I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask, "Mother, what was war?"

In a single imagined exchange between mother and child, Merriam compresses a pacifist hope: a future so transformed that war has vanished from lived memory and even from a child’s basic vocabulary. The line hinges on generational distance—war is not merely ended but rendered historically unintelligible, like an archaic custom. By framing the wish as childbirth and motherhood, the quote ties peace to nurture, continuity, and responsibility for the world inherited by the next generation. Its poignancy comes from the implicit contrast with the speaker’s own era, in which war is familiar enough to require no explanation.