What changed me

This past weekend, as everyone knows, marked the 10th anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attacks. On Sunday, I spent time talking with my daughter and answering her questions about the images she had seen on TV and the things she had been hearing the last few days leading up to the weekend.

As we talked, I also shared with her how the events of 9/11 changed something unexpected inside my heart. After that tragic day I spent so much time looking at my life and what it meant. What mattered most to me in my life? Before September 11, 2001, I was an ambitious, career-driven woman who had no time to stop and think about children or family. As a young woman I was told that I was infertile. After years of failed fertility procedures, I decided to turn head-first in another direction: career. After September 11, however, I realized that the one thing I thought I didn’t want was actually the very thing I wanted most of all. I wanted to be a mother. What I had been putting off might now forever escape me. We will never run out of excuses for things but at some point we will run out of time. So a few weeks after that tragic day, I walked into the bedroom where my husband was reading a book. I sat down next to him on the bed and announced that I wanted to be a mother. .

And that was it. From that moment on I became a woman on a mission. In the months that followed I learned everything I could about adoption. I kept my lesson from September 11 in my heart. We have no promise of a tomorrow.  We signed with an adoption agency and began what is commonly known as “the paper pregnancy.” Ironically, nine months after handing in our paperwork, we received news that our daughter was born. The moment she was placed in my arms everything in my world changed. Colors became brighter, music became more beautiful, sounds became sweeter and touch became like velvet. I had missed so much in the first 47 years of my life. I couldn’t take back my yesterdays but I was going to fully embrace today.

As I watched the images on television this past weekend I wept, I prayed and I held my children just a little tighter.

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