September 11

I will take refuge in the shadow of your wings until the disaster has passed.

—Psalm 57:1

September 11, 2001, was a Tuesday. Aaron and I had been married two weeks and had arrived home from our honeymoon just two days before. We didn’t totally understand the implications of what had happened. No one did, of course. But we knew instinctively that it was a night to spend with family, and we realized with a jolt that that’s what we were. We were family.

But he wasn’t yet, at that point. A wedding didn’t make him my family, or a honeymoon, or grudgingly giving him a little bit of space in the bathroom. What did make him my family was the decision to stay home with him on that Tuesday night, to sit, holding hands, watching the news for hours. Our first impulse was to go home to our parents’ houses. Instead we stayed in a house that didn’t particularly feel like home for either one of us at that point, and it became a little bit more of a home that night. That’s how family gets made.