Friday, September 11, 2009

Where were you?

I'm guessing most of us can remember where we were at the exact moment we learned about the tragic events of 9/11. What other moments in your life do you remember your exact location? I remember the Oklahoma City Bombing as well.

Now, as for 9/11. It's almost humorous because I was in my college sign language class (second or third level class) and the teacher was doing the sign of an airplane flying into a tower and then the tower collapsing. I remember being so confused. What was she doing this for? I remember leaving the class and going straight back to my dorm room to figure out if my translation was accurate. Unfortunately it was. I do not remember the rest of the details of the day. I do remember I went to my next class during which the professor excused us to go home. Classes were canceled on the University campus which was really rare.

Typing about it today it almost seems surreal, like it never happened. It's crazy to think that something so emotional to many of us begins to fade and that our children will only read about it in the history books. They will learn of this day 9/11 as fact, as trivia, as part of history. They will not know if this day because of the emotional imprint it has made in their lives. I wonder how many emotionally significant things in my parents' life I read about or heard about with out attaching any emotion it and then went about my life filing it away with all the other information in my mind. I realized that sometimes I'm hesitant to share really personal/emotional stuff with people for that reason. That the emotional weight an event carries when something is experienced can not be transferred or accurately communicated to another person. Somehow telling another person seems to trivialize it. Maybe a different way to think about this, is that in the communication a bit of the burden is lifted. In some way it is shared a bit.

Who knows. Enough of my rambling. I was laying in bed when my daughter decided that at 11:00pm she could not live with out nursing. I decided that tonight she could live with out it and that I was going to fight this battle till I won. She's now asleep. I laid in bed just in time to hear my darling son's voice through the monitor, "Mommy..." Through his sweet little mumbles I deciphered two things 1) he would like some water and 2) he would like me to sit in his room "jus a lil bit." Since I was already wide awake, and had made a stromboli during my battle with Eisley, I obliged to both requests. So here I sit contemplating the transfer of emotional events through communication. And you all get to listen (read) in, unless of course you've stopped reading already, which I would never know, and would also not take personally.
Here's to a couple of consecutive hours of sleep. One more deep thought before I go to sleep. Do you think the number of consecutive hours of sleep is inversely proportional to the number of kids you have? I'm sure we could figure out an equation for it, although, not right now.

Good night!

2 comments:

Amber said...

I don't know about the whole sleep thing... Wyatt and Icyle slept till 8:30 this morning after going to bed a 9 last night... but I remember 9/11... mom woke me up and said "an airplane just crashed into the twin towers, its on the news" so I went to watch live footage and watched as the second plane flew into the other tower... the guy who was taping it said "Oh ^%$#" and then that was it. I went to my only class for the day at NHCC and watched live footage of the towers falling... craziest experience of my life.

Aubrey said...

I was sitting on the couch with my newborn baby girl wondering if this was going to be what her life was about - terrorism.

Sleep? John and I have discovered a phenomenon: when we plan how we'll deal with minimal sleep certain night, we don't end up needing the plan. Weird, huh!