Fuck. It's Election Day.

I've lost the audacity to hope

Photo by bowie15/Getty Images

I wish there was a more articulate and perhaps less vulgar way to capture how I’m feeling right now. But I’ve combed through hundreds of synonyms, and I just keep coming back to:

Fuck.

I remember a time, not too long ago, when gluten seemed to be the largest threat to humankind. Obviously, there was other shit going down in the world, as there always is, but if you looked at the Internet around 2015, you might come away with the impression that Americans were spending most of their time and energy waging a War Against Bread.

Even I got caught up in the fervor. It was during the gluten-free mania that I went on my first and last diet, Whole30. If there was one thing I learned from Whole30 it was that I really, really love gluten. The crunch, the chew, the heft, the satisfying weight in my stomach.

Despite the fact that I denied myself the pleasure of my favorite complex carbohydrates for 30 days, I mostly rolled my eyes at the gluten-free hysteria. Diet fads annoy me. I’ve long contended that humankind has bigger fish to fry, and I could care less if we fried those fish in breadcrumbs or almond meal.

But now I find myself waxing nostalgic about the days when people wouldn’t shut up about the evils of gluten. I know our country had its problems back in 2015. Economic inequality showed no signs of narrowing. Systemic racism had yet (and has yet) to be dismantled, the patriarchy had yet (and has yet) to be smashed.

But to think, so many of us still had the emotional and mental bandwidth to seek out alternative flours, to deny ourselves small pleasures, to care about something as innocuous — for the 99% of us who don’t suffer from Celiac disease — as a structural protein found in grains.

When diet fads dominate headlines, it’s a sign to me that we have the luxury to be a little silly. That we have a sense, at least, that we’re headed in the right direction. That we’re in good hands.

Back then, those hands belonged to President Barack Obama, and they were such capable, comforting hands. No matter what opinions I had about what Obama should or shouldn’t be doing, what he was or wasn’t accomplishing, I felt secure in the knowledge that he was the one steering the ship.

So secure, in fact, that I voluntarily made my life hell for 30 days just for the fun of it.

//

On November 3, 2008, the night that Barack Obama was first elected President of the United States, I got very drunk. It was a reveler’s drunkenness, the same kind of drunkenness that had infected the entire population of New England on the day the Red Sox clinched the 2004 World Series. It was the hug-a-stranger, throw-your-hands-in-the-air-and-cheer type of drunkenness, with a euphoria that persisted even through the next morning’s horrific hangover.

When the election results were announced, I was at a bar with my now ex-husband in Washington, DC, the city we then called home. A news crew beelined straight toward us. They wanted to know what the interracial couple thought of this historic event. My mind went blank, as it often does when I’m put on the spot, so I just hugged a stranger, then threw my hands in the air and cheered. (To my knowledge, the footage was never aired, and if it was, I never want to see it.)

After the initial high wore off, some people complained about Obama, but I refused to partake. He was a solid, upstanding, compassionate, whip-smart man with a solid, upstanding, compassionate, whip-smart wife, and together they were showing an entire generation of children that wrinkled white men did not hold a monopoly on our country’s future.

//

Unfortunately, my own children don’t remember much about Obama. My daughter was on the cusp of turning five, my son just 16 months old, when our country screeched to a halt and threw itself into reverse.

On November 3, 2016, the night that Donald J. Trump was elected President of the United States, I once again found myself drinking heavily. But this time, my husband and I were on our couch in Portland, Oregon, not at a bar in Washington, DC. Our kids were sleeping (finally sleeping) in the other room. There were no strangers to be hugged, and the cheers poised at the back of my throat were making a slow, painful retreat, replaced instead by rising bile.

When I had poured my first glass of wine, it was intended to be celebratory, but as my sips turned to gulps, the wine became a coping mechanism to blur the edges of the new, harsh, unbelievable reality that stared at us from the bloody map on the screen.

The next morning, I woke up feeling very much hungover, and it had nothing to do with the bottle of Cabernet I’d emptied the night before. I wasn’t sure how to face the day. But life goes on. Parenting small children leaves little time for mourning.

I still stumbled out of bed in the darkness of early morning and beelined for the coffee maker. Absurd sentences still tumbled from my lips, like, “Stop licking my knee,” and, “Please take your Legos out of the peanut butter.” My daughter wanted to wear her party dress that morning, and I had to explain to her for the umpteenth time that her birthday party wasn’t until Sunday.

I was in no mood for power struggles. I already felt bullied, beaten, and utterly defeated. My daughter announced that she would not be inviting Donald Trump to her birthday party because he is mean. She asked if he was going to shoot lava at her because she is brown. She inquired about his toy collection and the color of the walls at his house. She thought gold walls were pretty cool.

