War prompts a mother to ask: What about my child?

By Dr. Heather Bozant Witcher
Young Adults

I had just finished checking on our baby, who had been struggling to go back to sleep because he was trying out his newest milestone: Pulling up on the crib.

Settling into bed, my phone’s news notification went off: Putin had made his televised address calling for war on Ukraine.

I remember remotely thinking that the next morning apologies would be made; there would be an admission of a mistake or an accident. But part of me also registered the need to note what, precisely, I had been doing at that moment.

Like 9/11, like the start of the pandemic, we register moments of what we believe to be historically significant. The next morning, I knew with certainty that this wasn’t an event that would fade. The images came pouring in, and the rhetoric surrounding the situation had exploded.

These are war times.

It seems surreal to even write those words. And despite it not being our war, it would be foolish to ignore the global ramifications. We can complain about soaring gas prices and continued inflation, but we must also recognize that we – like many other countries – are experiencing only the effects of war and global unrest.

History repeats itself. “What has been will be again, and what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9).

These discussions of soaring prices, of economic uncertainty, of the rhetoric being touted by political leaders – both here at home and abroad – all seem eerily similar to what we’ve learned in the history books.

And, yet, there will be something new, just as in the “Great War” (WWI), if the Ukraine situation continues to escalate. We will see a war unlike any that we’ve seen before. Threats of nuclear weapons have already begun, and the occupation of Chernobyl by Russian troops seems foreboding.

In the midst of devastation and uncertainty, I can’t help but look at my three young children and their innocence. What kind of world are they growing up in? What will their childhood and adolescence look like?

These are the babies born during pandemic times, during isolation and increased contagion, during social distancing and political crisis. Part of me hopes that these things will make them more resilient. But another part of me returns to history – the trauma of the Great Depression, the haunting images of the battlefields and the ghostly stares of soldiers returning home.

We don’t know what the future will bring, but it seems certain that times are changing. As a parent, I know that the world my children will grow up in will be vastly different from the world I knew. And like every parent, we worry. How will we prepare them for a world we cannot know?

Ecclesiastes, perhaps, offers an answer: “Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains the same” (1:4).

Our foundation is what matters: the earth, the home, the foundation that we provide. That’s what will remain and endure. That’s what we as parents – as leaders of a global world – fight for: our foundation, our earth, our home.

[email protected]