The Longest Bad Memory

My son was born on a Thursday afternoon in mid-June 2001, surprising us with his appearance five weeks before his July due date. He was little, but perfect and healthy. I’d left my job the day before, leaving a stack of papers on my desk representing the work I fully intended to do that day, wrapping up my week before I began training the woman who would do my job during my maternity leave the following Monday.

We plan, God laughs.

My maternity leave lasted the maximum allowed twelve weeks (that’s what we get here in the States), and it was by all accounts alternately wonderful and miserable. Wonderful because, well, the only thing I wanted to be longer than I’ve wanted to be a writer is mom. Miserable because I was blessed with the variety of baby who doesn’t sleep. I swear that boy didn’t sleep until he was fourteen, and now can sleep anytime, anywhere. Evidence is this photo I took in July:

He was also an extremely crabby baby, who cried all the time. So, there I was, a brand-new, sleep deprived (“Sleep when the baby does!” HA!) mom with a cranky baby who cried all the time and didn’t sleep, and yet I was deliriously happy to be his mom.

Complicated, I know.

As much as I desperately wanted to be a mother, I always new I would be a working mother. I was miserable because I wasn’t at work. At that time, I’d been at the company I’d later be forced to leave after twenty-five years for just over eight. I missed the work and feeling productive. I missed having a reason to get up in the morning and a place to go. Most of all, I missed my coworkers. I missed chatting by the copier and during lunch. I missed stopping by someone’s desk to ask how she was doing. Every other day, I swear I called the receptionist and begged her to put me through to somebody, anybody. I craved adult conversation with someone who wasn’t my husband and who wouldn’t mind my gushing about my baby for the duration of our chat.

I have nothing but respect for stay-at-home moms. I will go to my grave with the knowledge that it is the hardest job that exists, and I knew in my heart of hearts that I was ill-equipped to do it. So, the other thing I did during my maternity leave was find a caring day care center close to where I worked, and we lucked into an opening right as my maternity leave came to an end. My first day back at work was September 10, 2001.

I’m sure you can see where I’m going with this.

I don’t remember much about that first day, but I remember vividly the morning of the second day. The baby was–shockingly–still asleep as I got ready that morning, still trying to get my feet under me in my new routine of getting us both ready to leave the house. I heard the news on the radio and turned on the TV to see smoke billowing out of a building I’d only seen in pictures. I watched with horror as another plane crashed into the second. When the hour was decent, the first call I placed was to my dad; my not-so-wicked-and-actually-pretty-great stepmom is a pilot who still flies for one of those airlines. I just wanted to know where she was.

She was in Denver.

I mentioned before that I have an old, retired blog about my kids, and after a bit of derring-do, I unearthed those posts as I wrote this one. Here’s what I wrote about that day in a long-ago post I wrote on the fifth anniversary:

I don’t remember most of the rest of that day. I do remember very clearly apologizing to my then almost-three-month-old son on our way to his day care for bringing him into this world where all kinds of crappy things happen. That is the only day I have ever questioned my decision to have kids. 

I very clearly remember both of those things, though I must have decided having kids was okay, because three years and twelve days later, my daughter joined us. She was only four weeks early after I was on bed rest for three weeks, and was a much easier baby than her brother. She actually slept.

Not long after my son’s first birthday, when he slept better but was still fussy, I adjusted my work schedule slightly and started waking early to write before getting us ready for the day. That’s when I began writing the book that–seventeen years later–would become Whatever Will Be. I’m so proud I finished it and only wished I’d done it sooner. We aren’t promised tomorrow.

In 2012, we went on a vacation that included three days in New York City. We saw Phantom of the Opera on Broadway. We went to the top of Rockefeller center so we could take pictures of the Empire State Building. We rode the Staten Island ferry and waved at Lady Liberty. We went to lunch at the original Grimaldi’s and walked back to Manhattan on the Brooklyn Bridge. And we visited the 9/11 Memorial.

The infinity pools that represent the footprint of each building are surrounded by a sort of pedestal, where the names of those who died are carved. We walked around the pools, reading the names that ultimately represented a real-live person who wasn’t anymore. My son, then eleven, stopped and pointed at one such name. “What does this mean?”

Under his finger was the name of a woman, followed by the phrase “and her unborn child.”

“That means she was pregnant,” I told him.

This, more than any other fact, made that memorial come alive for my children. It represented a child–another person that would be around my son’s age–that would never come to be because of this horrific act. They spent the rest of our time there looking for this phrase next to other names. I think they counted fourteen before our stop in the obligatory gift shop. I’m sure if you asked about our visit there today, that’s what they would remember.

I could go on and on. I could write about how I’ve never felt the kind of unity before or since as I did right after those events, and how we could use some of that unity now. I could despair about the never ending war that has actually finally, sloppily ended, and bemoan the way Muslims have been treated with disdain and suspicion since that day, treatment which I find abhorrent and appalling.

Instead, I will remind you to live each day with no regrets. Be kind to everyone. You don’t know their story. And do what makes you happy, because–as I mentioned above–we are not promised tomorrow.