ohbloodyhell8

I asked my sons what they knew about 9/11.  Older son wanted to appear very knowledgeable and didn’t seem to want to talk about it except to show that he knows, he knows.  Younger son knew quite a bit about the plane that went down in Pennsylvania but seemed very curious about the Twin Towers.  We looked at a picture taken by an astronaut that day.  Then we watched news clips of the planes hitting the World Trade Center buildings and the Pentagon.  He may only be eight, but he got the significance of what he was seeing.  His eyes welled up with tears.  He quietly asked how many people died that day.  He asked how that number compared with all the people in the world.  He said in a quiet voice, “Terrorists did that, didn’t they?”

I don’t want to scare my kids with more information than they can handle, but I also want them to be aware.  I don’t want them to have a cavalier attitude about today or any of the holidays or remembrance days that are important to our country’s history.  They need to learn and understand now so they carry it with them and teach their own children one day.

The images still haunt me.  I didn’t show them the people jumping from the buildings.  I still dream of that and don’t know what to do with it.  Each year though I layer in a little bit more.  Younger son was trying to fit it into his mind that the Twin Towers were built when I was a little girl, that I had been in them several times, that they were destroyed decades later, and that he will never see them in person, but only in pictures and videos.  He pondered becoming an architect and rebuilding the Twin Towers so we could go up to the top together.

We ended our time reflecting on this day by looking at pictures of the new buildings and the memorial.  I know he can’t yet fathom the size of these buildings.  I still can’t.  I still can’t go to the site.  I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to go back there again.