Children of Hope

The other day I was in a checkout line at the grocery store, and sitting amongst the various trashy and semi-trashy periodicals that always reside there was that week's issue of People magazine. Staring from the cover, innocent and doe-eyed, was a lovely 9-year-old strawberry blonde-haired girl, her freckled face like something out of a Dutch Renaissance painting. She was holding a locket with a tiny picture inside around her neck. The picture is her dead father, and the story title was "The Children of 9/11." The article is a feature on some children whose fathers died in the September 11 terrorist attacks.

I didn't buy the magazine (actually purchasing a People magazine is a place I can't quite get to), but the headline and picture stuck with me because the girl on the cover is Abra's age. The girl never knew her father. All of the children featured in that story are close contemporaries of Abra age-wise, because all their mothers were pregnant with them on that awful day. So, as it happens, was I. I was a little over halfway through, in fact. I don't pretend to be affected any differently from anyone else just because I was expecting my first child that day--so were many thousands of other women, including a number of friends of mine. But because I did happen to be pregnant, that picture did a little bit better job than any of the other dozens of 9/11 commemorations that are currently ubiquitous in American media of bringing me back to that day.

As probably most people do, or at least think they do, I remember trivial things about that day pretty clearly. I'd just had my first Lamaze class the night before. It was a Tuesday morning, with absolutely perfect weather. Sunny, just the slightest hint of crispness first thing in the morning, mild sunny day later on. The sort of day that generally makes you happy to be here. In fact, I even remember what I was wearing. It was a purple maternity dress. It had long sleeves and that day was the first time I'd worn it--the dress was, like most of my maternity clothing, handed down from a friend, but it was new to me. Clad in a purple dress and black boots and by then sporting quite the visible pregnant waddle, I inspired one of my co-workers to quip at me as I was headed out the door that I looked like a walking eggplant. I laughed as I headed out the door, on my way to the Health Care center for 8:30 a.m. (central time) mental detention hearings. On my car radio, just before I arrived, whatever puff piece Susan Stamberg was doing on NPR was interrupted with the news that a plane had just hit the World Trade Center.

My first thought was, what a terrible accident. By the time I was finished with detention hearings and headed back to the office, of course, news of the other planes had gone over the airwaves and it was clear that it was a terrorist attack. Virtually nothing got done that day that didn't absolutely have to get done. We all did whatever court appearances we had to do, and spent the rest of the day huddled by TV sets and emailing friends and loved ones. And things went on in that vein for a few days afterward, too. Remember TV? Radio? For more than a week regular programming was essentially suspended, in order for the networks to be able to provide round-the-clock coverage. Football and baseball got postponed. Some of the cable stations went back to regular programming earlier than that, and I confess that I remember being relieved when the Oxygen Network resumed broadcasting Xena. I just wasn't sure how much more non-stop coverage I could seep into my head. But, like everyone else, I was feeling a little awkward about when and how we could return to normal, and also feeling more than a little bit like nothing would ever be normal again. In fact, a couple of weeks later, the venerable Onion hit the perfect note with its satirical headline, "Grieving Nation Longs to Care About Stupid Shit Again."

But of course, we did resume caring about stupid shit, because that's what humans do.  Things did become normal again, it's just that "normal" changed for everyone. But normal always changes and evolves. That's how life is. A few months later I finally became a mom--not without a lot of trepidation, wondering if I'd made a mistake bringing another person onto a deeply troubled planet. I don't think I did. And in a way it doesn't matter whether I did or not; she's here, and appears to be enjoying herself. Like the angel-faced strawberry blonde on the People magazine cover, Abra seems to radiate hope. 9/11 doesn't mean anything to her, just as Pearl Harbor or JFK's assassination don't mean anything to me in the personal sense because I didn't experience them. But I understand what those events mean to the world. They're part of my normal, just as 9/11 is part of our children's normal. Hope, and normal, continue to exist in the word of abnormal, simply because that's how it has to be.