[sunnysidedown]

I was on my way to my eighth grade civics class that day, in northern Virginia. I remember before class, a lot of people started talking about the Pentagon exploding (many kids had parents working there) and that's when it started to get out exactly what happened. People left school early, getting picked up by family members, etc.

I distinctly remember someone asking my civics teacher, "who could have done this?" and she said she would bet her life it was Osama Bin Laden. That was the first time any of us had ever heard that name or understood what terrorism actually meant. We were all too young to remember any other bad things happening in America, besides perhaps Columbine and had been pretty convinced America was invincible after finally "beating" communism in 90's and Desert Storm.

Over the next year or so, we talked about it so much and were inundated with so much coverage that I became almost completely numb to these sort of events, and eventually extremely depressed.

It's taken me becoming a parent to reconnect with the horror of what happened and now I have a hard time sitting through coverage of Ukraine as it relates to its impact on children.