Of Course This Week Feels Terrible

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I have an old picture of my kids from October 28, 2016, the day the Comey letter dropped. They’re 2 and 4. We’re at the park. Both wear cheap sunglasses and clutch birthday-party goodie bags. Lollipops hang from their mouths. They jut their hips and grin. I love it because they’re adorable, because time has passed now and they’re big, because I still wish that I might have them infinitely. I sometimes can’t look at that photo because I remember that, those few minutes at the park, was one of only a few moments I looked up from the news that day.

Eight years have passed. My kids are 10 and 12. Somehow — I wish I could say inexplicably, impossibly — here we are again. Anxious, desperate. Each time I look at my phone, I try to remember to look up, listen to my children. Each time I see them, hear them, think about them, I feel terrified again. I’m wary of the ways I might be thought of as shrill, hysterical. I continue to be astonished that everyone I know, including me, having already lived through a Trump presidency, and knowing full well how much worse this time promises to be, is not outside screaming in the streets.

A word I can’t stop thinking about these past few weeks is churning, which, when I taught each of my kids to ocean-swim, is how we talked about the stretch of water, just after the shore break, where you feel safe because you’re close to land but, actually, because it’s where the waves crash, it’s least safe of all. The chaotic froth is the most present; if and when you get held under, because it’s often less deep, you’re more likely to scrape a limb or cheek against the mix of shells and sand. Of course, the churn I’m stuck in now is mostly in my body, on my phone, in every moment that I think about the up ahead. While making dinner, when my kids are talking, while at our younger’s soccer game, at work, I scroll furiously through updates, polls. I keep thinking of that whirl of horror, anger that I so often can’t break free of, how trapped inside that there is so much of life, the world, the people that I love that I can’t see.

On the phone with our kids’ pediatrician this week, scheduling a checkup, asking for the various slim windows in which our kids aren’t at school and I’m not at work, the receptionist asked if we could do Election Day. Oh, I said. I mean. I made a silly not-quite joke about not wanting to go outside that day (we already voted). She didn’t laugh. Our 12-year-old has an appointment on November 5 at noon.

Also that day I have to teach two classes, attend two meetings. On November 6, I’ll teach two more. On the 7th, I’m meant to go in to my publishers to talk to librarians about my new book, come home to take our older kid to art class. That weekend, we have three soccer games.

I understand these things as moving through the lives we’ve built. I also cannot fathom, in the face of the weight of what this moment feels as if it might contain, that real live normal life will also happen on the other side.

A friend of mine has preemptively bought her children all their Christmas presents. She’s afraid she’ll be too depressed after, too scared, uncertain. She can’t say, really, why she did it, beyond, of course, at least it was something she could do. A colleague’s friend has a go-bag prepared for if Trump wins; in case of what, or when, who knows?

This morning, a writer friend called to cancel our coffee date. Her editor moved up a deadline for a piece; she was worried it would too likely be irrelevant or pointless if or when Trump wins. Of course, my brain began to spiral — what other ideas, arguments will be moot then?

Here’s an alternate perspective I tried briefly to grab hold of, from the director Damon Lindelof: “I’m feeling (uncharacteristically) optimistic … might as well be hopeful for the next two weeks because I’ll have four years to be despondent if I’m wrong.” I begrudge no one this feeling. I feel physically incapable of getting close to it.

My husband, the steadiest person I know and the son of an immigrant, listens to me fret and worry, talks through it with me, except every third or fourth day when he reminds me, Sometimes people have to leave the places that they’re from. 

Nearly everyone I know is also writing postcards, making phone calls, canvassing. But then there is so much more time in which to worry, stew, lament. Even if she wins, he nearly won. Again.

For a novel that I wrote in 2017, I learned about the dive reflex, a physiological response to the body sensing you might drown. The nostrils register that you’re submerged — cardiac output and blood pressure drops, the distribution of oxygen is slowed; the brain becomes the body’s primary priority.

One of the surest things that parenthood (and age) will teach you is that, good or awful, pomp and fizz or terrifying, time will pass. Whatever that Big Thing is up ahead — whether you think you can breathe or not — the up ahead is happening.

Here’s a thing I do not believe: that we will somehow get through a Trump win intact. Not only do I think it will be worse, I also think we undersell how terrible, for many people, the first Trump presidency was. That Roe was overturned, that so many women have suffered, died, and this is still as close as it is: I’m not sure how any of us walks around with that. I’m not here to argue that anyone not feel scared or gobsmacked, demoralized, appalled, by how close this election somehow is.

And also: There is no simple before and after. Celebration, ceremony. A single day to which we all look forward, that we dread and wonder about, yearn for, mark on calendars and then count down to. Much more often, life exists in middle spaces, rattling anticipation, knowing very little, while grasping, desperate, for answers to so many questions that are actually unknown.

My oldest, dearest friend is an immigration lawyer, helps get kids asylum from Central and South America. She deals with children who have lost their parents, witnessed murders. If Trump wins, it’s possible she’ll lose her job. She’s a single mom and goes home to be with her almost 4-year-old every day. You have to put it down, is what she says to me. You pick it up and hold it, do as much as you can. But then you put it down. Nothing will get better if you’re crushed by it, she says.

The waves are building. Anyone who says they know exactly what will happen either on November 5 or after seems like someone not attuned enough to the strange vicissitudes of life to be listened to. Perhaps this is my plea to swim out past the churn and sit a minute while we still can. No matter what, more time, days, weeks, months are coming. Politicians are not saviors. Nor are they football teams for which we raise our fists into the air and cheer before packing up and going home. There will always be more work, more phone calls, more pushing to be done. We can’t afford to collapse in relief after a Harris victory any more than we can collapse in defeat after a Trump win. Vote, make phone calls, canvass, absolutely, but don’t fester in all your worst, most dire imaginings of what’s next. Insofar as we’ll have big hard heavy things to carry, waves to try to claw our way up out of, perhaps this next stretch of time is best spent paying careful, close attention to the good that might be standing, hips jutted, grinning right in front of us; storing up as much energy as we can for whatever might come next.