"Did she win, Mama?"
"No, honey."
A single tear rolled down my daughter's cheek. She was still in bed, facing the tree out her window, which was almost empty of flaming orange leaves.
"You mean that rude man is our president?"
I probably should have let her get out of bed first, let her dress, sit at the table with a bowl of cornflakes, pick at her blueberries judiciously. Let her feel power over at least her breakfast. If you're a fourth-grade girl, with a class ratio is 14:4 (that is, 14 boys to 4 girls), the way to hear bad news about the first female presidential candidate losing to a loud, rude man is not lying down, snuggled in bed, vulnerable. Especially when she has a daily fight on her hands, a micro-world in which she is constantly talked over, shoved aside, and outnumbered by voluminous, space-claiming, jubilant boys.
In other words, she goes into a classroom very much like the world women endure every day.
I wiped her tear as my husband came in, wringing his hands, exhausted from being up all night. It's just an election, and yet the task of telling our daughter that her country elected a bully who makes fun of disabled children instead of a woman who worked hard serving other people most of her life is infuriating and deeply nauseating. We tell her, instead, that although she lost the presidency, Hillary won the state of Illinois, where we live, and many other states. We tell her Hillary won the popular vote. Within a few minutes, she is up and looking for matching socks.
I am relieved, but struggling for next steps. I have been actively using this election as a tool to prove things can change, that the gender-typical hazing she fights against and endures every day from a class of rambunctious boys will not be the norm forever. That, as she grows, it will go away. The election of the first female president would have been a truthful illustration of this claim. Now I have to find another example or admit that, in some ways, it isn't really true.
The nearly 4-to-1 ratio in her class is just dumb luck, but its consequences are anything but innocuous. Four voices are literally fewer and quieter than 14 voices. Four bodies are literally less noticeable than 14 bodies. I, and many women, are very familiar with the consequences of this mathematical deficit. Any woman who works in a lopsided corporate environment knows this dynamic, how it puts the focus on you at the same time that it takes away your power. You are scrutinized more, rewarded less. She is only nine, and yet I wonder if the exhaustion she sometimes feels upon coming home from school reflects this added labor, the labor of making herself heard.
By most accounts, the children get along in groups, perform the musical and theatrical productions in harmony. But I remind myself that alongside this harmony, my girl is forced to advocate for herself constantly: in gym class, on the playground, and in group discussions every day. I remind myself she has run for student council since second grade, and, every time, has lost.
Nevertheless, she painstakingly makes signs to post around the school, listing her qualifications for her candidacy every year. Teachers encourage all children who want to serve their school to participate, not acknowledging the gender imbalance. When she loses, I've had to explain for three years now that she's not losing because she's not qualified. "None of the girls ever win," she says. "Keep trying," I say in a supportive, upbeat refrain. Because I do want her to keep trying.
What I don't want is for her to know exactly the nature of who, and what, has won. We did not tell of the president elect's threats to minorities, assaults against women, and bigoted leanings. Nor have we told her that Hillary barely winning the popular vote meant that many Americans voted for a dangerous man rather than a flawed woman. We hid well what to me epitomizes the waking nightmare of a parent: that your child, upon realizing her parents can't control the outside world, worries she is not actually safe. But we could not and cannot keep everything from her. After watching the second debate, she noticed that Hillary's opponent behaved like kids in her class. "He keeps interrupting her," she claimed. "I can't hear what she's saying."
I'm preparing my daughter for the inevitability that she'll be called shrill and bossy, even as she's already internalizing the consequences of that kind of dismissal. "I don't want to hurt anyone else's feelings," she says, when I ask why she doesn't tell other kids to share the basketball court or stop kicking her seat. This translates to: I don't want to be punished for speaking out. I tell her I understand, but that speaking out is how others learn to respect you. I'm hoping this lost election will change her sense of possibility, shift her focus to the value of speaking up and trying.
The fact that she spent Friday nights in October at the Hillary for President campaign office, making buttons one at a time, her small hands on a giant steel contraption, for volunteers to take to Iowa canvassing the next day, made an impact on her heart, if not in the rest of the country. She put her hard work into something she wanted and found out firsthand what's it's like to believe in something, to put your faith behind a cause.
When I picked her up from school on Wednesday, she skipped into the car, almost completely recovered from the news that I and much of the country were still struggling with.
"This year I was elected alternate on student council," she said as she munched her pretzels. "That means two boys voted for me."
Change, though slow, is on the horizon.
