It was really an emotional news cycle the last few days. The lead up to the debate pretty run-of-the-mill. I wondered why The View put far too much makeup on Rachel Maddow. Trump pre-gamed by whining about a rigged debate to run interference against the fact that he hadn’t prepared at all.
Watching the news coverage of the debate was a lifelong journalist’s opium den. I looked like an air traffic controller with three devices simulcasting a changing variety of live coverage and news feeds, and just when I thought my brain was going to explode, suddenly the Taylor Swift endorsement news dropped like a fresh hit of Red Bull and pushed my bedtime back further.
I woke up, and it was 9/11 and there were images of Harris and Trump shaking hands, impossibly, for the second time in 24 hours, but like every American remembering where we were, I was swamped with memories of that tragic day in American history laser-cut into our brains. My story isn’t special or different as my heart goes out each year to those who were impacted irreversibly.
In 2001 I had only two of my four now-grown children. Sarah was in second grade a block from our house in the small town on Maryland’s Eastern Shore where we’d moved less than two weeks before; her little sister was three, home with me.
My husband was working as a contractor for the federal government and was at Raytheon in Texas; he’d flown the day before, his company would lose people on planes that day. The next-door neighbor who I’d met once so far, came running over, I remember the towel around her head because she’d just gotten out of the shower. I ran to the door thinking she must’ve had an emergency of some sort. She was screaming “Turn on the TV there’s been a horrible accident.” She, my three-year-old and I watched on the news live as the second plane hit the second tower. I remember the silence, for how rare that was to experience on a live news broadcast. How could any anchor know what to say? (There’s an excellent documentary on 9/11 media coverage.)
During the broadcast when I heard the Chesapeake Bay bridge was closed after the Pentagon was struck, I thought of the parents who wouldn’t be able to get home to their children, learned in a phone call that my husband was locked down at Raytheon, airports were closed and he wouldn’t be able to get home, and I walked over Molly to pick up Sarah from school.
We walked to the stone Catholic Church that was between the school and our house. As a lifelong Catholic, I was indoctrinated since birth. Every white-dressed sacrament, Catholic school for a decade, wooden-boxed confessions, their subsequent penances. And my mom dabbled in charismatic Catholicism, requiring us to pray the full rosary on our knees on Sundays as children, attend terrifying “praying in tongues” evening mass, and other ritualistic hogwash. But I faithfully baptized my children and continued the Catholic traditions because if there’s one thing the nuns ingrained in us, it was guilt.
Imagine my horror when, on 9/11, standing there with my two little girls, when I’d gone to the only place I could think of to pray for the victims—it was locked. At that point when we didn’t even know what was coming next, more terrorist attacks maybe, in a town where I’d just moved and didn’t know the name of a single other person, I’d sought shelter there and found locked doors. I’d never even seen a locked church. Something in my heart walled off in disgrace and disbelief as I walked my girls home, tears falling.
Later, when Sarah refused confirmation at age 12 completely on her own, she cited the outdated policies of the church on women and gays. Women in the community question why I didn’t “force” her to go through with the sacrament and I said the very definition of confirmation is that the person is accepting the church on their own. I’ve rarely returned since, only for the baptisms of the siblings who followed, a few masses, Sarah and Molly certainly weren’t married in that church.