Our history weaves together to form a repeating pattern of chevrons, I like to imagine.
During the 1970’s my mother and my father were married. He had four months of college, and once he graduated, they moved to Norfolk, Virginia, where my father was promptly assigned a ship and a billet to the Vietnam War.
My mother was young, barely 21, when she got pregnant with their first son, my brother, Chris. Since my father was deployed, my mother gave birth alone in a very foreign feeling Naval hospital. There was no Skype and transportation didn’t allow for her family and friends to support her in that moment. In that sense, she and I share very few similarities.
Years passed and my father retired from the United States Navy. Two additional children followed-the last, being me, who turned out to be a stubborn people pleaser, very conscious in my desire to forge my own path. I was reverent not to lose myself-not to a man and certainly not to a man who had sworn an oath to the United States Military.
In turn, my mother supported those ‘marches’ and did everything in her power to protect me from the outside world-though it was the outside world I longed for most.
But, even the very best mothers can’t protect their daughters from war and on September 11, 2001, it was my mother who notified me that a plane had flown into one of the towers of the World Trade Center.
It is my mother’s voice that I remember the most that day.
It is my mother’s voice that I am most grateful for on that day.
The day when I think my generation collectively lost their innocence.
There is a time in every American’s life for generations past that they can remember their innocence lost. For some, it was Pearl Harbor, the declaration of World War One or Two, Kennedy’s assassination, the Korean War, Vietnam, and for us it was 9/11. For me, it was the day when the sky fell in and I realized that real life happened not on stage, but beyond the exit wings. Eleven years later we are a generation that has grown accustomed to war, turbulence, unrest and change. It is amazing how ‘well’ we adapt.
It is amazing how history repeats itself.
