On April 19, 1995, my mom went to work.

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It was an ordinary day. Most of the time, then, mom wore long skirts, vests, slouchy boots. It was the mid-nineties, and I was 4 years old, but there was still a lot of 80s in Texas, and 70s. Our home was a low-slung ranch house with brown shag carpet, mustard-floral wallpaper.

Mom worked at the Fritz Lanham federal building in Fort Worth, Texas. That morning, she made plans to go to lunch with her office friends, and listened to her radio at her desk. News broadcasts broke in through the Christian rock: Some kind of accident, an explosion in Oklahoma.

Everybody assumed it was a gas leak, and hoped nobody had been hurt. Mom went to lunch with her friends — a little BBQ shack right across the street. When they came back, though, the doors of their building were sealed and flanked by armed police officers.

They wouldn't allow anyone to go inside the building, nor would they say anything about what had happened in Oklahoma. They just said nobody could go upstairs. Mom couldn't even get her purse, which contained her car keys; she had to get a ride from a friend to my dad's office.

She was frightened and confused. On the way to dad's office, she and her friend listened to the radio. People were dead. There were bodies in the rubble. There had been an on-site daycare on the first floor of the building, just like at mom's office. They turned the radio off.

By the time she made it to my dad, he had heard the news. It was only early afternoon, but he suggested they just go home: She was upset. Mom asked to pick my brother and I up, him from school, me from the preschool I attended in a small Baptist church.

I remember that it was warm and sunny and that buttercups and bluebonnets had already begun to spring up. I could tell mom was upset, but my parents didn't say anything to us about what had happened. At home, my brother and I went out to play. Mom and dad turned on the news.

When mom went back to work, things had changed. The daycare center on the first floor was rapidly moved off-site. We had visited her at work many times, but after that, not so much: There were metal detectors and armed guards now, and every visitor had to be logged, even kids.

You couldn't park anywhere near the building anymore, and the adjacent parking garage was no longer available for public use. You had to show ID to get in. After a while, it was just normal. We didn't think anything of it.

Years later, long after we had moved out of our old house and I was in elementary school, we were eating at an Outback Steakhouse, and the news broke in, again, this time through sports on the televisions hanging over the bar: Timothy McVeigh had been executed. Everyone clapped.

I didn't understand. And I didn't particularly understand why my mother picked me up from school in the middle of the day only a few months later, again with my brother in tow. She had been evacuated again, due to terrorism again. We stopped at a Jack in the Box for lunch.

It was 9/11. This time, nobody was really fazed, least of all my mother. Were federal workers killed in the attacks? Sure. She knew that. But by then she had known for years that she wasn't just a person with a job. She was a target. She was used to that by then.

And so what I wanted to say with this piece was that you can never actually get back what you lose in incidents of terrorism. The terrorists, in some sense, always win: Visible, permanent reminders of what happened appear. When you get used to those, more come.

The OKC Bombing changed my mom, her expectations, her sense of her work and her life. McVeigh killed 168 people, many of them infants and children. Gingrich and Clinton used the opportunity to ram through some of the most devastating death penalty legislation in US history.

We will always live in the rubble of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, just like we will always live in the ashes of the World Trade Center. That's partially because terrorism changes people and places, and partially because we reacted both times with draconian laws.

What happened at the Capitol, and whatever comes this week — let's not make the same mistake again, sacrificing civil liberties and human rights in an impotent battle against things that have already happened. It doesn't work. It just makes things worse. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/18/opinion/oklahoma-city-bombing-terror-death-penalty.html