“The child does not tell you what dangers he is in, because he knows that Mom will go crazy”

“The child does not tell you what dangers he is in, because he knows that Mom will go crazy. But we are not stupid. One look is enough.” Sharon feels pain in her womb area, Shira imagines what she will say at her son’s grave, Dana hung a sign on the door “Do not knock,” fearing that that specific knock will come. A new book brings moving and exposed monologues of mothers of combat soldiers, and outlines what life looks like between intense pangs of conscience, anxiety attacks, and the wait for the redeeming sign: two blue ticks in WhatsApp. And then it all starts over again.

“Since my child entered Gaza, I have ground down my teeth until they wore out, I started suffering from gum disease from all the tension,” says Sharon, a mother of a regular soldier in an elite commando unit. “I am almost 60 and I have symptoms of a woman after childbirth: my breasts hurt a lot and are about to spray milk, and my fallopian tubes are in excruciating pain, as if I have put my child in uniform back into the womb and I am wrapping him again and protecting him before a new exit into the world, but what world? A world that is entirely composed of the narrative of the Binding (of Isaac) that is in our bones, and I say this even as a secular person.” Being a mother to a child in combat is the toughest and cruelest challenge a parent can go through. Parents of combat soldiers are exhausted and finished not only because of the anxieties, but also because we are in an area of the soul that summarizes and weighs into a state of unknowing everything we supposedly knew until now. A situation that dismantles for us the concept of being a mother and being a father.

Explain, what do you mean? “After all, all our lives we raised our children in the most protective way, we kept them from any harm, and suddenly the age of 18 arrives and we send them to what could be their death in war. It is a dissonance that puts us through a transformation from which there is no return. I will never be the same person again, and I will forever carry wounds in body and soul. And not only because of the fear of the knock on the door, but out of the knowledge that I, I sent him there. After all, he didn’t become a combat soldier just because he wants to, but also because I bound him to it. I funneled him there.”

So you feel guilty? “Yes, because I live in a bipolarity where on one hand I raised him on the fact that one must go out to fight, and on the other hand I am his mother who is supposed to protect him, and therefore it hurts in my womb, because I want to swallow him back into me and close my legs and leave him there.” Sharon is not talking only about a sense of guilt, but literally about betrayal: her own betrayal of her son, and her betrayal of herself.

Why betraying yourself too? “What do you mean why? Because he is my child, they are our babies, and where exactly are we sending them? To die? I sit all day and look at his pictures when he was a baby, and as long as he is in uniform in Lebanon, there is no adult person in front of me. There is a baby I abandoned.”

Meaning, you deny his adulthood because it endangers his existence? “Definitely. And also take responsibility for the fact that here we betrayed them, here we were wrong, because 18-year-old children are not supposed to go to die in the army. We are in a reality where we raise our children from age zero under the knowledge that we will protect them at any cost and then we betray them, and it doesn’t sit well with me. After all, I am not raising a gladiator, I am raising my son who was born 20 years ago on the insight that I brought him to an amazing country, to an amazing world, to learn, to love, to develop, and I tell him since he was small that there will be peace and it will be good and do good and there are good people. And in the end, we behave exactly the opposite and send them to fight and die. And this is the dichotomy that parents of combat soldiers fall into, and exactly here one can go crazy. And I tell you that I went crazy and that my body also went crazy.”

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Disturbed like Sharon is also Efrat Shlomi-Leibovitz, a researcher and lecturer in the field of communication, gender, society, and the military at Ono Academic College, and also the author of the book “Mothers on the Front - The Experiences of Mothers of Combat Soldiers in Iron Swords” (Kinneret Publishing), which brings together 15 exposed and poignant monologues of mothers of combat soldiers, all of whom tremble at the knock on the door, but not only.

“My partner and I have been together for 17 years, and during the war, out of four children, we had two children in the army - both my daughter, as an infantry instructor who has friends who were hostages, and my partner’s son, who is a combat soldier who lost friends,” says Shlomi-Leibovitz. “This child lived with us and would come from the war to our home, and for me, this is my child on whom I see the influence of the fighting. From my life beside him, I wanted to research, hear, and understand what happens to other mothers, because the wound inside me was great.”

So she went on a journey in which she conducted deep confidential interviews with 15 mothers of combat soldiers, as is customary in academic research. Later, she processed and bound the interviews into a book “which is the story of all of us, as a society, as mothers, as women in a historical period in Israeli society. A period that I hope will not repeat itself,” she says, and drops a bomb. “There is one mother I interviewed for the research who is no longer with us, she could not bear the tension and the pain and the abandonment and the anxiety and the feeling of loneliness of being a mother to children who were simultaneously inside the war. It was too much for her,” says Shlomi-Leibovitz, and her voice weakens.

