“For all the things my hands have held, the best by far is you…” (unknown)

Greetings Dear Ones!

Secretly, today is always an intense day for me. It’s a day of poignant memories, secret celebration, and massive Gratitude. Now, on the twentieth anniversary of 9-11, a pulling in my heart prompts me to write honestly about a few hard things that have been weighing my spirit. After yet another sleepless night, it might help to share them with you…

Today, this day of National Mourning, is also my beloved daughter’s birthday.

Twenty years ago, she turned four. Her father and I had her birthday party first thing in the morning, as soon as she woke up, because what four-year-old wouldn’t LOVE that anyway, and he had to make it to Logan airport early. He was due to go to work in New York City that day, to make a presentation to the staff of the restaurant at the Windows of the World restaurant on the top of the World Trade center. His boss was furious because he hadn’t agreed to go down the night before, to stay in the Twin Towers Marriott and be there early. He had wanted the meeting to start at 9:am.

“What do you mean you have to put your daughter first?” he fumed, “She’s FOUR. She’ll never know!”

But her daddy got his way and the meeting was postponed to the afternoon so that he could be there when his little girl woke up. And she did know. Ever after, she has known. Putting his daughter first saved his life that day. We have no concept of how hers might have been changed, had she had to grow up without a daddy. Thankfully, we will never know. Today, she is 24 and, unlike so many of the victims of that tragic, hateful day, she still has her daddy.

She opened her presents, got butter and frosting on her nose, and he kissed her goodbye only to be back again later the same day, looking stunned beyond words. The people who were to attend his meeting, some of whom he knew personally, were Gone… along with an innocence America did not know she had.

________

Fast forward twenty years. Last night, around 5:pm, I left a small, successful business, which I own and have legally registered in my name with the State of Vermont. I work alone to my own standards and report to no one. I drove home in a vehicle, which I also own and know how to drive and maintain and clean (occasionally) (ok, maybe that’s a bit of an overstatement). I arrived home at a piece of land I “own,” as much as any of us can ever be said to “own” anything wild like land. Perhaps “steward” is better word. Still, no one else pays the taxes and no other name is on the deed. I changed into work clothes—a mix of witch and muggle fashion that pairs gloves and wellie boots with a vintage calico dress, denim leggings, and a floppy hat (I’m not required by law to cover this bird’s nest of hair but I choose to anyway)—and climbed onto a tractor I know how to drive and transported three loads of manure to the site of a future garden I intend to plant next Spring. I can plan to plant a garden because sunshine, soil, and water are assured and my home, my village, the surrounding countryside, all my neighbors are at Peace. I worked a tiny team of oxen I am also allowed to own and drive. When I went into the house later, three chivalrous house guests—delightful, gracious young men, two of whom are immigrants—had prepared dinner and set the table. We dined together happily without losing our virtue or our honor. We discussed history and politics without losing our tempers. They listened respectfully to everything I had to say.

I tried not to say too much—I do think of conversation like a “pie”—each person should be offered the same size piece. But when a topic excites me, like 1850’s history or the Civil War, I can get greedy and help myself to too many pieces at once. I have to remind myself not to eat the whole thing, without sharing “bites” (sound bites) now and then. They did not mind. Here, women can talk as much as they want. We all did the dishes, then the old crone (me) went off to say goodnight to everyone at the barn and they practiced music for a concert they are giving in a nearby town tonight.

Twenty years ago, I tucked my darling in with a princess-themed sippy-cup of water by her bed, in case she got thirsty in the night. Nowadays, my “babies” require five-gallon buckets hauled from the well by the house. (There are no princesses involved!) As I labor up hill and downhill in the dusk, the weight cutting into my palms is nothing to the weight cutting into my heart as I recall the evening news from other parts of the world. I am deeply conscious of my incredible amount of Privilege and haunted by the knowledge that very, very few of this planet’s women get to have even ONE of these exquisite opportunities I enjoy daily. Extreme empathy and a lively imagination can cause me physical pain if I am not careful to coral my thoughts and turn them to prayers. I look up at the stars and think of the women, the mothers, the precious daughters—at the mercy of regimes that seek to “protect” them by making them invisible, unheard when they cry. I lie awake in gut-twisting discomfort and “survivor guilt” because I feel so lucky to be who I am, where I am. I consider the history of women’s rights here in America, all the way from the current “Me Too” movement to my great aunts who were prohibitionist keg-bashers and suffragettes. How have our mothers bled to give us daughters these freedoms! What will we pass along to ours in our time? Our daughters will be princesses not because they have the right Disney cups, or believe they need to grow up to marry princes, but because their mothers have become Queens.

I know that my wealth and privilege are the result of education, race, and the choices of ancestors who risked everything to immigrate here in dire poverty, that each generation could do better than the previous one, so that one day, their frazzle-haired descendent could live safely alone where she wanted, eat what she grew, and wear whatever she damn well pleased, poopy shoes and all. I know that my chances would have been different if my ancestors had been enslaved, rather than simply impoverished, or if any of them had been denied the right to education and the belief that ALL people are created Equal. I feel both sad and immensely grateful.

