Looking Back, Looking Forward: Remembering 9/11, The Day That Changed Everything

For me, today is a day of remembering, and of beginning. Of looking back, and looking forward. While remembering the events of September 11, 2001, I said goodbye to my youngest child as she started preschool. In my mind, this is all related.

This morning I sat outside Louisa's classroom. (Louisa has a classroom!) As I waited, I chatted with a mom who has three girls under age four. I told her that I also have three girls, but that my big ones are 10 and almost 9. And this lovely, lovely woman, sure-to-be-my-new-best-friend said to me, "But you look like a kid! How could you possibly have a ten-year-old?"

"You just made my day," I said, and then explained that the reason we started our family when we did had everything to do with 9/11.

Today, we are all remembering. We remember the people we lost. We remember the disbelief. We remember where we were, down to the minute. We remember the phone calls, the ones that went through, and the many that didn't. We remember the feeling that our city was changed, forever. We remember making eye contact with strangers in Union Square, and seeing tears. We remember walking to Chelsea Piers to give blood, and being turned away. We remember the photographs of the lost, on every light post, on every bus stop, and the desperate loved ones diligently posting them, hoping.

The soot and dirt and smoke seeped in through our windows, entering our lungs and our blood. I had to leave. A downtown Manhattan refugee at my parents' house for the chagim, I fell into a silent cloud. Always a verbal person, I had no patience for words, then. What was there to say? Instead, I immersed myself in images. For the first time in my life, I made Rosh Hashanah cards, each one painstakingly cut and pasted from colored construction paper, a child's project.

I had no children, then. Nor was I a child. I was a young-ish adult, living what was, in retrospect, a relatively carefree existence. It didn't feel carefree, though. After leaving grad school, I was struggling to gain a foothold in my career. I was working full-time as an editor, but without title or benefits. I felt mistreated, undervalued, and underpaid. On that fateful day in 2001, I had a meeting about a new and exciting job opportunity. But, like everything else that day, the meeting was cancelled. And never rescheduled. Things like that happened, then. Everything changed, in the matter of an hour.

When I awoke from the stupor (was it weeks later, or was it months?), I had a strange, new compulsion. I wanted to have a child. I still didn't have a proper job, and Josh was still in grad school. We were in no way financially secure; we were just starting out. But none of that mattered. My plan on this earth was to share my life with children.  It was a seize-the-day, the worst-could-always-happen mentality; after all, what if there is no tomorrow?

In the spring of 2002, I became pregnant with Sunshine, as we called our in-utero peanut. I was 26 years old, which made me the youngest in my childbirth education class by roughly ten years.

Someone observed to me recently that growing children can act as markers of passing time. Their ages at different points and places remind you where you once were. That's true of when you first started dreaming about them, too.

This morning, for an hour and a half, my baby played and socialized and simply existed without me there to take stock in her experience. I've never had trouble letting go before; how unexpected to find myself tearing up last night at orientation, when the teacher talked about separation. "They're not babies, anymore," she told the room full of parents, and for many of us, this was news.

Our children will always be our babies, even when they go off to school on their own, even when they leave home. We'll always remember how they came to be.

Time passes, but the memories don't fade. We remember, as we always will, the day(s) that changed everything.

How Fragile We Are

This morning as I was scrambling through the morning get-the-kids-out-of-the-house routine, I heard a story on the radio about how the horrific Boston bombings, like other previous terror events, remind people about the fragility of life.

There I was, filling lunch bags, making tea, spreading spreads on toast, and rushing, rushing as usual, as I peppered my girls with the regular old questions: Did you brush your teeth? What about your hair? Go to the bathroom? Pack your backpack? Bring your book? Hurry, hurry, I said. We're running late.

And in the midst of that most mundane chaos, the radio reminded me that a father in Boston lost his eight-year-old son on Monday, while his wife and daughter's lives hang in the balance. Almost two hundred people, though they survived the blast with their lives, will forever after live with different bodies than they had before that moment.

On Monday, maybe an hour or two before the bomb exploded in Boston, I sat at lunch explaining to a new friend what it was like to be in downtown Manhattan on 9/11, because she asked. It doesn't come up often. For many of us, that experience of watching our city burn, of breathing the smoke and seeing the photos of the missing collect on lampposts and bus stops, is like a barely-healed wound. We try not to pick at the scab.

I told her that I decided that day in 2001, when I was 26 years old and had barely started a new career in publishing after a gear switch out of academia, that I wanted to have a baby; that I didn't want to wait until I was older. Because how could I be sure that I would be around in some unknown future? That's what 9/11 felt like to me: a cliff that the world almost fell over. The end of time.

The year that would follow held yet more difficulty for my family. That winter, Josh's sister Nina was in a traumatic car accident in which she lost her left arm.

Returning on the train to NYC from visiting Nina in the hospital in Boston, I sat next to a psychologist researcher doing work on trauma. (Or maybe I dreamed that I did, because the coincidence seems too strong to be true. But sometimes, this is exactly how life works.) He told me that trauma equals loss and that the loss can take many shapes: a person, a limb, or even a state of innocence. Healing from trauma involves acknowledging and mourning the loss. And it takes time.

I wish those amputee victims in Boston could talk to Nina now, and see all the ways in which she has reclaimed her self; how she has fought to be the powerful and capable person that she is, even without the arm that she was born with.

Some people argued after 9/11, as they always will, that it is futile to bring children into a violent world. But there's a difference between being aware of fragility and giving up hope.

I became pregnant with my first child in the spring of 2002, within months of both 9/11 and Nina's accident. That baby was, for me and Josh, a source of healing.

Yes, I am reminded this week, yet again, that life is fragile. That although it may feel that way sometimes, getting my kids ready for school--like most of our daily stresses--is way less than dire. But let's not let the horror in Boston take away our hope. Sending thoughts of healing and strength straight up 95 North...