Saturday morning marked one week since Hamas terrorized a music festival in Israel at the Gaza border, massacring 260 concertgoers and sparking the Israel-Hamas war. Thousands of miles away from it in Toronto, I woke up struggling to wrap my head around the moment – less than two years after the jolting start to the Ukraine war.

It can be hard to parent at these times – to strike that balance between awareness and innocence. Then my tween asked, “Can we see the Taylor Swift movie?”

Honestly, it was the last thing I wanted to do. I’m only marginally familiar with her music, and the prospect of the glam and glitz of “The Eras Tour” felt off-tone.

I also recognized it would do us both good to get out. 

I won’t speak of the music or the movie (just to say that the world now has one more “Swiftie”). I want to focus on the joy. The movie theater became a concert hall, where popcorn was put aside and the audience members jumped out of their seats, dancing with each song and clapping at the end. There was whooping and hollering after a particularly powerfully belted number, as if the audience were watching the performance live in real time.

It’s not that the world around me could be forgotten. It wasn’t lost on me that 260 concertgoers were killed in this very same way: reveling in music. And thousands of innocent people on both sides face the revenge of war.

But then I watched my daughter jump up and run to the front of the theater with other young people. I pushed away that darkness clouding over me – and allowed her ebullience to light our Saturday evening.