September 12

I was 9 months, hippo-grade pregnant with my second child on September 11, 2001. I'd gone to Lowes to buy potted mums that morning, and I was in full nesting mode to get some fall color outside our home before the baby descended upon us. I remember being at the counter counting the price of the mums in my cowlike, swollen state, and suddenly the employees began talking excitedly with each other. I looked up and someone said, "A plane just hit the Pentagon." It wasn't really that I believed the story at that moment; it was their level of concern that gave me pause.

I turned on the local news station in the car. The newscasters were in a difficult state describing what was going on. The panic was palpable like a predator creeping into a room. I could tell enough in the first moments that we were in a national emergency. I headed to the nearest gas station and filled up my vehicle (this is an automatic trigger in the Deep South when hurricanes are coming; disaster prep is hard-wired into our routines) when I heard, "There could be other planes in the air." I'd almost made it home when a tearful well-known announcer said, "The World Trade Center has just fallen." I made it home just in time to see the second tower fall.

I had a 2-year-old at a church-run preschool and I still believe I was the only mother to go pick her child up early that day, and yes, my nickname on the internet is sometimes Chicken Little, but I was worried about widespread panic and clogged roads if the situation escalated into (many) planes falling out of the sky. I feared freaked-out people running into each other on the roads more than I did planes falling. So I sat safely at home and watched the news roll in all day and most of the night. I remember sitting on top of my coffee table to get as close to the television as possible, not even remembering I was adding 55+ pounds of excess force to that poor structure.

That next morning, I got up before everyone else, and padded through each room, listening to their breathing, and marveling that my family been spared this horror. I learned that there was a 3-year-old on one of the planes that hit the towers. There was a dead infant found in a car seat in an underground parking garage. I shuddered to think about the heartbreak of being a parent with a child on one of those planes, and you now know you will experience your death and the death of your child in the next few seconds. I couldn't help pondering: "What separates my life from theirs, and what will we do with this world now, and didn't those children have lives and purposes, and things to do, and a chance to grow up?"

President Bush was interviewed about what was going through his mind when he was in an elementary classroom and first was told of the attacks, and he stated that the first reaction in his mind was the contrast of the innocence of children and the evil that had come upon us as a country. I felt this same thing as a mother carrying a new life. New life is given; life is taken in an instant. It's all too easy for someone or something to do.

I will never forget the survivor's guilt I had that next morning, September 12th, which oscillated between thankfulness for being alive, having live children, and grief for the losses that could never be replaced. This moment in time would be marked forever like an inky black blot spreading on a white canvas of former trust in our right to thrive. 9/11 made me respect life in a way that I hadn't before, and it deepened my well of reverence for other children; especially the ones who never got a chance to grow up.

Drake Alan was born exactly one week later, swaddled and healthy, in a room full of nurses. And I still felt the anger, the guilt, and the remorse for those who were so far removed from ever having joy in their lives again. They still deserve our prayers and the remembrance of what they were, and what they were to become. They were interrupted; they didn't get to finish. Most of them didn't get to even say goodbye. 18 years later, their lives still matter, and I still have the indelible imprint of that quiet house on September 12.