Where was I on 9/11?

Since it was a tuesday and in AZ it was two hours earlier, we were just getting up and getting the kids ready for school. I had the news on and saw everything as it unfolded. I remember being stunned and the whole thing was pretty unreal until my sister called from NY. She lived in the Bronx and had been on her way to work when it happened and she said that traffic locked down so quickly that she decided to turn around and go home.

I don't know how other people experienced it, but for us, it was the beginning of the end of the way we had been living. Up until that day, I felt like everything was going as planned and in order. After 9/11 and the stock market crashed, my husband's company used it as a way to lay off (fire) almost all of its upper management. After 13 years with that company, he was completely blindsided. I had a 9 month old baby and two years of college left. To put it mildly, everything about our lives has been pretty much downhill since then. We've had some brief (but false) glimmers of hope, but it has been a disaster.

We lost everything financially, but we have our lives and I am very grateful for that, probably too much so, because all the other bullshit doesn't seem to matter much. We drive a tiny little old car and that is the only thing we own of value (which ain't sayin' much!) but since we are all still here, breating in and out, I can deal with it.