No war is as hard as raising a 12-year-old girl

August 14, 2006 - 7:33 PM by Sarah

Brian Blum has been blogging about the agonizing decision of whether to send his 12-year-old daughter, Merav, to her first sleepaway camp experience, on a kibbutz, where on the one hand she’d have a great time, and on the other she’d be far from a bomb shelter.

Here’s how the story ends:

Survivor Day was set in a man-made swimming hole about a 15-minute walk from the kibbutz itself. After its early start in the wee hours of the morning, the action-packed day wasn’t scheduled to conclude until near sunset. Then, at approximately 11 a.m. Hezbollah fired five long-range, Khaibar-1 missiles from deep inside Lebanon.

Unlike the shorter range Katyushas, which fall on beleaguered closer-to-the-border communities like Kyriat Shemona, Karmiel and Safed, the long-range missiles can travel 100 km or more and pack a much more powerful warhead.

The Khaibars landed in the Mount Gilboa forests between Bet Shean and Afula. As soon as I heard the news (since the war started over a month ago, I have been obsessively monitoring the Internet, checking in no less than once every five minutes), I pulled out a map. Whereas the previous round of missiles fired into the Bet Shean area sailed mostly over the town and nearby Kibbutz Shluchot – setting off alarms, but touching ground a good deal away near the West Bank city of Jenin – this time, they were daringly close to a camp full of kids outdoors, who not coincidentally, were also miles from the nearest bomb shelter.

The phone soon rang. It was Merav. She was clearly in tears; I could feel her shoulders heaving up and down in the tremble of her voice. “They’re canceling camp,” she said. “We’re coming home tonight. They said it’s not safe here anymore.”

I didn’t know exactly how to respond. It’s hard enough parenting a teenage daughter in ordinary times and Merav’s emotions are already volatile; I never know if she’s going to take a comment in stride or launch into a sequence of ceremonial door slamming.

Should I try to comfort her, ask her how she was feeling and if she was scared? Or should I act all nonchalant and normal and say what a shame it was that camp was ending early, letting her initiate any heavy-duty discussion?

I looked for clues in Merav’s words.

“And today was supposed to be the best day of camp, too,” she said. I sensed less shaking now and more of a pout. That seemed to call for a laid-back direction.

“That’s such a bummer,” I said, picking my words carefully. “I know you were really looking forward to it.”

“But I’m scared, Abba.”

“You are?” I said, confused now by the rapid change of course. “Well, what was it like?”

“We heard this whistling sound, it was more like a ‘whoosh,’ then we thought we saw a light in the sky – I’m not sure – it was almost like a shooting star in the middle of the day – and then there were these big ‘booms’ and we saw all this smoke going up from the other side of the mountain. We had to duck under these picnic tables for, like 15 minutes, and we were all wet and it was muddy.”

“That must have been awful,” I intoned caringly. “No wonder you were scared!”

“And now you’re going to have a big load of clothes to wash!” Merav barked, a sprig of sarcasm back in her voice.

My parenting instinct was being ping-ponged all over the table. I needed to pick a strategy: casual or concern. But Merav had decided for me.

“I have to go now,” Merav interrupted my game of mental table tennis. “We need to pack. We’re coming home tonight. Bye.”