What am I going to tell my daughter?

Processing in real time

Needless to say, this was not the post I planned to write. Nope, that post is sitting in my Drafts file, ready to go at some future time when it feels okay to talk about anything other than the election. I knew, when I sat down to write it Monday afternoon, there was a good chance the world I woke up to on Wednesday would be a very different one. I even drafted an optimistic headnote, about how people would probably be looking for non-election content to take their mind off of things, and how election hot takes weren’t really my thing.

But I write in part to figure out what I think and feel, and those thoughts and feelings are overwhelming right now. Normally, they’d get refined through several rounds of editing; they’d percolate over a few days so that I don’t inadvertently share something I regret. This week, you’re getting something much more urgent and raw. Here goes…

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current mood

When my alarm went off this morning, I looked forward to a few more minutes of not knowing. I’d been at ceramics class Tuesday night and didn’t check the news once, figuring there wouldn’t be any definitive results until much later than I prefer to be awake.

My husband, bless him, had other ideas. He immediately rolled over in bed and showed me his phone: the New York Times had called the election for Trump. “Fuck!” was my first thought. Eloquent, I know. “How could this happen?” was my second.

The third thought hit like a sucker punch: “This is not the world I wanted to bring a daughter into.”