I turned my attention to dressing her brother, for whom Obama would be no more than a face in a textbook. As he transitioned out of his pajamas, he correctly identified his ears, nose, mouth, and belly button. There was applause, cheering, high-fives. Then the tears welled. The victory was so small, and my sense of loss was so stifling.

But there was no time to dwell on our country’s crumbling future. No time to process, no time to grieve. There was never time. There were still shoes to put on. As I attempted the Herculean feat of tying shoes on a toddler, I again cursed my husband for buying lace-up shoes. My son didn’t want his shoes on. He stamped his feet and pounded his fists. I felt not frustration but envy. I wanted to throw a tantrum. I wanted to melt into the floor right alongside him.

As I ushered my children to the door, I checked my phone, bypassing the headlines to look up recipes for German chocolate cake. Pussy-grabbing white supremacists aside, we would still be descended upon by 15 preschoolers come Sunday, and they would still expect cake. Also, balloons. God help us if we forgot the balloons.

It was past 7:30 a.m. — as usual, I was running late. And car seats and seat belts don’t buckle themselves. So I trudged on. It was all I could do.

//

Over the course of Trump’s presidency, I stopped listening to NPR, stopped reading the New York Times headlines, and even stopped watching The Daily Show, which had been my nightly ritual for almost two decades. In my 20s, I’d watched the 1:00 a.m. rerun after my bartending shift; now, I tuned in at 9:00 p.m. before heading to bed.

But even the news parodies kept me awake at night. It wasn’t Trevor Noah’s fault. He and his team were doing everything they could to find humor in all the things that should have been funny, except that they weren’t, because they were actually happening, and this was actually the reality we found ourselves fumbling around in, wondering if it was ever going to end, and feeling helpless to stop it.

When Michelle Obama’s Becoming documentary was released on Netflix, my husband and I watched it, thinking it would uplift us. We were in the thick of Covid, in the thick of Black Lives Matter protests, and we needed to be uplifted.

But by the end of the documentary, I was sobbing into my husband’s shoulder. I was grieving the world we had lost, the world our children had been born into. I was grieving the death of human decency.

//

Four months later: Election Day, 2020. My stomach was knotted with dread. Once again, I sat with my husband on the living room couch and watched the map grow ever more red. This time, it wasn’t disbelief, just resignation. I went to bed. Against all odds, I slept.

And yet, over the course of the next few anxiety-ridden days, something happened. The map shifted ever so slightly to blue. It was painstaking, and the margins were narrow, but it was enough.

We took a celebratory family photo and posted it on Facebook. But it wasn’t so much jubilation that characterized Biden’s ascent to the White House. It was relief braided with trepidation. Like we were dangling off a cliff’s edge and we’d just learned we wouldn’t plunge to our deaths just yet. We’d get to dangle a little while longer.

My daughter pointed to a photo of our soon-to-be first female vice president and said, “She should be president.”

I said, “I know.”

//

There is another photo that crops up in my memories from time to time, a photo from Obama’s inaugural ball. It was 2012, the year he was re-elected, three months after the birth of my daughter. I was wearing a shimmery blue dress that sparkled under the right light, the price tag tucked down my back because I had every intention of returning it the following weekend.

The truth was, I was tired that night. I was nervous about leaving our baby in someone else’s care for the evening and stressed that we were spending money we didn’t have. I was thinking about how I’d pay for the three glasses of champagne I’d allowed myself in more ways than one. I’d have to stay up even later to pump and dump when we got home, and I’d have to contend with an inevitable hangover coupled with inevitable sleep deprivation.

But you’d never know all that from looking at the photo. It’s not just that I look young, I look so hopeful. Obama had won a second term. My baby’s skin was the same shade of brown, and her future looked bright. We had not only elected a Black man to be President — we had elected him twice.

Me in 2012, at Obama’s inaugural ball.

I had faith that we, as a country, were inexorably progressing toward something better — albeit in a two steps forward, one step back sort of way. Yes we can. Hope and change. Change we can believe in. I might have rolled my eyes at Obama’s campaign slogans at the time, but I still felt them. They flushed my cheeks; they crackled like static electricity deep in my bones.

When I look at the photo from the inaugural ball, I can see the flush, the static, the hope. It captures a time when I still believed in my marriage, in the future of my family. I still believed in our country, in the future of our children. I still believed in the long moral arc of the universe, in the future of our planet.

This morning, I wanted to wake up with a tingle of anticipation, I really did. But my body feels heavy, resigned. Even if, best-case scenario, Harris scores a decisive victory by the end of the day, I’m already anticipating the backlash.

I don’t necessarily want to return to a world in which diet fads dominate the Internet. But I desperately wish that I could recapture that faith I maintained, not all that long ago, that our current generations would leave the world better than we found it.

All I can think right now is: Fuck. It’s Election Day.

But hey. At least I have gluten.