Did you identify her distress? “Yes, from the interviews I could notice that her discourse was indeed the most extreme, but it is completely hindsight wisdom to say ‘how did I not see,’ and it is also not my role to know, but it was a shock, a real shock.”

And indeed, each of the maternal monologues in the book is like a steel blade stuck in our collective stomach. The mothers talk about the helplessness, the guilt, and the parental dissonance in sending the fruit of your womb into the inferno, and about the break in the face of the lack of trust in the army and the government. They describe the physical expressions of emotional distress at the funerals of the fallen and in the face of the terror of the knock on the door, and the fact that the sons – and sometimes their partners – hide from them the real dangers in the field. They also reveal coping strategies: from prayers and separating challah, to searching for spiritual signs in the universe, and signs of life in blue ticks on the phone.

Shlomi-Leibovitz: “Only when I started interviewing the mothers did I understand what was happening to me at all, things I didn’t know how to give names to, feelings I didn’t understand which template to put into. Am I crazy? How is it that I feel so alone? The feeling of loneliness is something that mothers in the research talk about a lot. And also the feeling that you are going crazy, for example, imagining yourself at your son’s funeral, or hearing the knock on the door. When other women validate your feelings, you understand that you are not crazy and not alone, but part of something bigger that is happening, and that what you feel is legitimate.”

Are the anxieties of a mother whose son goes to battle not legitimate? “Yes. This is what we think, that our feelings are not legitimate, that no one will understand us, that we are not allowed to take this voice out, because it will weaken the combat soldier child and endanger his life. And this also corresponds with the fact that as women we are taught to be silent, to be those who hold both our anxiety and the need to encourage and strengthen the child in a place where you are the most afraid in the world.”

This dissonance, she says, creates circles of concealment and lies, where everyone tries to protect everyone: “Because you are afraid that he will weaken, you don’t tell him that you yourself are dying of fear and don’t want to let him go. And he is also afraid for you, doesn’t tell you what dangers he is in and sanitizes words and tells only his father, because he knows that Mom will go crazy. But we are not stupid, we know that we are being excluded. When the child comes home, one look is enough to notice that something significant happened to him, that he is not okay.”

In the book, for example, a mother named Amit describes how she understood that her son hid from her his direct involvement in the fighting, but she discovered the truth. “On his second exit from Gaza, he tells me ‘Mom, don’t worry, we are holding the territory, I am now in the back, in sniping, we are not inside.’ And then one Wednesday afternoon my phone doesn’t stop ringing and I get a lot of messages to turn on the TV. I turn it on, and on the screen the reporter is interviewing my son in the living room of some Hamasnik in the heart of Khan Yunis. He is lying to me, he is indeed in combat, and I can’t do anything about it. So he lied to me, but now the child is throwing an anti-tank missile or killing terrorists, so am I going to yell at him now?”

And when this child returned home, Shlomi-Leibovitz tells, this mother also discovered that not only was he fighting and hiding it from her, but he was in a death trap. “The mother tells me that the child returned from Gaza, went to shower, and when he came out wrapped in a towel, she identified on him a black stain that looked like stubborn grease. She said to him ‘Hey, you missed, it seems to me you have oil or grease or something that doesn’t come off the body. Go into the shower again.’ And then he sits her down in the living room, tells her ‘Wait here, I’m going to get dressed,’ and inevitably, reveals to her what happened and why he has this stain.”

Sharon: “I will never be the same person again, and I will forever carry wounds in body and soul. And not only because of the fear of the knock on the door, but out of the knowledge that I, I sent him there.”

If that mother hadn’t seen her son exposed with the towel, the knowledge of the death danger would have remained under the uniform, which hides not only the bruises, but also what is forbidden to bring home: the door that was kicked in a house they entered to clear, the shooting in the dark, the encounter with the terrorists. It turns out that when he led the force, her son fell into a booby-trapped shaft and only thanks to the fact that the rifle he carried caught on the opening of the shaft, he did not fall into it, but managed to hold onto the weapon and not explode with the rest. “All this the mother would not have known if she hadn’t seen the stain,” says Shlomi-Leibovitz. “Unlike her, the father of that combat soldier did know, and he also hid it from the mother, and thus a male alliance is created in the house where the mother is excluded. The desire to protect each other gives birth to circles of concealment and silencing that enter the domestic, marital, and parental space and into the soul of the mothers.”

She emphasizes that not only do the combat soldiers entrust the battle stories to the fathers, but the combat daughters also talk about the dangers they went through only with their father and not with their mother, who is excluded from the combat picture almost completely. “The fathers who read the book write and tell me that they can completely find themselves in the monologues of the mothers. That is, even when they hold a facade that fits the description of the male stereotype, they still have the same fears and anxieties as the mothers.”

