The post mortem

It's 1:57 am. I'm so tired. It's been a rough week for sleeping. I need hope in a dark world right now. I'm lying awake in my room and I hear my son cry. That sound is usually followed by a sense of anxiety or frustration. I know all he wants is his way. But I'm already awake. And I'm lonely and scared and Terrance is out of town so I go to him. I ask him what's wrong and his raspy, half asleep voice explains that a giant spider was just in his bed. I remind myself to take down the Halloween decorations and to stop screaming when I see spiders in the house.  I gather him in my arms and hold him. I need something good in my life. "Wanna snuggle yah bed" he begs. I let him sleep with me. I look at him as he drifts to sleep. He flops over and nuzzles his head into the crook of my arm. I lean down and kiss his head and the smell of his childhood innocence is intoxicating and tears well up in my eyes. I need his innocence again. I need the hope back. And then the responsibility I feel to raise him to be a good person weighs on me so much I almost suffocate under it. And then he sighs a contented sigh and I squeeze him a bit and let my face fall into his hair and that smell is there and I finally drift off. He's my hope. I need to sleep so I can get up tomorrow and raise him to be the kind of person that wants to tear down walls, not build them. 

Thoughts on the 2016 Presidential Election

You just elected a man who is the face of a world where if your daughter gets raped, it was probably her fault because her skirt was too short. You have to look her in the eye and explain why an unprepared, underqualified man gets chosen for a job over her because his hate speech resonated with angry people who have had to sit through a powerful Black man telling them what to do for 8 years. That no matter what she does on her own, her husband's actions will always be more important to talk about than her own. 

There's a lot of rhetoric coming out of the right about how the left is being worse than anything Trump did. This is the problem. Because if you truly believe that, you're only hearing what you want to. You ignored the parts where he incited violence because you didn't like Hillary. You ignored the parts where he advocated for sexually assaulting women because he has more money than them. When he objectified his own daughter and only wouldn't date her because of those pesky, cross-cutting social norms society has embraced that make it wrong to find your offspring sexually attractive.

I absolutely understand that the email issue is about more than just the emails, that it was a symptom, for you, of maybe something worse. But I'm still grappling with how you let a "maybe" outweigh a blatant disregard for so much of this country and the people that make it great. 

There have been rallying cries on both sides to unify. I'm trying. That will probably be easier to do when I'm well rested. When I stop waking up in the middle of the night, unable to sleep because the country which I love so fiercely elected a man who causes terror in the hearts of so many people I love. When I get physically sick thinking about what this means for climate change. When I can't quiet the gnawing voice in the back of my subconscious that tells me that he was elected because she is a woman that doesn't subscribe to your expectations of how a lady should act.  

I can't get behind the #notmypresident movement because it goes against my belief in our country and what it could stand for. I won't riot in the streets. I certainly won't burn a flag. What I'll be is fearful that what's about to happen will irreparably impact a world that my son has to inherit. That so many people that I walk amongst on a daily basis didn't think racism and misogyny and xenophobia were big enough reasons to not vote for someone.