I always have to present the most calm and controlled face in front of my children so that I can maintain their mental well-being. I want to prevent them from feeling fear or developing psychological issues that could affect their personalities in the post-war period. I don’t want their future to be impacted by what is happening now. I try to constantly invent new games to play with them.  I talk to my three-year-old about fun topics and tell her stories. I want them to forget about the war and experience as happy a childhood as possible. My four-month-old is always laughing and cooing. He is too young to understand what is going on. With Nadia, however, it is hard sometimes as she hears the sirens and jumps at the sound of the bombs and explosions. I hug my children as much as possible.

The war has very much affected me as a person. My feelings are a mix of fear and terror, and my mind is in constant anxiety about future events. I feel tense and under pressure all the time. I want to give them a sense of security that I personally have completely lost. Concealing how I really feel, being a rock for my children while everything inside me is breaking, is immensely exhausting. I feel numb due to the shock, trauma, and loss I am experiencing.

What scares me the most now is to lose my family. They are everything to me. I fear losing one of my children, losing my husband, or other close family members. I am also afraid of dying without my children, and of my family losing me. I am afraid of what will happen to my children if they don’t have their parents to take care of them anymore. There are so many orphans around us, so many children who have lost their parents. I am also afraid of being injured and unable to provide for myself and my children, becoming dependent on someone else.

My life feels like a nightmare I cannot wake up from. Every morning,I thank God that we are still alive. Every day brings news of the death of a friend or relative. Every day is filled with news of horror, destruction, and ruin, along with the sounds of shelling and rockets and nonstop ambulance sirens. Every day we hear these sounds. We cannot sleep due to the sounds of planes and shelling. We fear death; we fear not waking up every time we try to sleep. Our lives are ones of pain and exhaustion. I also fear the future and what will happen after this war. We have no house to go back to. What will we do? Where will we go? Our future has become unknown.

If you are a woman, you know what it is like to have your period. You know what you need and how you feel. Right now, we have no sanitary supplies. In the shelters, women must sometimes queue for hours to use the bathroom while feeling unwell and unable to dispose of tissues soaked in blood, as they do not have any hygiene pads. I know some underage girls who are really suffering, especially given how little privacy they have in the shelters in which hundreds of people have just one toilet to share. As women and girls, we do not feel safe. We cannot move around freely as we fear the shelling and destruction. We cannot gather with our friends for birthday parties, cultivate social relationships, pursue a hobby, or simply use social media to stay in touch as the internet is down most of the time. We feel isolated while at the same time having no privacy at all, sharing small rooms with strangers.

What makes the daily struggles and psychological scars worse is that we feel that while the world watches, nothing seems to change, and we continue to suffer. I want the world to know that we are humans with human feelings. We love life and hope for a better future. We do not deserve all this destruction, devastation, and death. We have dreams; we love to work hard to achieve our goals and aspirations.

We do not want to live in fear, war after war, and we do not want our homes to be destroyed. We do not want to start our lives from scratch each time, mourning our friends, relatives, and children who did not survive. We want to evolve, progress, and thrive. We want our children to grow up in conditions that support and help them achieve their goals, dreams and aspirations.