Sept. 11

Has it really been 8 years since the Terrorist Attacks? 9/11 has become one of these landmark events in life that slowly creeps away from us, only to sneak back up on an anniversary or when something else happens that reminds us of it. Like the reminders of a death of a family member.

I was so far away from the terror of that day and yet it felt so personal. I think many people felt that way. I was worried about my family (h.s. student, worker, fireman and policeman in Manhattan), about friends who live and work in DC, about my husband working across the street from the Sears Tower with a boss who told them they needed to stay at work, even though it was a start up with no operations and no customers (well that company didn't work out), and about G (who was completely safe at daycare, but that didn't really matter at the moment, I wanted her with me).

I remember thinking, Uh oh Al Queda, there goes Afghanistan when I saw some of the first news reports . I remember G making towers out of legos and knocking them over. Oh, and I was 7 1/2 months pregnant. The skies over Chicago were empty for the next several days (talk about strange when you live near O'Hare). There was a sense of something bad about to happen (again).

We mourned and cried over the lives that were lost, the stories that came out over time, over the devastation. That day has receded from the immediate. And then comes an anniversary and you think about it all again.

Now, I'm at the point about explaining it to my kids. They know what happened (sort of), but explaining who Al Queda is and was, how it happened, what it was like. How it fits in the pantheon of things that can happen but are extremely unlikely (all parents have a long list of those to help kids understand but not scare them half to death). But where do go with our kids?

I believe, we need to teach them to be curious about the world around them. About other cultures, peoples, religions. As parents we have a responsibility to create caring, empathetic and informed citizens of our country and our world. We need to know why what happens in Pakistan matters, why religion is both good and can be used for bad. Where fanatacism comes from and how to mitigate it. Why the rest of the world matters, when we have everything we need/want/could dream of, right here. We need to instill compassion and knowledge. They eventually need to learn the truth about the world, that people can be unsparingly kind to each other and also unsparingly evil. What we can do is to be aware, speak up, and work for kindness.