Only they suppress them? “Yes, they are very restrained. And, by the way, the mothers are also restrained and hold a facade outwardly, but inside they collapse.”

And in order not to collapse, or at least try not to collapse, each one develops her coping strategy. In her research, Shlomi-Leibovitz marks several such methods. “There are those who, despite the concealment, need to know. I call it ‘knowledge as an emotional escape.’ First of all on a basic level, what he ate, what he drank, is he cold, and after that where he is, what he is going through. Knowledge gives them peace, and certainty gives a sense of security.”

Certainty and security, supposedly. “True, but many mothers prefer to know than not to know, because the imagination has no limits, and when I don’t know, then uncertainty inspires insecurity, but when I know I cope. And there are also few mothers who intentionally don’t want to know anything, and say that knowledge will not add them calmness.”

Another strategy that stands out overwhelmingly in the current war sits on the connection with the commanders, when the mothers place on their shoulders a kind of secondary parental mission. “Mothers who say ‘I cannot be there with my child inside the battle, if I could I would come, but you are there and you will take care of my son and also tell me how he is.’ And so the commanders, who took in this war the place of the national calmers, send mothers pictures of the children sleeping at night inside a building in Gaza, so that they see that they are okay. That is, the commanders discover in this war that they are not supposed to deal only with fighting and the welfare of the soldiers and their own welfare, but also with the welfare of the mothers.”

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Another coping method is sticking to WhatsApp. Two blue ticks and the time indication in “last seen” have become an anchor inside a chaotic reality. Mom Naama, from the book: “I forced him to leave in WhatsApp the ‘last seen.’ I explained to him that when I see that you were in WhatsApp, for me it is enough. All day I check again and again when he was last seen, and when the sign disappears, the anxiety increases. I remember the day when an hour after he didn’t answer, all the rumors already arrived that the 13th Battalion was hit, and he doesn’t answer, and he is not seen in WhatsApp and the day becomes terrible.”

Also Mom Chana depends on the mercy of WhatsApp, which allow her to cope with the worry and anxiety for the welfare of her four sons and four sons-in-law. From the book: “I asked them to report every day, to call if there is an opportunity or to send some sign in WhatsApp, a message, a sign of life, that’s it, no need for much. A sign of life is enough, just to know that everything is okay.”

“The relationship with the double blue tick and with the ‘last seen’ on the phone summarizes the story,” says Shlomi-Leibovitz, and whoever holds her book in his hands will discover that on its spine appears a double blue tick, which is the oxygen balloon of the mothers. And yet, even after it appears, it provides only temporary comfort until the mothers find themselves again in a circle of waiting, hope, coping, and uncertainty.

What would mothers from wars in which they waited for a postcard say? “True, true, oh my, what a thing. How does a mother of a combat soldier survive without a double blue tick, it’s crazy and hard,” says Shlomi-Leibovitz. “I created with my son agreed signs, I told him that when he goes out for activity let him send me a heart and when he returns let him send me another heart, just so I know he went out and returned.”

“And then one evening he does a video call with me and I see him with these things on his forehead and tactical clothes and with camouflage signs and I don’t want to connect the dots and don’t want to think and he also doesn’t send me any heart,” she tells. “The conversation ends, and I go to sleep and wake up at five in the morning and see in my phone that he sent a heart and understand that he is on the way to an operation. And since I am in tension, I decide to go for a run, because I am not able to stay closed in the room. I start running and tell myself that until I don’t receive from him another heart that testifies that he returned, I don’t stop running. And I run and run and run from Herzliya and arrive already to Tel Aviv, and from time to time look in the phone and there is no heart and I continue to run because I made an agreement with myself.”

“There is no mother of a combat soldier who doesn’t know these agreements that we make with ourselves. And at some stage I have no strength left to hold, neither the run nor the worry, and I call my partner and he says ‘Yes, we just spoke,’ and I call the child and say ‘What’s happening, I am waiting for you to send me a heart that you returned,’ and he answers ‘But you spoke with me yesterday at night, you saw how I am dressed, you saw that I am entering. The heart in the morning I sent when we returned.’”

I am not breathing with you, as if I also ran all the way from Herzliya. “You understand, how all our emotional side, the anxieties, the uncertainty depend on two blue ticks in the phone?”

Dana (from the book): “I put a sign on the door with my phone number in big and wrote ‘Mom of a combat soldier, do not knock on the door.’ I cannot hear knocks on the door, call before. Doesn’t matter who, do not knock on the door.”

