I still remember the weight of the pen in my hand.

It didn’t feel like signing a consent form. It felt like signing something far more final, far more terrifying—permission for strangers to take our child into an operating room and do whatever they needed to do to keep her alive. Twice it was open-heart surgery. Once it was back surgery. Each time, the words were clinical, but the meaning was anything but.

We went through this three times—when our daughter was just five months old, and then again at ages ten and twelve years old. Each surgery was serious. Each one carried risk. And each time, we handed her over to the doctors and nurses and then walked away, because that’s what parents are asked to do in these moments.

But what stays with me most isn’t saying goodbye and good luck to our daughter before she entered the operating room or even the surgeon’s explanations beforehand.

The children’s hospital waiting room becomes its own kind of world. Time stretches in unnatural ways there—minutes feel like hours, and hours feel like days. You sit … you pace … you try to read … you pray … you try not to imagine what is happening behind those closed doors.

And while you might be performing these acts in solitude, you are not alone.

There are other parents in that room. You don’t know their names. You don’t know their stories. But you know exactly what they are feeling. You can see it in their eyes, in the way they grip a cup of coffee that has long gone cold, in the way they look up every time a door opens.

Because every time that door opens, everything stops.

A doctor steps out, and the entire room collectively holds its breath. Conversations freeze mid-sentence. Heads turn in unison. For a very brief moment, every parent is thinking the same thing: Please let it be my child. Please let it be good news.

Sometimes a name is called, and you watch another parent stand up—hesitantly, almost afraid to hope too much—and walk toward the doctor. And for a moment, you share in their outcome, whatever it may be. Relief, tears, gratitude.

Or sometimes, quiet devastation.

Then the door closes again, and the waiting resumes.

What struck me the most in those rooms, across all three surgeries, was how different we all were—and how none of that really mattered.

We came from different backgrounds. Different religions. Different races. Different economic realities. Some families spoke different languages. Some sat in silence; others prayed out loud. Some had large extended families surrounding them; others were alone.

But in that waiting room, all of that disappeared.

We were simply parents.

Parents who loved our children with everything we had. Parents who would have traded places with them in an instant. Parents who shared the same fragile, desperate hope: Let my child be okay. Let them come back to me.

There was a kind of unspoken bond there—one that didn’t require introductions or explanations. Just a glance, a nod, a quiet understanding: I see you. I know what you’re feeling. I’m feeling it too.

And on rare occasions, you might engage in conversation. I remember sitting next to a Hasidic Jewish woman in the waiting room during one of our daughter’s operations.  As a Modern Orthodox Jew, I don’t have many friends or acquaintances in the Hasidic community, but I remember connecting with this Satmar mother of a sick child.  We may not have had much in common in terms of our backgrounds, but we were bound together by a shared concern – our child’s health and welfare.

I’ve thought about those waiting rooms many times since then.

And sometimes I wonder—what if the world’s conflicts could be reframed through that lens?

What if, instead of negotiating across tables filled with politics and history and grievance, we brought together parents sitting in a room like that? Parents from different places, who see each other as enemies. Russians and Ukrainians. Turks and Armenians. Israelis and Palestinians. People taught to distrust, to fear, to divide.

And we asked them to sit together and wait for news about their children.

Because in that space, stripped of ideology and identity, something very different emerges. The labels fall away. The narratives soften. What remains is something far more fundamental and far more powerful: love, fear, hope, and the fierce, universal desire to see your child live, heal, and thrive.

In that room, no one is the “other.”

Everyone is just a parent.

And maybe—just maybe—that is where peace begins.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)