9/11
One of Abigail’s “jobs” is to cross the days off our calendar. It’s helped her figure out how the days turn into weeks and months and seasons, and it helps her count down to whatever she’s currently waiting for. It’s just kind of fun. This morning she checked the calendar to see what day it was and asked, “Mom? What’s Patriot Day?”
I glanced over and, sure enough, ‘Patriot Day’ was printed across the bottom of today’s square. “I don’t know,” I answered honestly. Was 9/11 dubbed Patriot Day and I missed the memo? (Quite possibly.) Is it just one of those holidays I’ve never heard of, and it coincidentally falls on the eleventh of September this year? Maybe. But before I could imagine a more suitable answer, she had darted off, distracted by the movement of siblings in the next room.
Abigail was a baby on September 11, 2001—she had just turned one. Owen and Audrey weren’t born yet. None of them know what happened that day. Yet.
They live, oddly, in a world where the attacks of September eleventh always have been, but also… are not. My children have always inhabited a color-coded country, are always surrounded by nonspecific threat. And yet they are unaware of it. The towers have been gone for as long as any of them can remember, but my children do not know that they fell. When we spot them in books—Lisa’s Airplane Trip, for example, or The Man Who Walked Between the Towers—we mention that the towers are no longer there. But we haven’t explained where they went. The children have not asked.
And I am glad not to have said anything. Yet.
Perhaps what should come to mind when I remember that day is the bravery of the rescue workers. But instead I remember the doctors and nurses who rushed to their emergency rooms to wait for the flood of survivors—that never came. Maybe I should talk about patriotism and heroes, and certainly one day I will, but what comes to mind still today is the destruction, the horror, the thousands of lives ended. And that’s not something I’m ready to discuss with my little ones.
One day I will talk about the headline in the French newspaper le Monde which read, WE ARE ALL AMERICANS. One day I will tell them how, no matter our politics, we all cried when the President stood behind a podium and on our television screens to rally us with a catchphrase: “Let’s roll.” One day I will have to tell them about airplanes and towers and a gaping hole in the pentagon and smoldering wreckage in a Pennsylvania field. But not today.
I’ll let them live in a world that is safe from that particular harm a little bit longer. And I'll be glad of every minute that I can.
[technorati tags: children, mom, spetember 11]
I glanced over and, sure enough, ‘Patriot Day’ was printed across the bottom of today’s square. “I don’t know,” I answered honestly. Was 9/11 dubbed Patriot Day and I missed the memo? (Quite possibly.) Is it just one of those holidays I’ve never heard of, and it coincidentally falls on the eleventh of September this year? Maybe. But before I could imagine a more suitable answer, she had darted off, distracted by the movement of siblings in the next room.
Abigail was a baby on September 11, 2001—she had just turned one. Owen and Audrey weren’t born yet. None of them know what happened that day. Yet.
They live, oddly, in a world where the attacks of September eleventh always have been, but also… are not. My children have always inhabited a color-coded country, are always surrounded by nonspecific threat. And yet they are unaware of it. The towers have been gone for as long as any of them can remember, but my children do not know that they fell. When we spot them in books—Lisa’s Airplane Trip, for example, or The Man Who Walked Between the Towers—we mention that the towers are no longer there. But we haven’t explained where they went. The children have not asked.
And I am glad not to have said anything. Yet.
Perhaps what should come to mind when I remember that day is the bravery of the rescue workers. But instead I remember the doctors and nurses who rushed to their emergency rooms to wait for the flood of survivors—that never came. Maybe I should talk about patriotism and heroes, and certainly one day I will, but what comes to mind still today is the destruction, the horror, the thousands of lives ended. And that’s not something I’m ready to discuss with my little ones.
One day I will talk about the headline in the French newspaper le Monde which read, WE ARE ALL AMERICANS. One day I will tell them how, no matter our politics, we all cried when the President stood behind a podium and on our television screens to rally us with a catchphrase: “Let’s roll.” One day I will have to tell them about airplanes and towers and a gaping hole in the pentagon and smoldering wreckage in a Pennsylvania field. But not today.
I’ll let them live in a world that is safe from that particular harm a little bit longer. And I'll be glad of every minute that I can.
[technorati tags: children, mom, spetember 11]
Labels: holiday magic
2 Comments:
September 11 has been named Patriot Day. I don't know who tagged it that, but that's what we called it at my school.
Great blog.
J.
Thanks. See, I knew I was out of the loop on that one.
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