down and try to remember what it felt like to not be waiting for something terrible. 

This is war fatigue. This is the mental exhaustion of being in a country that functions perfectly while your insides are crumbling. 

The Uneasy Calm 

We go about our days. The markets are open. The cafes are full. Children play in parks. From the outside, an observer would see nothing unusual. Just another day in a country that refuses to stop living. 

But if you look closer, you would notice the way mothers check their phones while pushing swings. The way conversations pause when a car backfires. The way eyes dart skyward at nothing. The way we all hold our breath, waiting. 

This calm is not peace. Peace is restful. Peace lets you exhale. This calm is just the space between waves, the moment when you know the next one is coming but you don't know when, and you cannot stop watching the horizon. 

I cannot detach from my phone. None of us can. We scroll endlessly, hungry for information, any information, as if knowing will somehow protect us. As if the right headline at the right moment could prepare us for what's coming. My thumb moves automatically now, refreshing, reloading, searching for news that never comes because the only news is that nothing has happened yet, and that waiting is its own kind of violence. 

Hoping Against Hope 

Every morning I wake up and think: maybe today. Maybe today sense will prevail. Maybe today someone somewhere will decide that enough is enough, that children have cried enough, that mothers have worried enough, that this whole terrible thing will be called off. 

And every night I go to sleep with the same weight on my chest, the same unanswered prayer, the same realization that the people who started this are not lying awake thinking about my daughter. They are not thinking about anyone's children. They are thinking about power, about advantage, about whatever game this is that requires real people to suffer so they can feel like they are winning. 

I do not know how to hope anymore without it hurting. But I also do not know how to stop. 

The Surreal Distance 

My friends and family are back home. They send messages asking if we are okay, if we need anything, if we are safe. They carry on with their lives, as they should. I do not blame them for living. But there is something profoundly strange about watching the world continue in one place while you are suspended in another, waiting to find out if and when you will see those faces again. 

They cannot feel what I feel. I would not want them to. But the distance between us has become something more than miles. It is the distance between those who live with the siren and those who cannot imagine it. Between those who calculate escape routes while grocery shopping and those who simply buy milk. Between those who hear a sound and freeze and those who hear nothing at all. 

I miss them. I miss the version of myself that could talk to them without calculating how much fear to share, how much to protect them from, how much is too much. I miss being a person who was not always bracing. 

My Daughter's Question 

She asked me again today. Same question she asks after every online class, every time she sees her teacher and friends through a screen instead of in a classroom where she belongs. "Mommy, when can I go back to school? I don't want to see them on the computer anymore. I want to hug them." 

And then she cried. Not a tantrum, not a demand, just tears that came from somewhere deep, somewhere tired, somewhere that has had enough of understanding things a five year old should never have to understand. 

I held her and I lied. I said soon. I said hopefully soon. I said all the things mothers say when the truth is too heavy for small shoulders. But inside I was screaming. Inside I was asking the same question to a universe that never answers. When? When can our children go back to being children? When can they stop learning about war and start learning about fractions and spelling and why the sky is blue? When will someone, anyone, think about them? 

The Cruel Truth We Cannot Escape 

It has become obvious now. To anyone with eyes to see, with a heart that still beats, with a conscience that still functions. This war is not about safety. It is not about defense. It is not about any of the noble things they told us in the beginning. 

This is a war of distraction. A war of manipulation. A war started by people who needed us looking outward so we would not look too closely at what they were doing at home. A war that has taken so much from so many and has not even shaken the conscience of the ones who lit the match. 

How utterly self serving they are. How completely hollow. They sit in their offices, in their compounds, in their positions of power, and they do not lose sleep. They do not hold crying children. They do not calculate whether today is the day they will have to run. They are insulated, protected, untouchable. And the people who put them there, who cheered them on, who handed them power and called it strength, they are now watching from the sidelines as we all pay the price. 

