The Whys of War
Submitted by Leslie Constans on Tue, March 25th 2008.
Category: Childhood
In the bliss of the baby years, war seemed faraway.
The battle between the Longnecks and the Sharptooths is the first conflict to enter consciousness. She cries, so we turn the video off.
On the playground, the pointed fingers and sounds of pling-pling-pling are just the weird noises of boys. She’s too busy playing Mom or swinging on the monkey bars to notice.
At 4, the re-wiring of her brain turns her into a kicking, hitting Tasmanian devil, and we enter into a brief but intense wartime of our own. The victims: my jaw, my husband’s hair, a bagel smashed in my fist.
Driving down Broadway one day past the Army recruiting center, cars honk and people cheer the war protestors flooding the sidewalk. Why are they honking at those people? the voice from the backseat asks.
They’re saying, No war, I tell the Tasmanian devil. She stares out the window, wide-eyed, serious, and I repeat: No hitting. No kicking. No hurting other people.
Okay, Mom, she sighs, exasperated.
In the end, it is the rows and rows and rows of red stick figures across one full page of the Sunday newspaper that bring the war home. This time on her terms, not mine.
Lying open on the breakfast table, the page is just another piece of paper in our pile of coloring books, catalogs and junk mail. Until a rebellious Cheerio escapes her spoon and lands on a figure, soaking it with milk.
She wonders aloud who he is, this milky red boy with a Cheerio stuck on his belly. He’s someone who died in the war, I explain. She frowns. What war?
Now 5, she’s the one agitated by the killing and hurting. She demands to know why and who and how. We talk in five-year-old abstractions. When people or countries disagree they should try to use their words.
But sometimes it doesn’t work, and people fight instead. The conversation turns to the decider in this case, the president of the U.S. She doesn’t even know there is a president or power or war.
Suddenly, her young mind spins with possible solutions: She can use her magic wand and take the president’s power away (and stop the war). Or, she can scoop his power out with a cup (and put a lid on it and throw it in the garbage).
Later, when my daughter tells me she will be a mom and the president when she grows up, my mind is the one spinning with possibilities. Maybe, finally, someday there will be no such thing as a childhood or a mother in wartime.
Leslie Constans
2008
