Family life in Israel

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Thursday, February 29th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Myrna Brown.

MARY REICHARD, HOST: And I’m Mary Reichard.

BROWN: Coming next: seeking stability in a war zone.

Life in Israel has been slowly taking on a new normal since the October 7th terror attack by Hamas. Many people are back to the jobs they had before the war and most children are back in school, but underneath the routine, many kids are fearful.

REICHARD: WORLD’s Mary Muncy brings us the story of an Israeli family trying to find their new normal. WORLD is not using their last name as a safety precaution.

SOUND: [Family in kitchen]

MARY MUNCY: Shira, her husband, and three kids are sitting around the breakfast table before they head to work and school.

JORDAN: [gasp] What happened? Tell us. What happened?

SCHYLER: So, there was this station…

They live in Jerusalem. It’s more secure than many other parts of Israel.

Schuyler is Shira’s middle daughter. She’s 12 and she’s telling the family about drama at the bat mitzvah she went to last night. Nate—Shira’s 10-year-old—is explaining what he needs to eat in Minecraft to survive. Jordan, the oldest, is quietly eating her cornflakes with milk and honey. She’s still waking up.

They finish eating, grab the lunches Shira packed, and head out the door.

When Hamas struck on October 7, everything stopped for Shira and her family.

The kids stayed home from school and the Israeli government called her husband to serve in the military. Shira started driving her kids to school so they didn’t need to ride the bus and she started thinking about how to keep her kids mentally and physically healthy.

SHIRA: There's no book out there that says how to parent during a war. I looked. I did go to Amazon. Did someone write a book for me? There's no book.

So Shira and her husband have been figuring it out one day at a time.

Routine went out the window and every day presented a new, overwhelming hurdle. So, on October 9th, while her husband was at the base, Shira gathered her kids around the kitchen table. She grabbed the whiteboard that had their calendar for October on it, erased it, and asked her kids what they wanted to do after the war.

SHIRA: Then they all shouted, you know, whatever they wanted and I would write it down and then I left it hanging in the kitchen.

They made columns for every family member—including the dog. They wrote down things like going to a water park, getting coffee at their favorite coffee cart, and visiting their grandparents.

SHIRA: So this whiteboard has been getting us through. Like when things are really hard. We're like okay, you know, what do you want to do after the war? Where do you want to go?

And things did get hard.

Her kids were scared. They couldn’t sleep because they were worried Hamas would kidnap them from their beds. They asked her what was happening to the children the terrorists kidnapped. She had to explain to her daughters what Hamas did to the women they took.

Over the coming weeks, they almost filled their whiteboard.

Shira is grateful her husband got to come home at night. But he was barely home. He usually left the house at 5:30 in the morning and sometimes wasn’t back until 9:00 at night.

SHIRA: So during that time period while he was on the base, I was single mommying suddenly, and in order to do that I actually had to walk away from some of my project work. So I lost a huge chunk of income that goes to pay our bills and pay the rent and keep the lights on in our house, and I spent the majority of my day literally driving carpool.

At first, Shira was just driving because it had to get done, but after a while she realized the forced one-on-one time gave her kids a chance to process with her.

SHIRA: It's hard enough to be like 12 in a new school, but to be 12 in a new school and have rocket attacks and a war and like your dad not being home.

In the beginning, they listened to the news in the car, but that got too heavy. So they started adding music to a YouTube playlist and playing that every morning. Shira calls it her war mix. They would pray in the car together and life started to settle.

Then one Saturday, over Shabbat, the Israeli Defense Forces lost 11 soldiers. At that point, it was the most soldiers they’d lost at one time since Hamas’ initial attack. Shira and her family talked about it together, but that only softened a very hard blow.

SHIRA: I had a hard time getting out of bed the next morning, but I had to take my kids to school.

So they got in the car, prayed, and started the war mix like normal. On that day, Nate was the last one she dropped off.

SHIRA: We were in the car. And my son said to me, “You know, I'm going to be a soldier one day.” I said, “Yeah, I know.” And he's like, “But I don't want to die.” And it was like, you know, that punch in the gut? What do you say? What do I mean? I say, “Well, I don't want you to die either, you know, please God, you won't.”

So Shira told him what she calls the lie every mother in Israel tells themselves.

SHIRA: I say to him, “Please, God. By the time you're 18, and you have to draft, it you won't- it won't be a war,” and then we drop him off at school.

Over the past few months, there were also small victories. Shira’s husband aged out of the military. He started his old job again and is helping with carpool. Eventually, 12-year-old Schuyler rode the bus by herself for the first time since before the attack.

SHIRA: She cried. She cried walking to school. She was really upset and she cried. But then she got to school and I told her I'm proud of her and then she adjusted. Yeah, it wasn't, I didn't feel good for me. It felt horrible. You know, I almost jumped in the car and picked her up.

But she wanted Schuyler to start feeling safe enough to be independent again.

Now, about five months into the war, they can do a lot of the things on the whiteboard.

NATE: First one is go to the movie.

SHIRA: Which we can do now.

NATE: We can do now. Next is go to a water park. And have a sleepover with my friends. And visit my family in America.

Life isn’t back to normal yet, but they’re getting there, one day at a time.

SHIRA: We said as a family that we want to live in peace. That's all we want.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy.

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