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The End of the Innocence
On telling one’s children about 9/11
Author’s note: a version of this piece was originally written for the 10th anniversary of September 11.
There’s a photo in our family album taken on the first anniversary, September 11, 2002. Our twins are seated in their double stroller, stationed on the sidewalk leading up to the first house The Husband and I bought. I’d purposely positioned my 9-month old babies next to the flowers and the American flags that lined the path.
Just as I snapped the picture, they both turned their little heads — and the result is both kids gazing simultaneously, almost reverently, at the flags.
Someday Daddy and I will tell you about That Day, I thought, staring at the photo after it came back from Costco. (Those were the days when we still dropped photos off in envelopes at places to be printed. My first digital camera was still several years away.) We’ll tell you what happened with the planes, and the people who flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and into the ground in Pennsylvania, and the thousands of people who died. We’ll tell you where this happened, and where we were, and how devastated we were, and how the country came together as our world was forever changed. We‘ll tell you about the who, the what, the where and the how.
