Vulnerable

Today we attended a memorial service for a friend of mine. He died tragically at 30; I had known him since kindergarten. Edith was one of two children in attendance at the service, toddling around the floor waving and blowing kisses to people indiscriminately. When my friend's mother and father looked at her with teary smiles, I knew they were seeing in her the little boy they remembered raising, their only child.

And then we came home, and I lost an evening's work to looking at photographs of dead children carried from a bombed building. And every one of them looked like Edith to me.

I don't know if I'm strong enough to be a parent. I have always been frightened by war. Terrorist threats are effective against me. I no longer like to fly or to go into New York City, a place I once loved. I don't even like living in New Jersey, surrounded by nuclear power plants. Edith points out every plane that flies over. She is fascinated by them, but they remind me not only of September 11 now, but of the years I spent lying in bed at night trembling that the jets I heard overhead, all of them landing at Newark Airport a few miles away, were actually Libyan bombers come to retaliate for the American bombing of Tripoli (a rumor that circled in New York area schools after that event). The children in the world who have lain and listened to planes overhead that did turn out to be bombers have lived the primal nightmare I can't contemplate enduring. Yes, I'm scared for myself and my loved ones, in a completely cowardly way.

But I also quake at violence elsewhere in the world. I despair at the damage it does to the much more difficult, painstaking, but ultimately long-lasting work of building bonds between people. I rage at being represented by a government over which I feel powerless, that consistently projects an image of "America" in which I want no part, and that I have little faith can be returned at this point to the hands of people who respect the rule of law.

As a historian, I am deeply frustrated that nation-states in particular and humans in general don't seem to learn from their past. Most historians would deny believing in human moral progress. But if they didn't at bottom hope the past had something to teach the present, why would they bother doing what they do? To devote one's life to the study of history, surely one has to see in it more than merely interesting stories. Like the professor for whom I'm precepting this summer wailed at the beginning of class last week, what is the purpose of our work as historians if it changes nothing? If no one is paying attention? What can I say when my students keep stumbling on parallels in American foreign policy 100 years ago and now? ("Um, Ms. Boger, I'm sorry to bring up Iraq again, but I'm seeing some parallels there to Haiti/Cuba/Guatemala/Chile...")

But now that Edith is here, I have developed an even greater capacity for fear of reckless human destruction. For fifteen months Edith has lived a cozy life, secure, loved, learning to trust the world. As a result she has blossomed into a happy, curious, confident child. The thought that tragedy could someday rob her of that trust is wrenching. The thought that tragic incidents have indeed robbed children the world over of trust and faith in humanity is almost unbearable. What kind of society can we hope to have if it will be built of so many broken children?

I am so much more affected by images of parents losing children than I ever was before becoming a mother. Everyone says this happens when you have a child, but before I had Edith, it sounded like plenty of other sentimental cliches about parenthood. I hadn't realized how true it would prove--indeed, how immediate and almost biological the change in my response to such images would be. Now a commercial can set me crying, and each appeal from St. Jude's Children's Hospital has me clutching for my checkbook. Seeing my friend's parents today trying to be brave in confronting the violent death of their son, seeing the lifeless bodies of children being carried out of rubble--bodies that look for all the world like Edith's when I carry her to bed already asleep--it's hard to cope.

But almost worse than imagining my child in the place of those children who have died tragic violent deaths is wondering how she'll make her way in this world if (God willing) she lives. Because it's the living who have to try to make sense of it all and find a way to keep going, in faith and hope. Right now I can't very well see how a child born in the twenty-first century does that.

I'm not looking forward to the time when Edith first becomes acquainted with grief. I hope she can find reservoirs of compassion and strength when that time comes. Her generation will need both in full measure.