THANKFUL FRIDAY

In April of 2018, Tammy Duckworth, a senator from Illinois, became the first use senator to cast a vote on the Senate floor with her newborn. Sen. Duckworth’s baby was just a week old and she wanted to be able to keep her baby close while still doing her job as a senator and previous rules of the Senate only allowed Senators and a few aids on the floor during votes. The Senate changed those rules to include children under the age of one. Sen. Duckworth thanked her colleagues for “recognizing that sometimes new parents also have responsibilities at work.” This was a huge step forward in recognizing the struggles of working parents, but that’s not the topic I want to discuss. The thing that I want to talk about is the reaction all of those Senators had towards that newborn when Sen. Duckworth rolled her into Chambers. Every single Senator in that room melted. They all wanted a chance to peak at the swaddled baby. Everyone was smiling. Joy filled up that space.

Now, I will always be an advocate for abortion rights. My body, my choice and it’s none of your business. I will also strongly stand by my decision to not have children. By no means does either of those two beliefs mean that I don’t like children. Quite the opposite. In particular, there is nothing more soothing than gently rocking side to side while holding a baby against your chest. Babies just have this beautiful ability to calm and bring joy. While I do believe that the world would change for the better if we all just took twenty minutes to lay down in final relaxation, I also believe that twenty minutes of gently rocking a baby would have the same effect. It seems that I am compiling a list of things that would make people calmer and happier: final relaxation, babies, puppies, kittens, roller skates and scooters. Maybe baby goats.

Tomorrow marks the 20th Anniversary of the 9/11 Attacks. For some of us, it’s really hard to image that it has been twenty years since such a horrific event occurred. Those events have morphed and changed this country in truly awful ways, but there were some good changes to remember. There were about a hundred babies born in the weeks that followed 9/11 whose fathers had died in the attacks. Jenna Jacobs, interviewed by People Magazine in 2016 in regards to her son who was born six days after the death of his father said “These children are what comes after 9/11. They are the joy, the salve, the ointment. They’re the love.”

One of the men that was in J’s unit recently had a baby and they named the new baby after J. In fact they call him Jaybird, which is a nickname we used for J. This week, my brother, Randy and sister-in-law, Katrina got to spend the evening with this little family. Katrina got to hold and snuggle this baby and they all had such a wonderful evening together. I could tell by the brief texts that I had with Katrina afterward that both she and Randy left that visit with fuller hearts. What a beautiful gift this man has given to my family by naming his newborn after J. I hope that meeting Jaybird was a healing salve for Katrina.

If you get a chance to cuddle a baby (or a puppy) today, do it. You won’t regret it.

SLIPPING UNDER

Praying

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I’ve been out with a nasty head cold that’s floating around the office. I still feel like a bit of a zombie even though I am awake, showered and dressed, sitting at my desk. I have my slides for a presentation I’m working on open, along with a paper about achieving high levels of simultaneous amplification of RNA and DNA. I said that paper is open, not that I’m actually grasping the vernacular. I will have read this paper by the end of the day. I swear it. I will also write up a new protocol for running a batch of slides on the spinning disk.

Goals. I’ve got them.

Last night Micheal asked me if I was going to make it to work today and I replied with a confident yes. In truth, I felt better on Tuesday. I had just slept poorly the previous night, tossing and turning. I would wake up sweaty and then wake up again an hour later freezing. So I gave it another day. I emerged back into the world just in time to be reminded not to forget about the significance of this date. Which is stupid because some dates, no matter how hard I’ve tried, seem to never erase themselves from my memory. Chris, Todd and I sat staring blankly at the TV in Galileo’s, slightly numb and wondering how it was possible that we found ourselves glued to the TV watching scenes of terror that were uncannily familiar to the ones we watched just six years previous when the Murrah building was bombed.

Maybe I should have taken an extra day.

I could not because I already feel guilty for taking those first two days. I feel guilty and bad about a lot of things. Last week’s holiday and conference stuff messed up my gym routine and my yoga practice. Half of this week was spent laying on the couch, feeling like a poopsicle. I am super paranoid about giving this virus to Michael and have asked him half a thousand times if he’s feeling okay. Just forget it if he sneezes or coughs. I might be overdosing us on vitamin C. I received a vintage camera and I managed to purchase the wrong film so I can’t test the camera. Then the actual film for the camera is expensive and so I have to be serious about the pictures I take with it. I think maybe I should have not been so impulsive when I saw the camera and was all “I want it!” Not because the film is expensive but because I don’t have the talent required to use this camera. Then today, my facebook timeline is clogged up with “Never forget!” and images of rubble. I think, of course I’ll never forget. This horrific event in history inspired J to go fucking save the world.

I feel myself beginning to slip under and I wonder how long I can hold my breath this time. One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three…

We all have our battles.

