I was driving to work on September 11, having dropped Katy (who was 2) off at daycare. By this time, Laura was five, had started living with her father and had started kindergarten.
I turned on the radio and MPR was on. At first I thought they were doing some sort of War of the Worlds type segment. Then I realized that they were talking about an actual event and that an airplane had crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. I sat in my car, so confused and trying to figure out what was going on. Realizing I was going to be late, I rushed into the building and saw people gathered around a computer and heard a radio playing the news. Less than a minute later, the second plane crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center.
There was so much confusion that morning. It took time to figure out that this was an orchestrated attack. My boss told us that we needed to go home and be with our families so I left work and went to get Katy from daycare.
When we got to the house, Katy and I were the only ones home. Even though Laura's dad and I didn't get along very well at the time, I still called to make sure she was ok.
I stayed home, and held Katy and cried, wishing my oldest daughter was with me. The horrible magnitude of the attacks would be made clear as time went on.
My pain on that day was so much less than the pain of others. My loss was nothing compared to theirs. Still, the pain of that time in our nation's history is inexorably linked to the time in my life when I gave up primary custody of my oldest daughter.
2011 is the ten year anniversary of the time when I stopped being able to wake up my precious girl every morning and was no longer the one to tuck her in every night.
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