Where Were You... (DSP Prompt 09/11)

Has it been 5 years already? Funny how this event, like most tragic events, seems still so close, and yet I can't really remember what life was like before it...

I was a stay at home mom 5 years ago, and I kept a 5 month old baby girl in addition to my 9 month old son. I had just gotten my son down for a nap, and I was trying to get Emma down, too, when the phone rang. It was my mother. Now, you have to know that my mother calls like 5 times a day, and she tends to dramatize things, so when she said, "Are you watching the Today Show? A plane just flew into the World Trade Center. They think it is terrorists," I blew her off. I told her, "Mother, I need to get Emma down--I am sure it is an accident." And I got off the phone with her and put Emma down...

After she was asleep, I turned on the TV just in time to see the second plane hit. And I knew my mother was right. I have never been so shocked in my life. I sat in the floor and cried. Then I called my husband at work and told him to come home.

I felt so scared; scared because for a couple of hours there, it seemed like there were planes everywhere trying to run into everything: The towers, then the pentagon, then a plane in a field. I am not sure how to explain those first few hours--they were so surreal...there were still babies to care for and food to eat and normal stuff going on in my house, when I just wanted to sit and cry...

So, for days and days I watched TV. I think it was like a week before normal TV even came back. I barely slept--no one I know did. It became almost like an act of respect. The families who were searching for their loved ones did not sleep. It seemed disrespectful to turn off the TV, somehow. I remember watching reporters cry in the middle of broadcasts. They were just overwhelmed...weren't we all?

I did not lose anyone personally, but I know a few friends of friends that lost family members. Less than 3000 died, & yet I still have met people who lost someone. It really is a small world...

You know, on one of those planes there was a mother and her 2 year old. And she had to know they were going to die. How do you hold your child and know you are both going to die? What do you say? Do you sing in her ear that Jesus loves her? Do you cry, or do you try to hold it together so that your little girl is not afraid? The absolute terror of it still horrifies me. I cannot imagine it, & it is the one thought that haunts me...