The unwavering courage of caregivers

A Palestinian girl helps her mother carry a jerrican of water back from a water distribution point in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on October 17 amid the ongoing war between Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas. Pic/AFP

These days my superhero cape feels worn out. Autumn has set in and as usual, has brought with it illnesses of various kinds. Going to sleep at night feels like entering the lottery. The chances are high I will lose. It has been three weeks since our toddler has had some form of illness which has manifested in poor sleep. It began with a middle ear infection which progressed to a kind of harmless cough that turned into bronchitis. As I was holding our child in my arms past midnight over the weekend as he coughed and coughed and coughed, I had flashbacks to when I was a child and coughed relentlessly and my mother tried everything from heating ajwain in a cloth on a tawa and placing it on my chest to giving me tea to just holding me as I coughed. She never complained, much like I don't either. But it was always in the wee hours, and she always had to set out to work by 7 am and clearly her superhero cape must have felt worn out too.

I had to take this week off from work to save myself from a potential mental breakdown. I feel, every day, like I am functioning on reserve. The consciousness of the political state of affairs in the world and the horrific atrocities that Israel is committing in northern Gaza makes everything feel even more hellish. Last night as I was staving off hunger and trying to contend with a child who was suddenly awake for what felt like no reason at all (possibly a regression, some milestone around the corner), I started thinking about how there is no desirable form of hunger besides the one you feel when you know for certain when to expect your next meal.
My heart went out to mothers in Palestine, in Lebanon who have spent so much of their emotional and physiological energy as caregivers only to witness their children's lives completely devalued, as if they never mattered to the world. War is a violation of this basic act of caregiving, which, we all know, is gendered, is something women have historically done. It is so easy to take a life if you have surrendered or compromised your sense of ethics or morality. It is so much harder to sustain life, on the other hand, so much more challenging to nurture another body, whether human or other species, and to value its existence.

Our globalised world privileges the patriarchal notion of survival of the fittest instead of considering the lowest common denominators and the role they play in advocating for different strategies for adapting to the world. Our present serves able-bodied white people with the right passports whose survival is intricately connected to the exploitation of those less privileged. Even in the face of climate disaster, it is not the rich who suffer but those who are already dispossessed and who come from racial and social backgrounds that have been historically marginalised. Sometimes, in moments of sleeplessness, I wonder what the world might look like if all our systems were geared towards the task of upholding life. What if our entire economy was based on people caring for each other, building communities and sharing resources instead of competing for them with each other? What if the love of justice fuelled our constitutional and legal procedures, and not the lust for revenge? What if international law could indeed hold world players accountable for their criminal misdemeanours instead of turning a blind eye? What if the world, in fact, stopped, for as long as necessary, to insist on a ceasefire and to ensure a solution to end this devastating land-grabbing conflict that has been instrumentalised by the weaponising of victimhood. What if we put caregiving at the centre of our political lives, honouring the emotional stamina it demands?

I am beyond tired of the resilience one is forced to build while navigating parenthood in our present reality. There is this split-screen quality to every sensation; a consciousness that whatever happiness you feel and whatever joy you derive in a present moment is offset against the horror of another mother's lived reality. That the world is okay with the killing, maiming and orphaning of innocent children fills me with horror and dread and sometimes the grief feels unbearable and inconsolable. There is no way not to feel the crushing weight of all of these atrocities and our helplessness in the face of it, because so many of us are stuck doing mother work and don't have the resources to mobilise a resistance. Because the present state of the world insists on alienating us from each other's reality and we have yet to find ways to resist. I am not without hope. But sometimes it's important to acknowledge the exhaustion, in case you have been feeling it too and found yourself without the words to express the dysphoria.

Deliberating on the life and times of every woman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.