“Mom, what happened to the Twin Towers?” asked Janie at dinner this past Sunday.
I put down my fork, thinking about how to explain, and my mother-in-law stepped in. “They flew two airplanes into them,” she said.
“Who?”
“Terrorists,” we both answered.
“Why?”
“Because they wanted to kill as many people as possible in as big a way as possible,” I said. ”So everyone would see.”
Her eyes went wide and her brown wrinkled. “But why would they kill all those people?”
“So that everyone would pay attention. They blamed out country for everything that was going wrong in the world, and they wanted everyone to know.”
“That’s not . . . why didn’t they just talk to us?”
“Because they’re mean,” said my mother-in-law. “Mean and evil.”
“But—”
“They wanted to scare us into doing what they wanted—so they would feel stronger,” I said. “Like bullies.”
“Did it work?” she asked.
I hesitated again, but no one else spoke.
“They scared us,” I told my daughter, who was conceived in April of 2002. “But they didn’t stop us.”
This is such a difficult and important topic. I think your answers were just right for your daughter.
I hope so, Lisa—explaining the inexplicable is tricky . . .
I absolutely agree with Lisa, Sarah.
Thanks, Downith. But I really wish my kids didn’t know what bullies were, either.
I can’t imagine how difficult that would be to explain to a child. It’s hard enough to explain to someone who was a child at the time. They just weren’t old enough to really understand what happened.
And yet, so much about it has changed their lives from the way ours used to be. Yeah.
But after this The Big Talk is going to be easy. Right? Um . . . never mind . . . .
The Big Talk …… *shudder* I almost initiated the big talk accidentally last week.
I keep trying to schedule The Talk, but it’s difficult to find the time . . . Darn.
It’s so interesting to me when I try to explain something to my kids how by taking out all of the adult BS, we find ourselves seeing how not complicated it really is. At least I do. And I’m always amazed at how if seven year olds ran the world, they’d manage to figure out that bullies suck whether it’s them or us, and that talking is so much better than senseless death.
Exactly. And then we’d all play outside with sticks and have cookies after, without guilt.
Last year we gave the big talk about 9/11. No matter how much time passes, it still hurts so much.
I imagine that for those who have such a deep connection to the city, the pain is even worse.
I’m not sure, though, that it’s such a bad thing that the hurt is still so strong.
You know old age has it’s advantages. After WWII, the holocaust, Korea, and then Vietnam, this particular horror story falls into a sort of perspective. After the 9/11 event, which cost over 3000 innocent lives, a war was unleashed which cost over 100,000 lives so far, many of them equally innocent. Who is the winner in all of this? The torn bodies and blasted minds keep stacking up. We hated the Japanese, now our best allies in the Pacific Rim, We lost 54,000 men in Vietnam. I am now wearing shirts made there. In our lifetimes we may yet be allied with the kin of the pilots of these planes that destroyed the towers.
Where have all the young men gone……When will we ever learn…..
Maybe those who remember history repeat it anyway? What a harrowing thought . . .
We don’t remember it the right way, that’s the problem. We tally up the wins and losses on a global scale and forget the individual stories of horror and heartbreak. If the suffering is not immediate and personal to us, it becomes this malleable abstract concept of something that happened somewhere else, in another reality, to other people’s families. It becomes political and not human.
“Political and not human.”
Yes. Exactly.
That was a good conversation about a very difficult subject. Well done.
Thanks. It doesn’t always work out that well on the fly.
Our children have so much more to consider about the world than we did. And not always good things. Since we can’t erase it from their lives, the best we can do is try to explain it. You did well.
Thanks, Sherry. This is one of the toughest parts of parenthood.