Becoming an Adult on 9/11

My Bat Mitzvah was scheduled for September 13, 2001. The party was to be held at a restaurant in lower Manhattan. Two days before the party that was supposed to mark my ceremonial, symbolic entrance into adulthood, the very real problems of the actual adult world intruded on my childish innocence. When the news from New York reached my elementary school in New Jersey we kids were gathered in the lunch room to say tehillim. Only after we saw two teachers sobbing openly did we realize that this was no ordinary assembly. Our teacher took us seventh and eighth graders back to our classroom and told us what was going on. As the older students, the mature ones, we were deemed capable of hearing the truth. But we weren’t. No one was.

That night, my family sat in front of the endlessly looping TV, watching the same impossible footage over and over, as if on the hundredth viewing it would suddenly become real, believable. But as hard as I tried to suppress it, I couldn’t help but worry about my party, even as I felt guilty about thinking about something like that while Manhattan burned. Finally, I spoke up. “Are we still having the Bat Mitzvah?”

My mother called the restaurant in Tribeca that we had booked months before. “We’re open!” the manager said, in a bright, cheerful voice that sounded like desperation and denial, even over the phone. “I mean, the neighborhood is closed to traffic and the street has some debris, but there is no reason to cancel. We’ll help you sneak your guests past the barricades.” Somehow, the surreality of that offer did not strike us at the time, although the impracticality did, and we quickly rescheduled the party for a Chinese restaurant in Queens.

On Thursday, I got dressed in the purple satin skirt I had chosen months before and had my hair done in the style I had cut out of a magazine. Everything was somehow, for some reason, going forward as planned. That was the whole idea of becoming a Bat Mitzvah–it meant you were an adult, ready to deal with real life and the responsibilities of being a Jewish woman, not just a party and a heap of sterling silver jewelry. Helping my little sisters into their party dresses and brushing their hair, I felt mature and resilient.

As the family minivan drove up the New Jersey Turnpike, the butchered Manhattan skyline suddenly jumped into view. As I looked at the familiar, and yet suddenly unfamiliar, sight, I felt my throat closing up with fear and sadness and other very adult felings I couldn’t exactly name. The lower half of the skyline was obscured with smoke, with a giant pillar of dark, thick smoke rising from the center and disappearing into the sky. Everything I had seen on TV for the last two days was suddenly excruciatingly real, and as mature of a Bat Mitzvah girl I thought I was, I knew I was completely unprepared to deal with it.

At the same time, the petulant, childish voice in my head whispered thoughts I felt sick to even be having. “Why now? This is supposed to be my special day! It isn’t fair!” I felt the weight of being an adult suddenly bear down on me and reacted to it by insisting that I was still just a little kid. The seriousness of the last two days suddenly became too much and I felt myself retreating into the comfortable narcissism of a child. As a kid, whenever I had nightmares at night, I would pull my arms, legs and head into my nightgown and sleep wrapped in a safe little ball. But in my satin skirt and grown-up black sweater set, that wasn’t an option anymore. I was just a kid. My most important thought was supposed to be about whether my hair looked cool or whether I would mess up my speech. I wasn’t supposed to know that there were people dying just a few miles from where I sat in the front seat of the minivan, putting on lipgloss in the rearview mirror and yelling at my sister to stop kicking the back of my seat.

I wasn’t supposed to have to know how to put on that grave, concerned face that my parents and all the adults had. I didn’t know how and I didn’t want to know how. On my lap was the speech I had been so proud of writing all by myself. It was all about being ready to take on the responsibility of being a Jewish woman, bringing light to a dark world, and the importance of tikkum olam–healing the world. Now that those were not just theoretical words in a world that seemed pretty light and healed all by itself, I felt like an idiot for even daring to say anything at all, for even pretending to be an adult who was ready to handle responsibility.

And even deeper inside, in a way that I didn’t even realize myself until later, there was something even scarier. What if, I thought, this kind of thing had been happening the whole time? What if, throughout my carefree childhood in the nineties, terrible things had been going on around the world and I had just not been told about it? Was this what adulthood was going to be like? Horrific news arriving every day through grown-up things like news channels and newspapers and I was going to be expected to be very serious and mature all the time? What if the world was a fundamentally bad place and it was only the children who were spared that awareness? The thought was terrifying.

I’m not sure I ever got over that fear. I don’t think any of us, the generation who were just barely old enough to understand 9/11, ever did. When we were barely teenagers, we were thrown out of the comforting naivete of childhood like litter from a moving car. Even now, as we graduate college and start looking for jobs in this jobless country of ours, I don’t think any of us are too surprised. Since we were old enough to remember, the reality of being an adult in this crazy world has been punching us in the stomach. And we’ve been learning how to handle it for ten years. We’ll be okay.

 

 

In Features. Tagged 9/11, September 11th.