Each weekday morning is the same. It starts with the antagonizing alarm, and continues through the bustle of getting everyone up, dressed, fed, gathered, and out the door. Somehow we manage it all in under an hour and it’s very much like clockwork at this point, but oh so hectic. Ask me an hour later what we talked about as a family and beyond the orders to get dressed and the negotiations over what to have for breakfast, I can hardly recall.

Conversations are rushed and when they veer from necessity are mostly controlled by a six year old force of nature, whose mouth runs from the moment her eyes open until her last good-bye and I love you are hollered as she and her father rush out the door. All morning the little guy desperately tries to keep up but always winds up falling behind, or should I say in step. He even picks the vitamin color she tells him to.

After the door shuts and half of our family has left for the day, it is quiet. That is when he comes to sit by me, and that is when we share a lovely 15 minutes together each day before it is time for him to leave. It is sweet, and it is special, and I never could have foreseen that I would come to cherish this time as much as I do.

Every morning I take him to daycare, but before that we have 15 minutes of quiet time, just the two of us.  We talk about various subjects and I can see it in his eyes that he finally has the time to formulate his thoughts, to truly think about what he wants to share, and to let me know just how much of this world he has come to understand.

My sister and I have five years between us, so even though I am the younger sibling I did not experience what is like to become a shadow. It took sharing these 15 minutes each day to make me realize just how much it is happening to my son, and beyond some bedtime cuddling just how little one on one time he was getting from me.

I cannot tell you how many times in a day I have to tell my older child let her brother speak, to give him the time to come up with the answers. What is 3 + 3? She knows, and it kills her to keep quiet. He knows too; he’s just not as quick yet and never has the time to blurt it out before she rattles off the answer.

This morning we talked about dinosaurs. I could have died from the cute as I watched his brow furrow while he shook his head and told me about how there are no more left; that they died a long time ago. Oh, these 15 minutes, just me and my son. What an interesting and funny little dude he is. Who would have thought this change in schedule that I was so dreading could turn out to be such a blessing?

……………………………………..

In the blink of an eye the end of October came and we were all sick; my house a hopeless infestation of untold viruses. Yet somehow we managed to get through Halloween and still enjoy the little guy’s birthday.

Four years old. Happy Birthday, Little Man. We are so lucky to have you.

She sits next to me on the stool, her tiny fingers spread over the ivory keys, her thumbs gliding across the span of an octave in search of that elusive Middle C.

“This one?”

“No, that’s the A. Where is the C?”

I catch myself because I know that I just sounded frustrated. I am only human after all and we begin her lessons by searching for Middle C daily. Sometimes she gets it right away, other times not so much. I have to remind myself that she is only six and is doing so well. To a six year old, all those keys can be an overwhelming sea of black and white.

Those who have the patience to teach piano to children are saints. Saints, I tell you. Sadly, I am not one of them.

She gets it on the next try and I make sure that this time my tone is full of praise as she begins her exercises. I continuously remind myself that it is my encouragement that will play a big part of keeping it fun for her.  Learning to play piano is no easy feat at any age.

But oh, she has that natural ear. She stops reading the notes after she plays them a few times through and goes on memory alone. She knows how it should sound and recognizes when it is wrong. It is going to be a gift but also a hindrance when she dives deeper into theory, so I remind her again to keep her eyes on the page.

After we finish her exercises she asks me to play for her. My fingers dance across the keys, muscle memory at its finest, as I tap out a few pieces from my childood that I would never have believed were still in me. Yet here they are.

“Play the Toy Story one Mommy!”

We have a few books of modern music and while some of them are beyond my skills due to 25 years of neglect, surprisingly with just a little effort I was able to hop right back on that bike.

“Someday I want to play like you,” she says.

“No Sweetie, if you practice a lot and try real hard, someday you will be better than me.”

“No, I want to be just like you.” Pride and sorrow stuck in my throat.

I looked at my husband later that evening and said, “But I don’t want her to be like me. She can be so much more.” And right there I recognized in myself for the first time that desperation for her to have it, to be it. I have always heard of parents who want more for their children than what they had for themselves. It is human nature; of course we all want that. Even before I was a parent I knew I would want that. Yet this was the first time that I truly, deeply felt it. And it was desire and caution wrapped up into a complex little bundle of hope. Knowing that I am, as I should be, forever destined to encourage, to guide, to stand aside. Understanding what I gave up and what she could have, and recognizing the fine line between her dreams and mine; our thumbs resting on Middle C.

It was approximately 8:50 in the morning when my office phone rang on September 11, 2001. I could tell from a glance at the caller ID that is was my fiancé, now husband. I barely skipped a beat as I raised the receiver to my ear and continued a scan of my morning email. I acknowledged him with my usual, “Hey”.

