I live in Israel with my husband and our three daughters, all under the age of six. I am 30 weeks pregnant and I work at a big tech company. I have written one novel and am deep into my second. I balance it all by building my days the way other people play Tetris.
Time management is my superpower. If I have 20 minutes, I answer emails while heating up dinner. If I have 90 minutes, I edit a chapter. If I have three minutes, I unload the dishwasher. I rarely start something that I cannot reasonably finish.
On the last Shabbat of February, another round of war with Iran began. By now, after two years of practice, I know that war does not share its schedule.
Missiles do not arrive in neat calendar invites. We can have 12 alerts in a row and then nothing for hours. The sirens seem to operate by Murphy’s Law, piercing the air just as we heat milk for coffee, step into the shower, or sit down.
Very quickly, I’m thrown. Do I have two minutes or two hours? There is no way to know, and the unpredictability unsettles me, even after so many rounds of this.
My rule to never start what I cannot finish becomes impossible to keep. If I begin editing a chapter and the siren sounds, I abandon the sentence mid-thought and waddle with three small girls to the bomb shelter. If I start a load of laundry, I may not return to hang it. If I risk stepping into the shower while my husband is on reserve duty, I send a joking text to friends: Prepare for a missile within minutes.
So I wait, hovering in the in-between. I sit at the kitchen table, looking at a mug of cold milk (is it worth heating up?), not opening Slack, not opening the manuscript, not pressing play on the washing machine. I tell myself I cannot begin because I may not be allowed to finish.
And then there is no siren. Ten minutes pass. Thirty. An hour. I feel the itch of wasted time, the old instinct to optimize rising in my chest. I could have done something. I could have answered that message, edited that page, or moved the laundry along.
War is the thief of time; it steals the certainty of it. It breaks the contract we assume with the day: that the next hour will resemble the last. That a task begun may be carried through to its end. But war is also the giver of time. When you surrender the illusion of control, it doesn’t necessarily lead to helplessness.
If the baby is tired now, she naps now. Not because a nap fits the schedule, but because her eyelids are drooping and, for now, it’s quiet. If the children are asleep in the bomb shelter, I sit on the couch and watch a mindless TV show.
Three days in, we’ve done a mountain of puzzles and stuck a thousand stickers before lying close together while the siren wails outside and the booms sound at a distance I no longer try to calculate. War is a reminder of the finite nature of time.
Intermingled with the fear is an unexpected abundance. We squash and squeeze into the bomb shelter for what my six-year-old calls “family night.” The neat lines that make our busy life manageable dissolve into a different logic: Do what you can, when you can, and enjoy it. When there is a break in the sirens, we race outside so the kids can jump on the trampoline. We move toward fresh air and fun when it is available, without waiting.
War narrows the future tense and makes the next hour opaque. It strips away the certainty of time and shows me how much of my sense of competence is built on assumptions. In exchange for what it takes, war gives permission to loosen the plan and remember that time, whether days of regular life or minutes between sirens, is a gift, not a gap.
I do not romanticize this. War is scary. When this is over, I want my husband home, my kids to resume their routine learning, play dates, and activities. I want to work and write in uninterrupted stretches. I want to shower without hesitation and make coffee without monitoring for the next explosion.
But I hope that when we go back to the busyness of life, something remains. Not the sound of the siren or the danger it brings, but the understanding that life is always uncertain. That even in peace, the next hour is not guaranteed.