What should I say?

I took the last few days off from being online. I today that there are about 4396841 posts remembering 9/11 and a lot of those are pretty good. I spent time with my family yesterday, as I normally do this time of year, to reflect on how good our lives are even with everything that’s happened in the last 8 years. There’s no place I’d rather be.

My youngest came home from school yesterday with questions about the terrorist attacks and I did my best to answer them. I don’t know how to answer questions about why the bad men did those horrible things that day. I don’t know how to explain to her that some people are just evil. How do you address those issues with a 5 year-old—especially one that is so very sensitive? She drew some pictures of what was going on in her mind. One dealt with the planes going into the World Trade Center and all the debris afterward. The other was more disturbing. It showed people running around screaming. I asked her if they saw a video in class (she’s in kindergarten) and she wouldn’t discuss it with me. She does that, she ignores me if she doesn’t want to discuss something. I’ll have to wait for her teacher to email me back to find out what was happening in that classroom. I just was at a loss about talking to her about it as I didn’t know that it was part of the lesson plans for yesterday.

My eldest daughter, of course, was in school in 2001. She saw what was happening as, for some reason, the teacher had the news on that day. Probably a civics lesson or something, I don’t remember. She, too, was older than Mags when it happened, so was better able to understand. So, this was a first for me and now I’m spending some time looking for ways to better explain what happened that day and how it changed our country.

If you’ve got any suggestions, I’d appreciate hearing them. Anything is fine—even a link back to your own post (as long as it directly pertains to this request, for obvious reasons). I just felt so helpless trying to talk to her about it and I don’t want to be the kind of mom that just doesn’t know how to speak to her children.

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