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 Tower of the World Trade Center. She wrestled alone with the idea of driving her only son into preschool that day, unsure whether or not her country was under attack.
In school that day the teachers were equally unsure how to behave, how to protect us from the reality of what was happening. They were focused on that same replaying reel that my mother had been captivated by. They stared at it, shell-shocked, teary-eyed and muttering quietly amongst themselves. I wondered why.
If ever I’d been in the room with the news on, it had never been positive — mounting chaos in the Middle East, explosions and terrorist attacks weren’t unusual. They were staple features of that weird talking head chatter that adults liked to watch. I couldn’t understand how this banal pastime of theirs could be upsetting them more than The Lion King had upset me.
Now, when I see my little cousin, his smile gleams — through masks and wildfire smoke and riots and insurrections. He watches Bluey as the climate changes. He plays with dinosaurs as we worry about AI uprisings.
His free-flowing imagination belongs to a far less dire world. And yet, he walks the earth with the gleeful pounds of a giant.
He’s oblivious to the scary times he’s gallivanting through. He’s blithely and beautifully unaware of the threats we face. And in his contagious laughter, I see fleeting reflections of life’s joyous sides. But reality always sets in. They’re flickers, and the flickers fade.
He’ll grow up. Ecstatic smiles will sour with the passing seasons. I resent the things he’ll have to see, the new normals he’ll have to accept.
I want to protect him from them. I want to hold out my arms and shield him from any of the futures that might force him to look back longingly on these strange days of domestic decay. I wish he understood the childhood he was missing — not so that he could envy it, but so that he might somehow transcend all of this turmoil we’ve left for him to clean. It’s a lofty vision.
When he thinks back on these earliest years, what will he remember? Will he think wistfully about these dystopian days in the same way I think about the morning cartoons, MP3 players and the bygone candies of my childhood?
Will the thought of masks and TikToks and backpacks with bullet shields trigger the warm, fuzzy feelings of nostalgia that the closeted cartoons of my childhood still do for me?
Will he look back at all of this confusion and remember only the calm?
Will he fall into the illusion of thinking that we terrified adults actually have some hold on the ground beneath our feet?
I don’t remember much of what happened immediately after 9/11. I don’t remember the confusion or the feelings of unity that followed. I don’t remember the ground shifting at a break-neck pace beneath me. But by the next time I walked into an airport, it surely had. I didn’t understand that yet though.
My world was jungle gyms and kickball games, Nintendo 64 and tree-climbing, Game Boy games and caterpillar hunts. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were abstract concepts that could never have distracted me from my enthralling land of make-believe.
I was privileged, but I was also a child. Disease and starvation and insanity and addiction and grief were things that I was aware of, but only loosely. They could slip my mind unnoticed for entire weeks at a time.
It’s easy not to notice the future being sold out from beneath our fingertips when the payments happen in installments. We don’t recognize it for what it is in those moments when we barter away our tomorrows.
Where was I when the wars started? Was I swinging on the jungle gym or playing Simon Says when the troops were deployed?
Where was I when the entirety of human knowledge entered our pockets? Was I catching fireflies or jumping on a trampoline when the stock market collapsed?
Somewhere stretched in between silly band bracelets, or lost in old cartoons, or concealed within the distant echoes of ice-cream truck jingles, our futures drifted quietly away from us.
Is it actually possible that children today can see the beauty beyond all of this chaos we’ve left them? It’s hard for me to imagine, but then, I’m not nearly as good an imaginer as I once was.