Blessed

Two days ago, I read the account of how Frances Harrison, the first female BBC Bureau Chief of Iran, juggled motherhood and her journalist career. Reading about how she brought up her child while running out to capture war stories and newslines was fascinating. She revealed that motherhood brought a new perspective.

“At night in Sri Lanka, I would sit under the ceiling fan and rock my tiny baby to sleep in my arms, haunted by the stories I reported by day: tales of torture, mass graves and the agony of the missing fighters' mothers who never received a corpse to mourn. Both sides reeled out casualty statistics like cricket scores, forgetting the people they talked about were once someone's baby, loved and protected.”

What really struck my heart was when I read this:

“For me, what it means to be a good mother is defined by the women I interviewed for my book on the horrific end to the civil war in Sri Lanka. At the height of the fighting in 2009, hundreds of thousands of civilians were shelled and bombed while hiding in flimsy earthen ditches. Mothers used their bodies to protect children from the flying shards of deadly metal. Dying women gave their babies one last breastfeed, knowing they'd otherwise starve in a place where milk cost more than gold. And some discussed suicide together because they couldn't bear to be separated.

One Tamil widow I met has a daughter the same age as my son. The child lost half her body weight in five months from starvation. Surviving against all odds, the mother crawled under barbed wire in the middle of the night with her children to escape an army detention camp, only to get lost in the jungle. She hid in different safe houses every night, dodged rebel informers and somehow reached the unlikely sanctuary of New Malden in south London, where she immediately settled down to prepare her eldest child for the 11-plus school entrance exam. By day it was verbal reasoning, but by night she would comfort her daughter when she woke up screaming because she feared she was back in the war zone. These brave, strong women put the trials of motherhood in perspective.”

Read: “Parenting on the frontline: when the war correspondent became a mother”.

I teared, as I imagined the dying mother who fed her baby as her life slowly faded away. Oh. What can we do for these poor women and babies?

It is time to stop my apathy. I cannot live in wilful ignorance; we should not be able to read things like that and continue living our lives unaffected by others’ misery.

The least we can do right now is to sponsor a child or widow, and i’ve shortlisted two charities. This shall be P’s and my christmas present to each other.

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Reading this makes all my trials seem so trivial. Yesterday i found that I had greater patience than before, while putting Calista to sleep. She resisted bedtime as usual and kept creeping up or flipping over to play and wander about but I was not upset as I mulled at how blessed we are, to live in peace, to have the luxury to not fear, to have time to stare at each other.. as i sang her a lullaby, i am not afraid that a bomb will descend anytime; i am not worried about where i am going to scrape our next meal from.

Thank you Lord for blessing us even though we have done nothing to deserve it.