One of the things I truly believed, twenty years ago, in the wake of 9/11, was that “we” were going to change a lot of things, especially the lives of women in places like Afganistan, for the better. Personally, I did very little, beyond teaching my own little girl to read. I now wonder, What the hell did “we” do? What can I do now? What can any of us do? What should we do? One has to pay attention closely to the news reports to infer the rest of the story, “there are no women on the streets of Kabul…”

Here on my farm, I keep realizing I need a Good Fence. I tried saying prayers and affirmations, hoping to manifest a fence and it actually worked! A neighbor GAVE me the makings of an electric fence. But…it is still rolled around a post and leaning against a wall in the barn. So I keep looking out the windows and seeing no fence. The sheep are still lounging on my back deck, cudding nonchalantly, as if they are New Yorkers on a cruise ship bound for the Bahamas. It’s starting to dawn on me that if I want to look out the window and see a fence, I’m going to have to get off my ass and build the damn fence.

It’s the same for changing anything about our world.

Twenty years on, everyone is asking what the enduring legacy of 9/11 is. What are we creating for ourselves, for our daughters? Do we have a plan? I want to think more about the legacy of what happened on 9/12 when, we were united by loss, fury at being threatened, and dawning awareness that we had a lot of work to do to change hearts and minds about how America is viewed in the rest of the world—that we couldn’t hang out in the shelter of our own vast continent of isolation and be “safe” from the effects of how we behave in the world. Senator John Kerry said, “[September 11th] was the worst day we have ever seen, but it brought out the best in all of us.” Where is that “best” now?

Today, I don’t think 9/11 is the worst day we have ever seen. In my humble opinion, that day is now January 6th, 2021, when we attacked ourselves from within. The global threat of terrorism that surprised us all twenty years ago is nothing to the current threats of Covid-19, racial violence, and climate disasters. But where the attack in 2001 brought us a temporarily heightened sense of unity and patriotism, these new threats divide us and corrode our basic fabric of civility and decency. Where we once shared facts but not necessarily opinions, now we have no idea what Facts even are and our “opinions” are deeply personal and vicious. Twenty years on, it seems like nothing unites us now. What’s up with that? Even “Patriotism” seems explosively divisive and “political.” Is this what we want for our children?

On September 11, 1997, when I stared for the first time into the eyes of the being who had been trampolining off my bladder for the past 42 ½ weeks, I couldn’t believe the rush of love I felt. I loved Her and I also loved the magic of the biology of me. One of the biggest surprises of motherhood is the way it changed how I began to look at myself, who I was, and what I believed I deserved, especially in contrast with what I wanted for my little girl. What are daughters for but to make us see the innocence, the beauty, and goodness that can come into this world and inspire us to be the best versions of ourselves? Would we inflict our own bargains on our daughters?

Even in a land as rich and vast and magical as America, our women know what it is to tread carefully, silently, fearfully. Every day in the privacy of my little dressing room, I glimpse the scars. I see the wounds of flesh and psyche. Some of us have been hurt by fists as well as words. Worst of all is being hurt by the lack of words, the lack of story, the lack of being heard, seen, valued, cherished, or allowed to blossom. My own life is haunted by painful choices that led to painful learning. At the tender age of 46, I decided I was going to live Authentically, or not at all. I decided to get off the floor and LIVE because I had a precious daughter and a precious son who needed their mama not just to survive, but to teach them how Strong a woman really can be.

Many women never get that choice.

My dear friend, who just turned eighty and has lived a long life in service to others, says “Whatever this lifetime has left for me, it’s got to be the lifetime in which I get to be who I want to be. So it should be for all women.” This is all I have ever wanted for my daughter too. Too many people believe that if the cage is pretty enough, no one will care if the bird sings or not. I care. Smash the cages. I want ALL birds to sing.

To get where I am today, I’ve had a tremendous amount of love, help, and support. I didn’t do anything alone. I am thankful to live, love, and work in this country, flawed and misguided and selfish as it is. I gratefully pay my taxes. I really do kiss each check as I put it in with my returns and send it with a blessing that it be spent well to help many. I am thankful to all those working to keep us “safe.” I question whether safety comes at the end of a rifle but I do know from training cattle that words don’t teach unless you are prepared to back them with the force of an understandable consequence. As a woman who owns nine sheep and no fences, I know that strong boundaries are a MUST. But so too are gates. Being open to ideas, to healing, to those who know and can do better is a MUST as well.

I am thankful to have this incredible daughter and to share the experiences of womanhood with her. I celebrate the miracle that enabled me to create a life within my bones, ribs beneath my ribs, flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, and to feel with awe the crush of a skull forcing its way through the portal of pelvis to air and light and the waiting embrace of Love. Today, as always, I cherish my gift to do that for someone I have grown to love so dearly. I may have given her the gift of life, but Life gave me the gift of Her. I wouldn’t change my gender for all the tea in China, and miss out on an experience like that. I genuinely mourn for those who would chose to bear or keep their children and can’t.

I count my blessings every year on this day, that there are brave souls who wisely put our daughters first. It’s good for them. It’s good for all of us. Saving our daughters saves us all in the end. I know that we need more Menders in this world. More strong daughters. We haven’t done our best by them, from the looks of things, and I am deeply sorry about that. But perhaps… We can take up the work that has been left for us to do…and KEEP MENDING!

What shall we give Life/birth to Today?

Thank you.

I love you.

Nancy

P.S. I know this has been a long, tough read. Thank you for enduring. This essay contains 2,526 words.That’s not even one for every name of a person who perished in the initial attack on September 11th 2001.