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Afterwards

Elizabeth Harrell10 Comments

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So I may as well just get this out of the way, I’m very sad today. I feel great despair about the election.

Great. Huge. Bigly.

Too soon? Sorry.

I took Jane to the polls with me yesterday. I told her it was an important day, and that women haven’t always been able to vote, for a long time only men could.

She said, “That’s mean.”

“I agree,” I said. “But now we can vote. So we have to make sure to vote every time we can, and I’m going to take you with me to go voting.”

“Okay,” she said excitedly.

In fact, her level of excitement was a little bit disproportionate to the “going voting” thing, but I just assumed it was her natural zest for life.

But as we were standing in the gymnasium waiting to vote, her zest evaporated. She wasn’t her normal cheerful cooperate self. She was downright ticked off.

“Where is the water?” she demanded.

“What?” I asked.

“THE WATER,” she repeated, hands on her hips.

“Baby, I don’t understand,”I answered as I scrambled in my purse for some goldfish crackers (every mother’s solution to impending chaos).

“THE WATER FOR THE BOATING,” she yelled.

Apparently all her zest had been for boating. Not voting.

“Jane, we aren’t going boating. We are voting,” I explained as she paced around me, investigating the 1910 era gym for some sign of maritime opportunity.

She turned on me with very betrayed eyes.

“There’s no boats today?” she asked seriously.

I shook my head and held the bag of goldfish in front of me like an olive branch.

She eyed said goldfish, because clearly she’d been led to believe there would be boating, and those crackers were the only water creatures she would be encountering. And now the entire situation was dead to her.

She slowly reached out, took the bag from my hand, sighed, and said loudly, “I think I’m just done with all of this.”

An elderly woman behind us leaned around me and said, “Sweet girl, you just spoke for the whole nation.”

And it’s kind of true.

Now I have to figure out how to take the kid boating. In New York City. In November.

10 thoughts on “Afterwards”

  3. Liz

    Let me first say that I have missed reading your blog and I am glad you are back! I hope your break has helped.

    I too, felt heartsick yesterday. The election results were like a death to me. Today, I am moving slowly on with the process of grieving, both the hope of finally having a woman president and the fact that I my beliefs and hope for America is not shared with half the nation, or more accurately, half the nation that voted.

    It will take time, but we all have to do what we can to make it the America we believe in and pray for the next four years.

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  5. I am despondent that a man who bragged about assaulting women and who degraded large segments of our population was elected, and elected over a woman, of all the horrible ironies. A man who threatened to jail his political opponent, who wants to interfere in the freedom of the press, who believes climate change is a hoax. A mean-spirited, no nothing huckster elected to the American Presidency.

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  6. What a moment! I think Jane pretty much summed up how we all feel. After finding out the results, I prayed and will continue to pray for our country.

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