MEMOIR
Two Towers and Twenty Two Years
Playgrounds and shifting paradigms
I was five years old when 9/11 happened. But I still had a childhood.
Sometimes it’s hard not to mourn for the children growing up today. Sometimes it’s easy to understand why fewer and fewer of us are deciding to have children in this relentlessly spinning world. It’s a difficult time to explain to the young. I have to remind myself, though, that this chaos isn’t entirely new.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve slowly gained a deeper appreciation for the challenges my parents faced while raising me. Throughout so much of my life it’s been easy to view my mother and father as sure-footed adults. It’s been painful growing to understand that they, too, were once children thrust into a daunting world of adult decisions and responsibilities. It’s strange to think how disorienting that must have been for them, and stranger still to think how terrifying it must have been to bring a child into this dizzying, dizzying world.
I was five years old when 9/11 happened and it’s one of the very first memories that I have. It was the first time I saw adults confused and scared. My mom drank her morning coffee with tears in her eyes and sat in her beige-blue recliner, eyes glued to the television screen as billows of smoke rose from the North…
