We’d finished doing all the things.
Rock painting and regular painting and wall painting (without parental permission), hook loom and puzzles and games. We’d done all the crying and said all the “Mommy, I’m boreds” that could possibly be said.
We’d watched our neighborhood of Neve Yaakov, home to the largest population of children in all of Jerusalem’s neighborhoods, go silent as a tree trunk on a blistering summer day. We’d scurried like thieves to take out the garbage, we’d seen police drones hover overhead and listened to loudspeakers blare loudly to stay inside — no walks, no bikes, no ball. And miraculously, at the very point when we’d done every single indoor thing we could possibly think to do, a tiny bit of air came seeping through concrete walls. The ban on venturing more than 100 meters from one’s front door was lifted.
Maybe he sensed the change, or maybe he was simply done, but my ten-year-old son who’d managed well during the days of lockdown was suddenly losing it. I took one look at him and asked my husband to watch the other kids.
“But where will you go? Everything’s closed,” he said.
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