Aw, man! It's not nice to make the pregger girl cry!
My now 5 year-old daughter took her first steps that day as her daddy and I were glued to the T.V. Such a sweet moment on such an awful day.
I was a young widow, watching it all happening before my eyes out of my apartment window in Lower Manhattan. After the smoke and dust cleared, my baby said her first words. Pointing to where the towers had been she said: 'All gone.'
I understand all about the evil of extremists and terrorists and I make no excuses for the murdering psychopaths that they were. However, our security agencies could have done a better job of keeping track of the known terrorists within our borders. They should have deported them. I don't excuse the incompetence within our own government that did nothing to prevent this attack. This isn't a political criticism. These agencies were lax under previous administrations.
My older kids had to pick their way home from school through debris and oozing body parts, knowing their cousins who worked in the WTC were probably dead.
We were fortunate. Only one was killed. We could have lost three of them. I almost lost my sister. Everyone else escaped.
Unlike most residents of Lower Manhattan, we knew the air quality was dangerous despite Christy Whitman’s and the EPA’s assurances to the contrary. (My friends and I are engineer-scientists.) So I pulled my children out of their schools and sent them away; I even sent my baby away. Though I was pregnant I had to remain in New York. It is my responsibility to support myself and those kids. My work was in Manhattan and I have no independent source of income.
I taped the windows and a friend brought me several heavy-duty air cleaning systems for the apartment. For months I never left the apartment without a mask. I gave birth to my baby several months later in Scotland. I left my new daughter and my other children there with my aunt until I was certain it was safe to bring them back to New York. (Remember the anthrax scares. I felt they were safer with my family in Scotland; my relatives who had been working in the US decided to return to the UK after 9/11.)
My kids all returned to NY with heavy Scottish accents which they have never lost entirely, and a taste for Irn Bru. Though their father was an American, and the boys were all born and raised in the US, my children want nothing more than to return to Glasgow. As for me: Weel, ye canna tell frae ma accent but ma bonnie Hielan hame is here in the hie touers o New York.
Fiona