These days my superhero cape feels worn out. Autumn has set in and as usual, has brought with it illnesses of various kinds. Going to sleep at night feels like entering the lottery. The chances are high I will lose. It has been three weeks since our toddler has had some form of illness which has manifested in poor sleep. It began with a middle ear infection which progressed to a kind of harmless cough that turned into bronchitis. As I was holding our child in my arms past midnight over the weekend as he coughed and coughed and coughed, I had flashbacks to when I was a child and coughed relentlessly and my mother tried everything from heating ajwain in a cloth on a tawa and placing it on my chest to giving me tea to just holding me as I coughed. She never complained, much like I don’t either. But it was always in the wee hours, and she always had to set out to work by 7 am and clearly her superhero cape must have felt worn out too.

I had to take this week off from work to save myself from a potential mental breakdown. I feel, every day, like I am functioning on reserve. The consciousness of the political state of affairs in the world and the horrific atrocities that Israel is committing in northern Gaza makes everything feel even more hellish. Last night as I was staving off hunger and trying to contend with a child who was suddenly awake for what felt like no reason at all (possibly a regression, some milestone around the corner), I started thinking about how there is no desirable form of hunger besides the one you feel when you know for certain when to expect your next meal. 
My heart went out to mothers in Palestine, in Lebanon who have spent so much of their emotional and physiological energy as caregivers only to witness their children’s lives completely devalued, as if they never mattered to the world. War is a violation of this basic act of caregiving, which, we all know, is gendered, is something women have historically done. It is so easy to take a life if you have surrendered or compromised your sense of ethics or morality. It is so much harder to sustain life, on the other hand, so much more challenging to nurture another body, whether human or other species, and to value its existence.