This is not what I had intended to write about today; I was planning on posting about my blogging award from Another Jennifer (thanks Jennifer!!), and possibly about our wood stove project which is more or less completed (we have a fire going in it as I type – hooray!!).
But in case you haven’t been following the news as of late, the Iraq war officially ended sometime late last night or early this morning, and it was featured on Weekend Edition this morning which we listened to over pancakes and eggs. My husband commented that our oldest son – who’s seven – hasn’t known life without our country at war. And yet neither the Iraq nor the Afghanistan war has affected his day-to-day life much, nor does he really have a concept of what’s going on over there.
As we considered this our conversation gradually started to include our oldest, and as we explained the ending of the Iraq war, we found that it needed to be framed within the context of 9-11. We have explained 9-11 to him before; we’ve even been to a firefighting museum in upstate NY that had a whole room dedicated to it, but he tends to have goldfish-memory when it comes to things that don’t really have a direct impact in his life (like toys).
So we started in on re-explaining 9-11, but I’ve noticed that it’s nearly impossible to have a brief conservation about it. We ended over an hour later sitting on the couch with a coffee-table sized book on 9-11 (courtesy of my sister-in-law, who knows I grew up in the NYC area) talking about the day and its aftermath and looking through book’s photos. I suspect that now that he’s actually seen images and had us explain in depth about that day that he’ll remember. We were probably a bit vague on the specifics the last time we discussed it since he was 5, and we figured then that it would be better to save the details for when he was older. Which he is now. But I certainly didn’t start my morning with the expectations of discussing war and the devastating events of 9-11 with our oldest son.
Those are tough conversations to have. Yet, we have to have them with our kids. I always think it’s better to explain things than to let them learn about the tough stuff from who-knows-where. We first talked to our oldest son about 9-11 this September. We showed him pictures and talked about how we felt when it happened. At 5, we didn’t go into too much detail, but he understood the overall concept. I blogged about it too – http://anotherjennifer.com/?p=1814. I’m sure there will be more conversations to come! (And, you’re quite welcome.)