“The World Trade Center is on fire.”

“Huh?”

“Turn around and look at the television.”

Having spent the first several years of our courting working there himself, he knew my office well. He knew that directly behind me on an elevated platform where I spent most of my day was a television broadcasting market updates. I peered around and looked at the television that I subsequently would not remove from my sight for the next seven and a half hours, and saw what I was missing.

What’s always bothered me the most about me in that very first moment when I saw the flames and the smoke, was my initial reaction; a sort of weird rush of excitement. Call it years of blockbuster movies, call it desensitization to images on TV, call it if you must just being a terrible person, but it took me a good minute to understand that what I was seeing was not a harmless explosion on television like we all see on the average evening program.

I looked around my office, already buzzing with activity. Coworkers were busy at fax machines and copiers. Some were on the phones or carrying breakfast and coffee to their desks. Others were visiting each other’s cubes or chatting around proverbial water coolers as they prepared to start the day. It was just before 9:00 AM on a Tuesday morning in a financial building. Of course there would have been countless individuals in the World Trade Center doing just the same thing.

We hung up the phone, and as I seated myself on the platform I was quickly joined by others. I remember the initial rumor that it was a small plane and the comments around me that there was simply too much damage to be something as tiny as a Cessna. I remember a dozen conversations bouncing back and forth as I watched the second plane hit; an unmistakably very large plane.

And then there was that sinking feeling, the understanding that this was no accident. For the next half hour, watching the chaos, I was consumed not only by the grief and fear I was watching on screen, but also by the stories that were flooding in around me. There was a coworker who had a relative on one of the top floors. There was the knowledge that one of our related companies had offices high up there as well. There was the report that one of our best friends was supposed to be on a fight out of Logan that morning bound for California (he wasn’t). There was the rumor that other cities could be affected, and the fact that my soon to be husband was sitting in a skyscraper in Boston, along with several other close friends in tall buildings nearby.

As if that wasn’t frightening enough, all that worry changed to outright terror at 9:37 when the Pentagon was struck. As a young American, this is something that I had never experienced before. This almost ready to settle down Generation Xer had never known what it felt like to have my way of life or liberty in peril from tyranny. That is just something that does not happen to us. It happens to other areas of the world, places which at the time I couldn’t even name, but most definitely not to The United States of America.

I felt woken from a deep sleep, unprepared, uneducated, and shaken to the core; I could not for the life of me understand why this was happening. Al Qaeda? Never heard of him.  The World Trade Center had been bombed previously? Missed that. Taliban? Gesundheit. Oh, how very quickly I learned that my freedom had bred my own complacency. How blind I had been.

The rest of that day was a blur: watching one tower collapse, then the next, hearing about the plane in Pennsylvania. The order has become fuzzy, but throughout the day we tracked down loved ones, got word from my husband that his building was evacuated and he was carpooling it home with friends, and call it strange but to this day every time I look up at the sky I think of that day when I stepped outside, looked up at the crystal blue, and did not see a single plane flicker against the sunlight. No planes! It was a quiet and eerie feeling.

The next three days were numbing. Tears, work, tears, CNN, tears, Fox News, tears, ABC, tears, and newspaper article after newspaper article. They are all in a box in the attic now. Somewhere in that box is an image of an upside down man falling from the building, head first, his tie flapped outward, his arms resolutely by his side. I need never look at it again to remember that image. It is forever imprinted in my brain.

I remember discussing the photo with a friend who said to me, “how bad did it have to be in there for that jump to be your best option.” Oh, God, those poor people. Whenever I think of 9/11, it is not the smoke, it is not the flames, it is not the second plane crashing into the building, it is not the towers collapsing, it is not the throngs of people covered in debris and running for their lives, it is not the police and firemen walking towards instead of away from the flames, and then later the more who came to help search for civilians and their own. All of those images follow, but it is that of the falling man that is always my first visual recall. I hope with all of my heart that his family did not see or recognize him in that photograph. I wish that I had never seen that photograph.

That Friday night after 9/11 we gathered at our bar. On that particular evening there was a universal vigil, and as I was driving through some back roads to meet my friends I remember seeing a family of four standing outside at the end of their driveway. They stood close together, arms about each other and candles in hand. In that moment I had such love for that family I did not know, and I knew that my pain was theirs.

At the bar we drank, we cried, and when it started to get dark we lit candles on the back deck. We sang God Bless America together, an entire bar full of people; strangers, friends, coworkers, all gathered together to help ease a shared sorrow. I remember saying to my girlfriends, “Things will never be the same.”

I longed so badly in that moment for 9/10, as I have every day since.

This was my 9/11. I wrote it down to remember. For the lives that were stolen that awful day, and for the families who remain to mourn their absence, my prayers are sent from my still aching heart. God Bless America.