Motherhood, Wars and the Weight We Carry

The past two weeks have broken something open in me that I am still trying to understand. As the missiles fell and the body counts climbed and the headlines churned through another cycle of devastation with an unclear means to an end, I found myself unable to do what I have always done: compartmentalize, file, move on.

War has always touched the innocent. However, there is something particular and shattering about watching life treated as disposable, while you feel the innocent kicks in your belly and a toddler squeezing your hand for dear life. The anger that comes with watching this through the frosted glass window of distance is different from anything I have felt in the field — it is slower, deeper, more igniting.

How can so many people in so many rooms decide that other people’s children matter so little? I do not have an answer, yet I know that I cannot make sense of things that make no sense. I also do not want to contribute to the cacophony of right versus wrong, and what it means to speak up without speaking out.

With that, I have been thinking a lot about a journal entry from three years ago, and how it continues to ring true with the passage of time: the anger, the helplessness, the holding on and the letting go.

March, 2023

I am home, sitting alone on a frozen afternoon by The Wharf in Washington, D.C., watching the gentle water ripple around the mass of beautiful boats owned by politicians and rock stars. Church bells chime across the street, echoing in the hushed cafes.

As a suddenly unexpectant, expectant mother, I feel everything all at once and then steadily much less — a simplifying of the deeds that do and do not matter. I’m walking the path of the very things that scare me the most — whether I can live without recklessness, whether I have seen too much to believe in beautiful things, and whether I can take care of a tiny soul when I had struggled for so much of my life to take care of myself.

And right now, as the new section, not merely a new chapter, of my life book flutters open, I am just an ordinary girl stepping into my extraordinary situation. It is much more petrifying than the familiar cosmos of conflict that I can lose myself in and run from battle to battle. Just as we do not always know where the missile will land, life compels us to loosen the reins of our pre-constructed plans, and off we ride into the sundown armed with the stories, the tales of life, that knowledge to this point that nothing can erase from our history.

Further, motherhood compels me to embrace the concept I feared the most: to be ordinary, but beautifully ordinary. After all, it takes ordinary people, a lot of ordinary people with a will to do the right thing, to make a dent in the world. It should not take a superhero to perform the ordinary human duty of helping people in need. There is also a freedom that stems from being comfortable in one’s skin, to understand that all the parts of my body I once loathed are there for a reason.

I worry about how I will make ends meet and how I will raise a child in the twister of my very free, independent writing life, especially without the cache of going to war zones for a while. It keeps me awake at night. Then I remember what my former colleague Malia once said to me in Los Angeles. I was barely 25 and already worried that I could never have a family on a paltry writer’s salary with incremental two percent raises each year.

“A child just needs to be loved,” she promised me defiantly. “That is what matters. That is all that matters.”

Later, Ryan and I stroll through the colossal sprouting of soft pink as the cherry blossoms burst from their cocoon-shaped buds to mark the beginning of Spring, speckled in and around the carved stone memorial for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. One quote catches my eye:

“I have seen war. I have seen war on land and sea. I have seen blood running from the wounded...I have seen the dead in the mud. I have seen cities destroyed...I have seen children starving. I have seen the agony of mothers and wives. I hate war.” — August 14, 1936

I, too, hate war.

We are all touched and hurt by war, however far away we think the battle zone may be. Battles rise and fade, but their ramifications never die out. Every single war is a tragedy that cannot be undone. I think a lot about the frustration of all this writing, whether it even made a mild dent in bettering a single life. Perhaps only the history books will tell. Even if I never go to another war zone again, I will always be a war reporter, or maybe more of an anti-war reporter. Wars live within us, first in experience and second in memory. I never want to forget what war does to people, to innocent people.

Whether inside the theater or out, all we can do is play a small part in compressing the wounds of bleeding countries and people, look forward in our lives, yet not be afraid to look back.

We must be the somebody there: for ourselves, for those we love, and for strangers — and the budding offspring — we are yet to meet.

***

I am stepping back from social media, at least for now, and I want to be honest with you about why. The platforms that once felt like tools for connection and information have become something else entirely: loud, corrosive, engineered to keep you angry and scrolling rather than thinking and feeling, not to mention the abuse by others who can’t stand to read an opinion that does not jive with that of their own.

The authenticity I once loved about these online connections now feels fabricated, driven by posts written not from the heart but by ChatGPT, and by photos and videos filtered to cartoon extremes. Over the past few weeks, I’ve found myself pulling books off the bookshelf, then falling into an addictive doom scroll, and not opening up to a single page. This isn’t the life I want for myself.

In a world that is already this heavy, I am no longer willing to let an algorithm decide how much of the darkness I absorb each day. This Substack is primarily where I will be. The best place for me to write is away from the noise and demands of social media.

Take good care of yourselves out there. That’s no small matter. It is an act of resistance to choose to protect your own peace in a world that can feel so heavy and heartless.

Much love,

Hollie xo