I watched a video this morning and the baby in it was so happy.
A few months old. Swaddled tight, the way you do at that age, so only his face is out.
And he's looking straight down the lens. Not past it, not at his mother. At the camera. At us.
Smiling. That open, uncomplicated, delighted smile babies give you when they've decided you're a friendly face.
He's smiling at the people that are about to scroll past his video.
His mother made the video. She's in a tent in Gaza, speaking into her phone, asking strangers on the internet to help her feed him.
And she pointed the camera at his face.
She would have had to. She knows what works.
That's the part I haven't been able to put down all day.
Somewhere in the last two years, that woman has learned content strategy. Not because she wanted to. Because it's the only channel left.
She's learned that a crying baby makes people uncomfortable and they swipe. That a smiling one makes them stop. That you have to say the worst of it in the first few seconds or you lose them. That you can't cry too much, because people can't sit with that and you can't look too composed either, because then they don't believe you.
She's learned there are thousands of other mothers doing exactly this, right now, on the same app. All with the same story. All competing for the same few seconds of attention from the same bored people.
And she's learned that her son's face is the strongest thing she has.
So she holds the phone where he can see it, and he smiles because somebody's looking at him, and she uses it. Because if she doesn't, he doesn't eat.
A mother has to market her child to keep him alive.
And she has to be good at it. Not just desperate.
Good.
Better than the next mother. Because the ones who are good at it get funded and the ones who aren't get scrolled past, and that is apparently how we've decided which children in Gaza survive.
And he is so happy to help.
He has no idea. He's a few months old. He's never seen anything that isn't a tent. He doesn't know what the phone is, or what he's being asked to do, or that his face is being used because it's the only currency his mother has left.
He just knows someone's looking at him. And being looked at is lovely when you're that small.
So he gives us everything he's got.
I watched her face while she talked. Steady. Even voice. She can't break.
Not for the camera, because people don't share what they can't watch, and not for him either, because babies read faces before they read anything else. He'd feel it instantly and he'd stop smiling, and then she'd lose the only thing that works.
So she holds it together. For strangers and for her son, in the same breath.
He won't remember any of this.
She will remember all of it. Every single time she had to point a camera at her baby's face and hope.
So let's not be the people who scrolled.
That baby smiled at us.
He thinks we're kind.
Let's be the thing he thinks we are.
Let's deserve his smile too,
Hafsa