9/11 2001

I woke up this morning thinking of this song (Alan Jackson's "Where Were You"). I have to admit that I have issues with "Patriot Day". It reminds me of free-er times, especially of flying without being searched every 30 yards in the airport. Okay, that might be a slight exaggeration, but it is how I feel.

On the original 9/11, I was living at the Ronald McDonald House in Louisville when the Twin Towers were destroyed. I was in the upstairs living room attending a house meeting, the tv was on, and I watched with incredulity.

After the meeting I called Steve, or he called me, I don't remember which. He gave me a crash course of street smarts during times of terrorism. He told me that if I saw a package lying on the sidewalk or anywhere out of the ordinary to not pick it up because it might be a bomb. He was worried about me crossing the bridge to Indiana from Louisville for fear it might be blown up. He had learned all about the ugliness of war and the things to watch out for while he was in the Marines.

I finally did get up the courage to cross the bridge into Indiana to go to the closest Walmart. When I got there, I found people standing in a circle, holding hands, and praying at the front of the store. When that group left, another group would fill their place and another prayer was offered. I never participated. Maybe I should have, but all of this felt so surreal; I felt very detached from it all.

Back at the Ronald McDonald House I heard parents and grandparents talk about relatives they knew who were going out and enlisting.

For me, however, I was seeing life tottering on the brink of death every day at the children's hospital. Little babies hooked up to machines that hummed, whirred, and beaped, creating an orchestra of sound all day and all night while nurses stood guard like soldiers warding off death and despair.

I saw my premature baby, Michael, struggling every day to breath on his own, to eat on his own, to keep up his own body heat. I felt fear every day that his shunt for his hydrocephalus would malfunction or get infected, or that he would get RSV and we would start from square one, trying again to get him off of the same ventilator that had kept him alive for 7 1/2 weeks while he couldn't breathe on his own back in the beginning. I felt like my son was being held hostage, and I was far from home hoping for his release.

In other words, I was part of another war. One that wasn't on the tv being covered in great detail by the media. In my war, many families were hoping that their children would recover, but knowing that many would not: an 8 year old on a ventilator and not being able to come off of it after a routine surgery, an 11 year old who had had an unknown heart problem and when he dove into the water at the swimming pool he had a heart attack and now had brain damage causing CP and mental retardation, and endless baskets of babies with myriads of problems including one with a rash on his skin that caused him pain at every touch and needed an ointment which played havoc with trying to keep lead wires for monitors stuck to his injured skin, others undergoing heart surgeries, while still others had neurological problems. These were the casualties of another war, and the battles kept on day after day.

My view was skewed that year. While many cried for their relatives, so did we. Sitting by bedsides. Hoping for life. Hoping for normalcy.

We each fight our battles every single day. May God bless us all who are struggling with events that happened and were created that 9/11 of 2001.

Leaving Eden

Things had gotten ridiculously hard after Michael was born. Within the second week of his life a bill had already arrived announcing how much his first stay in this world had cost: $250,000.

Steve and I had always tried to be self-sufficient. We had had to turn to family at times, but we always liked to repay the debt. There would be no way that we could pay for this baby by ourselves, and the realization was frightening and humbling.

As we looked into alternate methods to pay, we looked first to the hospital charities that were available. They took care of the bulk of the first charges. Then we turned to the state and got accepted for Medicaid. With the medical bills in some sort of order, we then started feeling the crunch elsewhere.

Steve had lost his tele-commuting web work job during the dot com crash. He tried working at a local computer store in a town 45 minutes away from home for a little while, but when he realized that he was making less there than he could doing his own business, he drove full force into the entrepreneurial life.

We had owned and managed a web hosting company for about 5 years, and though it paid some of the bills it had never managed to pay them all at once. Steve spent all of his time trying to bring in more web hosting clients, and I got some work for us building websites for a few local companies.

Steve had taught me html, and though I was still very shaky on the how-to's of building a website I wanted to help out too, so I came up with the ideas for the layout and he wrote the code. We charged $200 per website, which was nothing to sneeze at, but after all of the time it took to create them we were probably just making minimum wage.

Before Michael was born, Steve and some friends had started a wireless internet company... or tried to. In the fall and spring they could get reception, but during the summer when all of the leaves were on the trees the signal remained low. They tweaked, and worked, and got dishes up on cell phone towers, but no matter how hard they tried, their best wasn't good enough and after a year and a half they threw in the towel.

Unfortunately, a new business is expensive to start, and each of them had invested a lot of time and money, and just because they decided to call it quits, our credit card company still wanted their money.

When I learned that we had put $20,000 on the credit card in expenses for the business, I was devastated. We were making such a small amount of money a month and didn't have any extra. We were bound tightly. We worked hard and had little to show for it. The time came when we were only able to make interest-only payments on our mortgage.

My mind started turning to Utah, where we were both from. Good paying jobs were easy to find there with Steve's skill-set. My family was all there, sans one brother and sister-in-law, and Steve's grandma and lots of aunts, uncles, and cousins were all there. In Kentucky, we had Steve's parents and some younger siblings, and they had been a wonderful help while Michael had to go back time and again for more surgeries and I went with him and left Steve to being a single parent raising our other 5 children alone for weeks at a time. Maybe going back to Utah would provide some relief financially and we could spread out the need for help throughout a wider family network there. I talked to Steve and he agreed, telling me that he had been feeling the same way. So we put the house up for sale in November and had a buyer by January.

The cold and flu season hit our family hard that year. Instead of packing for the move, we were nursing each of the children, each other, and ourselves. When the day came for the move, we were ill prepared.

Many from our church family came to help us pack up the rest of our things into boxes and then into the moving truck. I asked one friend to direct everyone as to where to put things and what to do, and I sat and fed Michael and tried to keep him warm while we had the door opened most of the time in that February weather.

Eventually it was all ready to go, and my heart panged. This had been my Eden, my haven from the real world. Though I had been anxious to get moved so that the terrible financial struggles would end, now I almost regretted that decision: leaving the markings on the wall that showed how my kids had grown, leaving my beautiful soapstone woodstove, leaving all 120 acres of my haven that had made me feel like Simba, because everything that the sun touched was mine. My heart felt so heavy as we drove down that driveway for the last time.