Our Hearts Are With You, CT

I watch the news every morning, without fail.  It's a holdover from 9/11 for me.  I have an irrational fear that something horrible is going to happen and I'll have no idea, just like that fateful day in September so many years ago.  While the world watched with their mouths open in horror, dabbing tears away from their eyes, I slept.  While the towers fell and so many lost their lives, I dreamed. I spent the next two days on the couch, watching the TV reports, crying and unknowingly planting a seed of fear and paranoia in myself that would take years to sprout. 

After being alerted via friend's Facebook updates that something big had happened, I went over to Yahoo.  The headline punched me in the stomach and a cold terror filled my gut.  27 dead.  The numbing continued as it became clear that so many of them were children. Little children, with parents that loved them, clung to them, had memorized the smell of their hair and the curve of their noses.  Some were likely only children.  Just like my son.  

All day long, I felt sick.  I turned off the TV and my computer to make sure I didn't waste the day watching recaps, false reports, media spin to boost ratings.  There's another side to tragedy, and that's profit.

While part of me feels so far removed from the whole thing--it's far away, my son is still much a baby and not yet in school--the part of losing a child--that fear that sometimes I can allow to consume me, was near.

Brixton woke up coughing around 9:30 at night and clung to me.  He wanted me to hold him just as much as I wanted to nuzzle him close to me.  I brought him downstairs, much to Brendan's chagrin. We sat on the couch together and I looked at him.  I watched his eyelashes dance, his open mouth, his nose in profile.  I memorized the soft curve of his fingers as they closed over my arm.  The rhythm of his breath. 

I knew that night 20 sets of parents were not as lucky.

Later in the night, we lay close together, his sweet baby head turning this way and that, giggles escaping as I tickled his neck.  I didn't care it was hours past bedtime, I only wanted him close, to hear him laugh, to feel his kisses.  Because I could.  I still could.

I don't pretend or profess to have experience with tragedy.  I can't understand how it feels to lose a child, your child, maybe your only child.  

But I know how it feels to have one.  And I would never, ever want to let him go..