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I am thirty-three years old, and I am so happy that I am not a mother. I do not hear a biological clock ticking, only the nerve wrecking ticks of bombs yet to explode. My friends are leaping whenever their cell phones ring. "Where are you? No, you can’t go out. No, I don’t care if all the other children are going". How naïve children are when they tell lies. What mother in Israel now would believe that "all the children are going" anywhere? And where are the children going? Where will their fears take them? In many places in the world children are afraid of the unknown, of the unreal. You know that you live in a war zone when you realize that the greatest fears of the children are of what they know only too well. Two years ago, when my younger brother was ten, he came home from school, and as he opened the door he heard the familiar sound of explosion rising from the street he just left behind him. Sitting in front of the television five minutes later, he could see his friend wandering blindly in the street, which was covered with body parts and injured people. The friend’s father, who picked him up from school and took him for a pizza, was killed in front of his eyes. My brother refused to talk about it. "This kid wasn’t really a friend of mine," is all he would say, "I don’t really know him that well". That evening he told my father that he is afraid of Freddy Kruger, a monstrous murderer from a common horror film. My father didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but I suspect he felt some relief. How good it is to caress your child’s hair and to tell him that Kruger doesn’t really exist. | 