It is a collective failure. All of us. We let this happen. We let them divide us, distract us, use us. We were so busy being afraid of each other that we forgot to notice who was really holding the weapons. And now here we are, mothers and daughters and fathers, carrying the cost of their ambitions, their egos, their endless hunger for more. 

And Still We Wake Up 

I do not know how to end this. There is no neat conclusion, no hopeful resolution, no wisdom that makes any of this bearable. I only know that tomorrow I will wake up and check my phone. I will make my tea without milk and help my daughter with her online class. I will watch the clear blue sky and wonder what it is hiding. I will hold her and tell her stories about a future where she can hug her friends again. 

I will do all of this while exhausted in ways I cannot describe, while furious at people who will never read these words, while heartbroken for all of us caught in something we never chose. 

And I will keep hoping, even though hoping hurts. Because the only alternative is giving up, and I have my daughter watching. I have to show her that even in the middle of madness, you keep loving. You keep feeling. You keep asking why. 

Even when no one answers. 

Even when the sky stays blue and the phone stays silent and the waiting never ends. 

A mother who is so tired but cannot look away...

The Enemy Within: What I See as a Mother Watching the World Burn

I sat down to write this when my husband and daughter stepped out to pick up some groceries. I kept aside my phone and the news images finally stopped playing behind my eyelids. I couldn't stop thinking about what I've been watching unfold. Not as a commentator. Not as an expert. Just as a mother. Just as a woman who has held her own children through nightmares and cannot fathom being the one to cause another mother's child to have them. 

I have an observation. It's been forming for weeks, months, years really, watching conflict after conflict, violence breeding more violence, hatred passing from parent to child like an inheritance nobody wants but everyone collects. 

The only thing the present war in the middle east is proving is that so long as we fear differences, we will be easily let into hatred and continuous conflict. We are our enemy, gullible and vulnerable. And political leaders, whether we idolize or fear them, will use our fears effectively to continue to grab power and serve their own interests. That is the only truth. 

 Let me tell you what this looks like from where I sit. 

The First Thing We Do Is Stop Seeing Each Other 

I remember teaching my children to look at people. Really look. The elderly man on the bus who might need a seat. The new student sitting alone at lunch. The cashier who looks exhausted. I taught them that every single person has a story, a mother who loves them, a life as real and vivid as their own. 

And then I watch war happen and realize that the very first thing it demands is that we unlearn this. We must stop seeing. We must stop recognizing. We must transform human beings into categories, into threats, into symbols of everything we've been taught to fear. 

When I see a child in Gaza, I see my son's face. When I see a child in Israel, I see my daughter's eyes. And I cannot understand how any mother anywhere looks at someone else's child and feels anything other than her own heart breaking. 

But we are taught to fear differences. We are taught that their pain is different from our pain. That their dead are counted differently. That their tears mean something else. And once we believe that, we are already lost. Already capable of anything. Already ready to hate. 

I See Myself in This and It Haunts Me 

This part is the hardest to admit. It would be so much easier to point fingers, to blame them, to pretend I am above all of this. But I have felt the pull. I have felt the anger rise when I see injustice. I have felt the desire to draw lines, to pick sides, to decide who deserves my compassion and who has forfeited it. 

That is what frightens me most. Not the hatred of strangers, but the hatred that lives quietly in my own heart, waiting for permission. Waiting for a reason. Waiting for someone to tell me that this time, it's justified. 

We are so gullible. All of us. We want so badly to be right, to be good, to be on the side of justice, that we will swallow any story that makes us feel righteous. We will believe any narrative that confirms what we already suspect. We are vulnerable because we are human, because we are scared, because the world is terrifying and belonging to a tribe feels safer than standing alone with our doubts. 

I have caught myself doing it. Accepting headlines without question. Sharing outrage without verification. Letting my fear of one group justify my indifference to their suffering. And every time I catch myself, I have to sit with the shame of it. Because I know better. Because I am raising children who are watching me. Because the cycle continues through people like me who should know better and still get swept up. 

