The whiplash hit me at the supermarket, trying to choose a dip to have with dinner.
Hummus? Eggplant? Something spicy?
I just couldn’t choose.
And then I found myself walking the aisles picking out the most random items, tossing things into the cart like a woman told they have hours left to live. Heck, how have I gone 33 years and never had this… weird biscuit thing?
Blinking into the sunlight as we emerge from twelve days of war with the Iranian regime, everyone is feeling the whiplash in different ways.
It’s the aching legs.
The argument about nothing.
The unproductive hours of ‘work’.
Still waking up at night.
Should I shower or will there be a siren? Oh wait…
The gravitational pull away from the news and onto Ginny and Georgia.
There’s a unique kind of whiplash for parents. We spent those twelve days shielding our kids from the scary and bad things outside.
We absorbed it all and smiled through bedtime stories, quickly turning down the phone alerts before they heard it. We hid tears behind kitchen counters and checked the news while they were busy playing.
And now, as the dust settles just enough to see, our nervous systems are catching up and letting out the stress and fear we absorbed for them, and didn’t let ourselves feel in real time.
As I unpack the items from the shopping bags (and wonder what I was thinking), I wonder if this is part of the resilience everyone talks about.
Is this just the part of ‘bouncing back’ that’s closer to the floor than the sky? Maybe that famous Start Up Nation spirit takes a minute to unwind and eat weird biscuits.
As I place the challah on the table, I’m reminded that while the twelve days ended with a ceasefire, it’s far from over. For some families, this is the first Shabbat with a chair left heartbreakingly empty, their son or husband killed in battle this week. The number of families with someone missing at the Shabbat table continues to grow. And for those whose loved one is still held hostage in Gaza, every Shabbat is another unbearable wait.
So if you ask me, what is the real essence of our resilience? It’s knowing that we would run back into the shelters again and again (and again, and again) to bring them home.
We would do it all over again, in a heartbeat.