Thirteen years. A blink of an eye and yet a million years ago.
Andy was a newborn who scoffed at sleep, I was a new mom who wanted to set fire to the phrase, “sleep like a baby,” because my baby didn’t sleep. And one beautiful September morning, after yet another night of it’s-kinda-sleep, after being screamed to his bedside yet again and giving up any hope of shut-eye to rock him in the early morning hours, the world changed.
The boys see 9/11 as history, something they’ve read about in books and seen on BrainPop. Tom and I see it as the day when everything changed. We went to bed the night before, having watched the Broncos game and seeing Ed McCaffrey’s horrible leg break, and woke to a different world.
Even now I give thanks that Andy was a five month old, never sleeping infant. If he’d been older that day would have been an even worse hell, traumatizing him to a point I don’t want to even consider. We could barely hold it together; an intense child losing his own shit on top of that…I don’t even want to think about it.
I’m relieved the boys will only know this day as something in a history book, that they weren’t here to live it. I wish none of us had had to live it.
Peace and blessings on this day of remembrance. May no one see this kind of evil again.
Pook was four months that day, and my reaction was so different. For school he just had to interview someone about their memories of it and I had to say that it couldn’t be me. I have very few memories of it all all. I had a protective new-mom-bubble around me that nothing could puncture. Everything that happened happened “out there” and not to us. It was like it was all a tv show and not real. I’m a bit ashamed of that reaction, but it is what it is. On the other hand, I remember the Challenger accident clear as a bell.
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