Don’t pity the 9/11 babies

Cathy and Darin Brunssen checked into St. Luke's Hospital in the early morning of Sept. 11, 2001. The Atkins couple were set to welcome their child into the world.

“We came in early in the morning, checked in and got settled in our room,” Cathy Brunssen said. “My husband flipped the TV on, and by chance, the channel the TV was on showed a plane crashing into one of the Twin Towers.”

She remembers her sense of security being shaken. The Brunssens watched the coverage of the 9/11 attacks periodically throughout the day.

Julie Coffey did, too. Then a staff nurse in the Pediatric Bone Marrow Transplant Unit at University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, Coffey caught snippets of the coverage while in her patients' rooms.

Pregnant with her second child, she would return to the hospital later that day as a patient.

“It was sometimes difficult to attract the attention of the health professionals,” the Iowa City mother said. “They'd come in and look at the TV. I blame that on why I didn't get my epidural on time.”

As the country remembers what was lost 10 years ago on Sept. 11, several Eastern Iowa families remember what was gained. Fifteen babies were born in hospitals in Linn and Johnson counties that day. Across the country, 13,238 children claim Sept. 11, 2001, as their birthday.

These boys and girls will celebrate their 10th birthday the way they always have - with presents, balloons and cake. Little sadness surrounds their birthdays because their families choose to focus on the positive, the happiness that came into their lives that day.

Abby Brunssen was born that day at 7:49 p.m. Her parents had difficulty reaching some relatives with the news because cellphone signals were busy.

Kieran Coffey was born at 10 p.m. When Julie Coffey and her husband, Daniel, called their friends and family, several people commented that if she had held out a little bit longer, Kieran would have been born on Sept. 12.

“Would that really have been better?” Coffey said. “It didn't take long to realize that people felt sorry for me, felt sorry that my son was born on that day. That didn't sit well with me.”

There are still double-takes. Sharing a child's birth date results in looks of recognition.

“There's that pause after you say it,” Brunssen said. “Then there's sadness. You can see them flashing back to that day and how they felt.”

Kaden White, son of Suzy Hammer-White and her husband, Kyle, of Tiffin, was born at 3:07 p.m. that day at St. Luke's. Time has eased some of the pain, Hammer-White said, but she, too, gets a pause when she shares her eldest's birth date.

“They'll ask, ‘Really? That day?' and I'll say, ‘Yes, Sept. 11 - same year, too,' ” she said.

The children are aware of the significance of their birth date.

“Whenever people talk about their birthday and I say mine is 9/11, they're like, ‘Really? That is so cool,' ” Kieran said.

“People say to me, ‘That's when the Twin Towers fell,' and I usually say, ‘Yeah, I know,' ” said Sophie Alessio. She was born at 7:46 a.m. that day at Mercy Medical Center to Ellen and Tony Alessio of Marion.

Abby has encountered people who don't believe her. All the kids have been asked: Do you know what happened the day you were born?

And they do, to some extent.

Kaden is a history buff. His family has several 9/11 books, and he likes to go through them, matching the timeline of the events of the day to his personal history. Kieran has copies of the newspapers about the terrorist attacks and Osama bin Laden's death pinned to a bulletin board in his bedroom.

Sophie has seen the pile of magazines her parents have about the day she was born, but she hasn't read them all. Abby can give you a synopsis of the attacks, but she doesn't go into excessive detail.

“She's aware of what happened, but I don't think she understands how it changed everything,” Brunssen said.

To these kids, nothing has changed. Their country has been fighting terrorists since before their first birthdays. Taking their shoes off before boarding an airplane is normal.

They've discussed 9/11 with their parents. They've asked why America was attacked, and their families have tried to answer their questions the best they can.

Sometimes they've talked about it in school, but it isn't something that's taught to elementary students. Neither the Iowa Department of Education nor the National Council for Social Studies has curriculum guidelines for elementary school discussions of Sept. 11, 2001.

Brunssen is OK with that.

“Abby is only 10,” she said. “She shouldn't be concerned about national security.”

Dr. Steven Berkowitz, director of the Penn Center for Youth and Family Trauma Response and Recovery at the University of Pennsylvania, agrees. Berkowitz has tried over the years to stop schools from having memorials, pointing out that students who are seniors this year would have been about 8 years old on 9/11. Most elementary students weren't even born yet.

“We don't need to subject them to something that isn't really relevant to their lives,” he said.

For now, the birthday children are more concerned about the significance of entering the double digits than they are about American history.

“It's a birthday to us,” Coffey said. “We think birthday, we think joy.”