Olive & After

The Things a Four-Year-Old Should Have to Think About At four, my daughter should be deciding whether she wants pink ribbons or yellow ones. Whether her jacket should be red or purple. Whether her little braids look prettier with flowers or bows. These are the serious questions of being four. But my daughter, Ayloul, is growing up in Gaza, where even the simplest wishes have learned to wait for the end of a war. She watches children on YouTube opening colourful lunchboxes and showing their school supplies. She sees a world where going to school is ordinary, where children worry about what to pack for lunch rather than whether they will ever get the chance. One day, she asked me for a lunchbox of her own. “When the crossings open and the war is over, we’ll get you one,” I told her. She thought for a moment, then answered: “Then give them money. Tell them to stop the war.” I have carried those words with me ever since. She is four. She does not understand political calculations or the machinery of war. She only knows that grown-ups have the power to change things, so perhaps they can be given something to make the frightening thing stop. How do you explain to a child that the world is not as reasonable as she believes it should be? How do you tell her that something as small as a lunchbox may depend on circumstances she cannot understand and has no power to change? I could not explain it. I could only listen. I think of all the things she should be free to want: colourful hair ties for her little braids, a warm jacket for winter, an outfit chosen simply because she loves its colour, an umbrella that turns rain into an adventure, and a lunchbox of her own. A small whiteboard and an abacus, where numbers can become games and learning can open windows onto a world larger than the one around her. None of these things is extraordinary. That is what hurts. A child should not need a remarkable story to deserve ordinary joys. Winter is approaching. For some, rain means cosy mornings and the sound of drops against a window. Here, it brings questions a mother should never have to carry alone: what will stay dry, what will keep her child warm, and how to protect the fragile routines of childhood when so much remains uncertain. I want Ayloul to remember colours, little braids, laughter, lessons, and the excitement of packing her lunchbox for an ordinary day. I want her wishes to belong to her age, not to the war. War does not only destroy homes and possessions. It enters a child’s imagination, rearranging what should be simple. It teaches a four-year-old to connect a lunchbox to a crossing, a crossing to a promise, and a promise to the hope that someone, somewhere, might finally decide to stop the fighting. I do not want the world to look at my daughter and see only a child from Gaza. I want it to see a four-year-old girl with a head full of colours, little wishes of her own, and a mind trying to make sense of a world that has made the simplest things so difficult. She should be wondering which ribbons match her jacket. Instead, she has offered the world a solution to its war. And I am left wondering what kind of world asks so much understanding from someone who has lived for only four years. #Childhood #War #Peace