And Then There Are the Men Who Profit From Our Pain 

This part makes me want to scream. Because while we are out here, holding our children, worrying about their futures, crying over news that breaks our hearts, there are people in power who need this. They need the fear. They need the hatred. They need us divided because divided people are easy to rule. 

I watch them on television, these leaders. The ones I admire and the ones I despise. And I have started to notice how similar they are. They all speak in certainties. They all paint the other side as monsters. They all promise protection in exchange for obedience. They all need the conflict to continue because without it, what are they? 

The leader we fear becomes the villain we need protecting from. The leader we admire becomes our savior, our shield, our strongman. Both of them depend on our fear. Both of them profit from our pain. And our children, all of our children, pay the price with their futures. I think about this when I tuck my kids in at night.

I think about mothers doing the same thing on the other side of the world, under different skies, speaking different languages, praying to God by different names, but doing the exact same thing. Loving their children. Wanting them safe. Dreading the morning. And somewhere, men in suits are making decisions that ensure none of us will ever feel safe again, because our fear is their currency. 

Maybe This Is the Only Truth Worth Knowing 

I wrote that line and I meant it. Not because I have given up hope, but because I think we have to name the thing before we can change it. The conflict is not just out there, happening to other people in other places. It lives in here, in my heart, in your heart, in the way we learn to see each other, in the stories we accept without questioning, in the fears we carry without examining. 

I do not have answers. I am just a mother. I am just a woman who cannot look at a dead child anywhere in the world without feeling something break inside her. I am just someone who is tired of being afraid, tired of being used, tired of watching the same cycle repeat itself while the people who could stop it profit from its continuation. 

But I have to believe that noticing this matters. That naming it matters. That somewhere, another mother is looking at her children and having the same thought. That if enough of us refuse to be enemies, refuse to be used, refuse to let our fear become hatred, maybe something shifts. 

I don't know. Maybe that's naive. Maybe that's just what mothers do, hope when hoping seems foolish, love when loving seems dangerous. But it's all I have. And I'm putting it here because I need to believe I'm not alone in feeling this way. 

With a heavy heart and unshakeable hope, 

A mother who refuses to stop seeing

Holding It Together: A Mother's Diary from the Edge

The air here is thick with tension. It's a strange, suffocating feeling. A heavy stillness that has nothing to do with the weather, even as the skies remain cloudy and rain occasionally falls. My name is Ishita, and I am writing this from my living room in Doha, a place that was supposed to be a temporary chapter in our lives but has become a fortress we cannot leave at will. 

My journey to this part of the world began in 2019, a story of love and new beginnings. I moved here to join my husband, who has been working in Qatar since 2015. We were finally together, building the life we had dreamed of. Soon after, we were blessed with the happy news of my pregnancy. It was a late pregnancy. I was in my mid-40s and we were understandably apprehensive. Having had two previous C-sections, we were on high alert. But miraculously, everything was going smoothly. 

We had a plan: I would travel back to India for the delivery, to be close to family and familiar doctors. Then, the world stopped. COVID-19 struck, borders slammed shut, and our plans were swept away in the global tide. We found ourselves stuck in Doha for nearly two years. 

And in the middle of that uncertainty, our little miracle arrived. My daughter was born here, a tiny, perfect beacon of light in a time of lockdowns and isolation. When she was a year and a half old, we finally made that long-awaited trip to India. Watching her meet her siblings - my older children and my husband's from our previous marriages, was a moment of pure, unadulterated joy. Our family, in all its beautiful, blended complexity, was finally whole. 

Life, however, had more lessons in store. At age three, our bubbly girl was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The world we knew tilted on its axis again. We learned she started social communication late, but to us, she has always been our pride and joy. We found her a wonderful special school here that has worked wonders. She has blossomed into a confident, happy, and fiercely independent 5-year-old. 

