9/11 and Our Kids

9/11.  Seventeen years ago.  How can that be?  That day will be in our minds forever like it was yesterday.

I remember where I was.

I remember the crazy-busy workday.

I remember believing what a cruel hoax I thought this was, because of course, this couldn’t be happening.

I remember the faces of certain patients to the detail.

I remember words exchanged.

I remember the confusion, the desire for detail our office couldn’t receive because our clinic was t.v.- and radio-free, and smartphones weren’t “a thing” yet.

I remember a patient coming in the office and stating that many firefighters had also died.

I remember thinking my husband and I would be bringing children into a world where the bar for horrific had been raised exponentially.

I remember speeding home after work to turn on the television to get the full story, desperate to put together all the sickening, jumbled snippets that patients brought in the door during the day.

I remember being exhausted from the effort to remain composed and present while caring for sick patients.

I don’t remember thinking about how I’d talk about 9/11 with my kids.  But that fateful Tuesday has come up many times in their young lives.  Once they pulled out a scrapbook, and instead of seeing their baby photos, they saw a preserved image of the exploding twin towers.   Of course, they asked me to explain. I panicked, and fell back on the default:

We’ll talk about it when you are older.

Now that our kids are older, I still don’t know for sure how best to talk 9/11 with my kids.  It’s too horrible and complex for them to understand fully.  But a wonderful friend of mine from our days in Wisconsin posted this today:

Here is a book about a select group of middle schoolers in the days leading up to 9/11.  There is also a book entitled Eleven by Tom Rogers about an eleven-year-old boy and his rescue dog which takes place on that fateful day.  These books may be the way to talk 9/11 with our kids.  My husband and I are looking into using both for a family reading club.

9/11 was (and still is) a horrible day that is hard for many of us who remember it to discuss without becoming tearful.  But we can’t protect our kids from it.  They will learn about 9/11 somewhere, somehow, and likely see or hear about it in all the wrong ways (case in point:  my daughter said two boys in her class at school decided to role-play  “the building and the plane” while the teacher were out of the room…).  So thank you, J.H., for your Facebook post this morning; these books look like the answer we parents need to guide us through discussing a difficult subject with our kids.

#9/11

#neverforget