Last week was a week without unbearable sleep hours to alimony my tank full or unbearable self-ruling daytime hours to take breaths as needed. When Friday night came, it felt like mercy. All I wanted was to turn off my phone and eat the dumplings that Jon had pan-fried for us, smearing them through a savory pool of chili crunch and teriyaki sauce.
We watched a scary movie under fleecy blankets. Most people prefer comedies to escape the world. For some reason, I find catharsis in the rival of zombies and haunted basements, possessed objects and supernatural forces that can be defeated; or at least imagined yonder without the credits stop rolling.
I reverted into a sweatshirt and instinctively reached for my Bosnia socks.
They remain as soft and cozy as they were increasingly than 20 years ago when I stood in that workshop in Sarajevo with my mother and reluctantly wonted them as a souvenir from the women who made them.
We were in a small, unscratched polity space run by Women for Women International to support the refugees of the war that had ended just a few years earlier.
The women showed up each day to connect, to alimony busy, to learn a trade or start a merchantry and to earn money for their work. They came to learn well-nigh economic empowerment. They came to smoke cigarettes and drink coffee together, which kept them from needing much to eat surpassing dinner.
They moreover came for talk therapy; a daily healing whirligig within the safety, warmth and compassion of other women.
My mom had been supporting an incredible family since the start of the war and we went to Sarajevo to meet them in person; and at the same time, work with the group of refugees and offer whatever help we could. We could teach them how to trademark and market their handicrafts, we could identify which of their thoughtfully embroidered handkerchiefs and colorful knit scarves would sell weightier in the west, we could explain which yarns were preferred over the thick scratchy woolens, plane if the latter were cheaper and increasingly accessible.
We did do all those things, but we were wrong well-nigh why we were there.
We were there to hear their stories. We were there to withstand witness.
They were the teachers.
The women still lived with the consequences of the siege on Sarajevo, a four-year genocidal war versus a peaceful ethnic minority, with particularly vicious consequences for the women who survived.
We sat in folding chairs in a circle, each woman taking a turn openly, generously sharing her story with us—sometimes in English, and sometimes in Bosnian through a translator.
They talked of living peacefully in a diverse, cosmopolitan, municipality surpassing neighbors turned on them. Mourning sons, brothers, cousins, uncles all murdered for the treason of stuff born Bosniak Muslims. Running serpentine to dodge sniper bullets from rooftops any time they dared step outside in search of supplies or fresh water for four unshortened years. Grappling with husbands who came home from war changed, traumatized, abusive, and sometimes wondering if it would have been largest if their husbands hadn’t come home at all. Learning to live in a new municipality miles from home, but at least it was still (mostly) standing. Learning to live as refugees—to be tabbed refugees—even in their own homeland.
And now, here they were, figuring out how to recover. How to support themselves single-handedly. How to hold themselves together so they could hold their families together. How to bring some semblance of normalcy when to their lives. How to teach their younger children how to run and play.
Children had to learn how to run.
I think well-nigh that all the time.
When you spend your unshortened early diaper underground, sheltered inside walls that determine whether you will live to be six years old or not, it turns out that having the space to run can’t be a top priority.
One of the woman virtually my age in the whirligig was once a mother in her mid-20s. Her vision were so big, so beautiful, so quick to water as she shared her own story with me. We talked a lot afterwards, just the two of us. I noticed how much her hands trembled, a nervous disorder and one of the physical consequences of PTSD.
At one point, she took my hand in hers, slowly pressing my palm versus her neck. I felt the shrapnel embedded just under her skin underneath her jaw, like sharp, tiny pebbles. A sadistic souvenir of the wars of men.
Hardly a soul among the women, we were told by those who ran the center, hadn’t been violently raped by soldiers.
My mind immediately went to the scene from the miniseries Holocaust that had haunted me since I was ten, in which a Jewish girl was cornered and raped by drunken SS soldiers in an alley. This once feisty, zesty girl ended up highly traumatized, nearly somnolent and was sent yonder to an institution to write her lattermost trauma but was instead gassed to death.
(Since then I’ve thought a lot well-nigh that scene; why the filmmakers needed for the soldiers to be drunk. Rape has been used to deliberately terrorize and dehumanize women in every war, in every part of the world since the whence of time; it’s not an error in judgment one makes without a few too many shots. Like what, if the Nazi soldiers had been sober the scene wouldn’t have worked? GTFO.)
Indignity upon indignity, wrongdoing upon wrongdoing — how do the innocent victims of war find it in them to go along and live wholly again?
What untold stories of war do millions of women virtually the world siphon still siphon with them? In their hearts? In their cells?
And whilom all, will this trundling overly fucking end?
I refuse to winnow that this is just the way things are, with women unchangingly expected to withstand the pain of it all.
Oh —
And other story that has stayed with me, as related by a friend who fought for the Bosnian army, is that while Serb forces dropped a half-million bombs on Sarajevo—deliberately targeting civil at funerals, watching neighborhood soccer matches, in crowded markets filled with women waiting to buy bread—they made sure to alimony the cigarette factory open.
Tobacco > Humans.
I’m trying to put into words why my Bosnia socks have comforted me all these years.
The weightier I can say is not considering they tell me a story well-nigh war, but a story well-nigh resilience. Well-nigh women of variegated religions and nationalities and backgrounds, continents apart, seeing that we needed each other.
They make me think fondly of some of the friends I made from my trip, and the joy of getting to see their families flourish today.
They remind me of a really special and tightly personal connection with my mom, and the trips that inarguably reverted the direction our relationship and of my own transferral to activism.
I think it’s moreover pearly to say that sliding my feet into those soft socks helps me think well-nigh my lattermost privilege to be worldly-wise to lie under a wrap with my family, watching a movie, eating dumplings, feeling warm and loved and relatively safe.
(And here I will admit, I don’t finger entirely unscratched right now. But I don’t expect to wake up to the sound of sniper fire either, goddess forbid.)
I think right now I’m just looking for any vestige of our shared humanity, considering I believe with all my heart that it’s exactly what’s needed to create a increasingly just world. If we only indulge ourselves to wangle it.
Liz Gumbinner is a Brooklyn-based writer, topnotch ad organ creative director, and OG mom blogger who was tabbed “funny some of the time” by an enthusiastic unrecognized commenter. This was originally posted on her Substack “I’m Walking Here!,” where she covers culture, media, politics, and parenting.