We were counting down the days until our next trip home in March. The bags were almost mentally packed. We couldn't wait to see the sparkle in her eyes as she played with her siblings again. 

Then, the worst happened. The spectre of a US-Israel-Iran war became a terrifying reality. 

Our dream of going home has evaporated. Even if the land borders and airspace are partially open, the cost is now astronomical - a luxury we simply cannot afford during a crisis. But the financial strain is only the beginning of this living nightmare. 

Our days no longer begin with the sun, but with the shrill, horrifying sound of alert sirens. We wake up, our hearts already racing, and brace ourselves for the sounds that follow: the heavy thuds of interceptions and the terrifying booms of explosions. We are living in a real-time war zone, watching the news in disbelief as the conflict plays out just beyond our windows. 

But the true devastation is not the fear I feel for myself; it is watching it shatter my daughter's sense of security. 

My brave little girl, who has fought her own battles to communicate and connect with the world, is petrified. The loud, jarring alert message on our phones is a trigger she cannot comprehend. Today, something happened that broke me in a way the explosions never could. 

She came to me, holding her precious tab which is her comfort, her coping mechanism, her window to a world of favourite shows and placed it gently in my hands. With her big, innocent eyes looking up at me, she said, "Mummy, you keep the danger... I don't like it!" 

My heart shattered into a million pieces. In her 5-year-old mind, the source of the scary noise was her tablet. She was trying to give away the "danger" to protect herself.

Now, she spends her days with her tiny hands clamped over her ears, hiding in her toy room. I put her favourite shows on the TV, cranking up the volume in a desperate attempt to drown out the sounds of a war she cannot understand. We are trying to build a bubble of safety in a room, while the world outside is on fire. 

We are not soldiers. We are not politicians. We are just a family, stuck in the middle of a geopolitical storm, trying to protect a little girl from a fear no child should ever have to know. 

This is my account of being stuck not just in a country, but in a nightmare of uncertainty. We don't know when we can go home. We don't know when the next siren will sound. All we know is that right now, in this moment, our entire world consists of keeping a 5-year-old girl calm, happy, and unaware of the "danger" we are all living in. 

And yet, even in my fear, I am haunted by a devastating truth. If watching my little girl hand me her tablet to "keep the danger" makes me feel this helpless, this vulnerable, this utterly broken, then what must it be like for the mothers in Gaza? In Israel? In Iran? In Yemen? In Ukraine? In every conflict-scarred corner of this world? 

I have the privilege of walls, of a TV to drown out the noise, of a toy room for her to hide in. But there are mothers right now, somewhere in the darkness, clutching their children in basements or bomb shelters, or worse - searching for them in rubble. There are children who have known nothing but the sound of explosions their entire young lives. Children who have no tablet to give away, no favourite shows to distract them, no safe room to cover their ears. 

My daughter is terrified, and it is unbearable. But at least she has me to hold her. At least she has a room to hide in. For countless mothers and their children in the direct line of fire, there is nowhere to run, no volume loud enough to drown out the nightmare, and no one to hand the "danger" to. They endure this horror every single day. And that is the most heartbreaking thought of all. 

Amidst the fear and the chaos, I must also take a moment to acknowledge something that weighs heavily on my heart. We are stuck, yes. We are afraid, absolutely. But we are also alive and unharmed. For that, I owe a profound debt of gratitude to the country that has been our home since 2019 - Qatar. 

To the government and the authorities here, thank you. Thank you for the systems that intercept the danger before it reaches us. Thank you for the early warning systems that, however terrifying, give us those precious seconds to brace and protect ourselves. Thank you for the stability and safety that this nation provides, even as the region around us burns. In a sea of uncertainty, knowing that we are under your protection is the one anchor we have. This country took us in, it saw my daughter born, it educated her, and now, it is keeping her safe. For that, we will always be grateful.