Today I pray

I sat in my classroom, seven months pregnant with Daughter 1, when a colleague came in and whispered in my ear, "America is under attack."  I had no idea how to respond.  Her words didn't even make sense to me; not because I was pregnant and gestational alzheimer's was running amuk through my body, but because America being under attack was something that had no context to me.  Or any other living American.


I finished the day at school on auto-pilot.  I led assuring discussions with my freshmen and sophomores  reminding them that we had, in Oklahoma, endured a terrorist attack on our own land and had come out stronger for it.  That's the way America worked - we came out stronger.  By the end of the day, I almost believed it myself.

Then I went home and sobbed.

The Dad was working across town at an elementary school; they dismissed an hour after we did.  I sat on the couch and watched the incredibly unbelievable news - which was the only thing there was to watch - and cried myself to sleep.  I don't remember the rest of the day.  I don't remember eating dinner.  I don't remember The Dad coming home.  I don't remember going to bed.

I woke up the next morning in the same confused and injured world that I went to sleep in.  It was the that morning that it really hit me.  Not only was I living in a world that seemed to have gone crazy, but I was bringing a baby into this same world gone awry.  The only solution to this issue, that I could fathom, was to find a deserted island where The Dad and I could quietly raise our daughter away from the madness that was the rest of the world.

I was then reminded, through an online friend, that we don't know the potential that our babies have.  We don't know if they'll grow to be a force for good or a force for evil or a force for nothing at all.  We have to have faith, however, that their presence in this world will be influencial in such a way that the world is somehow better.

Thank you, Mrs. King, for your faith in our world.

And then I thought of those who have made peaceful strides:  Mother Theresa, Ghandi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jesus, The Dali Lama.  And on September 12, 2001, I thanked God that their mommas had faith enough to bring them into the world raising them in such a way that they could become instruments of peace.

So, today, on the tenth anniversary of September 11, I pray
... that those children, including my own, who have grown up in a world filled with terror,
...that those children who live day-to-day hearing bombs and seeing the ravages of war,
...that those children whose fathers died a hero's death on September 11, 2001 in New York City or Washington DC or Shanksville, PA before their babies could even see the pride in their father's eyes
...I pray they all will grow to learn the path of peace.

And practice that so that they make their mommas proud -- and so that the world will want to follow their lead.