The Posts I Never Want To Make

I’m superstitious. I am. I always have been and I get more so as I get older. Or maybe, at some point, I just stopped denying it. I never lie about my kids being sick. I know many who will tell someone that they can’t go to a meeting or meet a deadline because their kid is sick. I don’t do that. I believe that in some sick way, this is what will happen. They’ll get sick. Not worth it.

I don’t care about ladders and cats; lines on the street or whatever. I just feel that sometimes, we can think our way in to something terrible. In my mind, I have posts I never want to make. I can’t even bring myself to list them, though I know what they are.

It’s like the time when my oldest daughter was very young and was getting terrible headaches. I took her to the doctor. Migraines, the doctor told me. Like her father, like her grandmother. Inherited. Expected. Deal.

“Are you sure?” I asked the doctor, terrified it could be something so much worse.

“What are you afraid of?” the doctor asked. And I explained that I couldn’t bring myself to say the awful words that I feared. She said those words and saw me cringe. “Is that what you are afraid of?” and I nodded my head.

She smiled, that wonderful smile she had – the one in which she showed that we were friends of a sort and she respected me and didn’t think me a hysterical mother. “You’re lucky,” she told me, “you don’t even know the things you should be afraid of!” She had recently had her own child and because she was a doctor, every illness, every symptom was so much worse.

As to these posts, I recently read a blog post that made me remember my own list. This was one of them. This woman’s son was on the border; there was an alert and they were called into the field. Something went wrong. Horribly wrong and her son’s friend was killed by friendly fire, right before his eyes.

She asks some hard questions, ones I don’t necessarily see in the same way, but there is no doubt she is writing one of the posts I never want to write, feeling the same agony for her son and the mother of the soldier killed in the incident.

I won’t now list any of the other posts I never want to make; some are obvious, others will be left to the deepest parts of my mind.

May God comfort Nadav’s family and may his memory be blessed.

Here’s the post: http://www.racheladelman.com/2011/01/vertigo/#_edn3

1 Comment

  1. Thank you for sharing this. When we first heard about it, it was the same day as the shooting in Tucson, where my other son goes to school…

    When I hear of things like this, I think I should THANK the IDF for messing up J’s recovery.

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