TRAJECTORY

Yellow

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I opened my daily news email and right at the top is read "Today is the 16th Anniversary of 9/11." I was struck by this sentence, like falling into an icy river. Was that really today? I remember Chris and Todd picking me up before lunch at work. We went to Galileo's and sat with a beer, unable to stop staring at the TV. Chris and I looked at each other at one point and we both said "Talaura" at the same time. He went to his phone then and sent her a message. She was fine. The country went into shock. We went through all the stages of grief. We went to war. 

Chris and I would later joke about how politicians would use the phrase "9-11 changed everything" as a scare tactic for votes. We shifted into a country easily ruled by fear. Too easily. The date 9-11 became the Boogie Man. You said the words with a hushed tone while looking over your shoulder as if someone might hear you. And then what? Something bad would happen. Might happen. You never know. The date became cursed. The reality was that the changing of everything would end up being a delayed reaction for me. It would take four, no..actually three years for that wave to hit. J would go to war. We would spend Saturdays building care packages. We'd send him our Girl Scout cookies. I'd buy an extra box of tampons so I could send them in his care package. You know...for bullet wounds. Chris would spend late nights on his computer and occasionally he would be able to catch J online for chats. Chris would come wake me up and say "J's online now. You want to talk to him?" I'd crawl out of bed and sit at Chris's computer and chat about nothing with J. The last time we talked, I told him about Dad's haircut. We laughed. Later on, I would find out that out private messages where all being recorded and read by my government and I would be filled with rage over the injustice of it. 

When the tsunami wave of 9-11 finally did hit, it destroyed everything in it's path. Dad stopped sleeping. Mom grew hateful and bitter. Katrina went a little crazy, but can you blame her? Randy pulled further inside his personal shell. It was all sad all the time, but eventually we started to rebuild. We found a way to absorb it all, some of us better than others. That's how it works. Shit gets destroyed, you clean up the mess and rebuild. Prepare for the next disaster. Today though, I started playing the What If game. What if J hadn't died? What if he'd come home to us all? Would Dad not have gotten Alzheimer's? Would Chris still be alive? The What If game never goes well. Michael and I watch a show called "You're the Worst" and most of the characters on the show really are the worst. One guy though is really sweet. He's an Iraq Veteran and he suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). We watched an episode recently where he was really struggling. He was struggling to keep it together. Struggling for help. Struggling to stay alive. What if J had come back to us in one piece? Would he be struggling with PTSD? It's naive to think he wouldn't come back from that changed in some way. Would we know how to help him? I mean...we didn't know how to help ourselves for a while there. 

Sometimes I am still amazed at the chain reactions. Life is just one giant Rube Goldberg device. Some of it resulting in disaster and heartache, but some of it also resulting in great joy. I hate that 9-11 changed everything. 

FEAR BUT NOT LOATHING

Memorials

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Earlier this week one of the local news stations posed this question to viewers: "Do you feel safe since 9/11?". They asked you to tweet or text your replies. I heard their question as I drove to work and thought that there's no way a tweet could hold my answer. Partially, I feel like it's a very silly question. I remember clearly watching the events of 9/11 while sitting in what was then Galileo's, horrified at what I was seeing, but I never felt unsafe. I live in the Midwest. I was in Chickasha when Timothy McVay bombed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City. I'm more afraid of terrorist attacks from disgruntled American citizens than I am from outside this country. If I where to realistically look at the dangers surrounding me, I am most likely to be hit by a car or disease. So, I suppose my answer to the question would be that the events of 9/11 didn't have any affects on how I feel about my safety.

But when people say that 9/11 changed everything, they are correct. It made many of us fearful of people who have slightly darker skin tones and middle eastern accents. It made many of us a bit more racist. It made us feel a little vulnerable, because it shattered the idea that we were invincible. We realized that things like car bombings that happen every day in some other countries, were things that could happen here. We thought we were above that. 9/11 was an attack on our ego, but it was also a test for humanity. We saw great acts of kindness, support and love go out to the victims and family of victims. We took care of each other. Young people were inspired to stand up and enlist to protect this country. This is where the terrorists would hit the rest of us. They would take away our sons and daughters, our brothers, sisters, nieces, and nephews. The fear should not be for our safety, but for those of our loved ones. 

I cannot say that J would still be alive today if it were not for 9/11. He was a natural hero and already heading into a law enforcement type of career. If not this, than that. Maybe we would have had him with us longer. I don't know. I do know that 9/11 was a horrific and tragic moment in American history and it will be decades before it becomes a date that we just give a slight head nod too. It was the front moving in at the horizon that brought the sad cloud that settled over my family. We will be feeling the aftershock of the fall of those two buildings for a very long time. So instead of focusing on my personal safety or lack there of or whatever, I'd rather spend today remembering loved ones lost, sending out loving kindness to family victims, and having a moment of gratitude for the good things we have in our lives.