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And there are mothers who choose a strategy of maintaining a routine as if there is no war: a kind of game in which the refrigerator is full of all the things the child likes even if he is not at home for weeks, and in the background songs, and a false pretense that the house functions supposedly as usual although nothing is as usual. Mom Amit, from the book: “After he leaves the house, I don’t allow anyone to enter his room or change sheets, until I know he is coming to sleep back. As he leaves, I cover all the mess on the bed with a big blanket, no one is allowed to get on my child’s bed. I don’t wash the clothes he wore on his vacation, until he returns. I need his smell in the house.”

And there are mothers, Shlomi-Leibovitz tells, who run away from the house, which is supposed to be the safest and most protected space, because it puts in them anxiety before the knock on the door that might come. They arrive home, quickly do what they need, and fly from there, just to not be at home if they knock on the door. But this does not protect them from the horror shows of the imagination, to such an extent that they built themselves methods of action for conduct inside the anxiety. Mom Dana, from the book: “I put a sign on the door with my phone number in big and wrote ‘Mom of a combat soldier, do not knock on the door.’ I cannot hear knocks on the door, call before. Doesn’t matter who, do not knock on the door. I am not religious but live in a settlement where there are religious and if after the Sabbath enters I hear a vehicle, I run to see what vehicle it is. I built myself such a hangout on the balcony, freezing from cold or suffering from heat, doesn’t matter, the main thing is that I can observe the street - just that it won’t be a military vehicle.”

“In Soroka Hospital I have friends, when helicopters enter, I immediately call and ask the color of the shoes and then I know if it is ‘ours’ or not ours. Stupid things. Methods. Red shoes? Start the car, drive to Soroka, because if it is not him, these are his friends. Following small nuances. If they say in the news ‘98th Division entered Gaza,’ or ‘returned to fighting,’ I start following. From the moment they say ‘intense fighting,’ I enter the house, wait for ‘permitted for publication’ and pray that I won’t be the one they knock on her door.”

Efrat Shlomi-Leibovitz: “Fathers who read the book tell me that they can completely find themselves in the monologues of the mothers. Even when they hold a facade that fits the description of the male stereotype, they still have fears and anxieties like the mothers.”

Shlomi-Leibovitz: “One of the mothers really told me how she and her daughter heard a knock supposedly on the door of the house and already saw in the imagination the movie of the notification about the son’s fall, and the anxiety realizes in one moment. The mother tells me ‘I already see them entering and holding me and notifying me.’”

That mother was rushed to the hospital in the middle of an anxiety attack, without anything real from all that she imagined happening in reality. Mom Naama, from the book: “You live it, you live in horror, in existential anxiety. Everything is a trigger, every funeral that is shown, everyone who is wounded. You see yourself there, thinking what you will say at the grave... how we stand there and eulogize. You shower, imagine and cry.”

Is there a difference between believing and non-believing mothers? Do the believers say ‘everything is in the hands of heaven’ and worry less? “There are those who are not religious at all and have no connection to religion, but inside the anxiety they still turn to the spiritual part, do ceremonies, go to the Western Wall, do separation of challah. In all of them the deep fear exists, even in the religious ones.”

“There is for example in the book a religious interviewee, who had in the fighting four sons and four sons-in-law and her daughter was evacuated from a settlement in the south. This woman went through a very long period in which she went crazy, she could not know when it will come and from where it will come. When reading her text, there is an open layer that says ‘everything is in the hands of heaven, everything is for the best,’ she is as if in a calmer state compared to other mothers, but when entering and analyzing the text, one sees that she is exactly like everyone. She has the same anxieties, the same fears, the same relationships with the sons around the concealment, the same fear of death, because every day there is ‘permitted for publication’ and every day sons of friends fall, and there is no family that doesn’t know a fallen or fallen woman in this war, and of course there is inside all this also a very big break towards the state and the army.”

Shlomi-Leibovitz says that this war is not like the rest of the wars and rounds. The unique difficulty of the current war lies in the fact that it did not happen “there,” but entered our home. On the emotional level, the fact that the enemy was able to invade the state’s territory, the settlements, the houses, flooded very deep emotional layers that connect to previous traumas of all of us, which until today were not flooded.

What is flooding in the current war? “Questions of mothers who wonder ‘who is he following, who is protecting him, on what are my values based, where am I sending him,’ and alongside this the knowledge that I have no choice. They don’t ask me.”

And jealousy of mothers who don’t send children to fight? “It is not jealousy, but a very big anger at the inequality in the burden, up to feelings of being a ‘sucker’ (freier) because while the sons who fight hundreds of days a year and lose their most beautiful years, there is a population that gives nothing and their children are not hit in endless rounds of fighting, but continue their lives. This leads the mothers to a feeling that they themselves are also ‘suckers,’ because after all the conflict and guilt around sending sons to battle still exist. On one hand they know that ‘this is what is needed, and these are the values,’ and on the other hand they stand before a broken trough, and this broken trough is they themselves.”