When my son was just over 2 weeks old, I woke up to feed him at 3 in the morning. At this point I was used to these middle of the night feedings, and I used the time to watch Netflix or look things up online. On this particular night, I'd gone to bed early, as I was in the habit of doing, and had missed the election results. So I went to look them up and do a little cheer for our first female president.
Except that my phone said Trump won. My blood literally ran cold when I saw the results, and I spent the next hour convinced I was having a nightmare, hoping that at any moment the baby would start crying and wake me up. Except that the baby was already awake and eating contentedly. I didn't sleep much for the rest of the night, and I spent a good chunk of it wondering if I'd just made the biggest mistake of my life, bringing a child into a world that was apparently a lot worse than I'd ever imagined.
For the next several days, I focused entirely on my kid. It felt like the world was tumbling down around me, but I could feed him and change diapers. I could sort of comfort him. We took turns crying. He'd get upset and I'd bounce him and tell him everything was going to be okay. Then I'd burst into tears because it felt like I was lying to my son, and the first lie was supposed to be Santa Claus, not Trump.
Up until this point, I'd been doing really well with the whole postpartum recovery thing. I was taking walks every day and getting stuff done around the house. My mom had come and gone, and I felt like I had a handle on this new mom thing. I was eager to get back to reading and writing and start getting the house cleaned up. But Trump getting elected was a mental and emotional setback that I hadn't seen coming. It didn't help anything that I also contracted shingles (thanks to a combination of my depressed immune system from being pregnant and stress), which meant that for the next week I could barely walk. Instead I sat on the couch, cared for my son as best as I could, and watched silently while the world around me slowly came to terms with the results of the election.
To be honest, I'm still a little bit in shock. I'm still focused pretty heavily on taking care of my son, one day at a time. But I'm ready to start interacting with the world again. And part of that is finally recording the first few weeks of his life. The blog is likely to be jumbled and out of order for the near future, while I get things down as I remember them and feel able to write about them.
I wish my son had been born into a world where the US elected the first female president. But he wasn't. Which means I'll have to work that much harder to make the world a worthy place for him to inherit. I'm most scared about climate change, and whether there will even be a world for him to inherit. But having children at all is an act of hope, and raising them forces you to act on that hope to turn it into a reality. Now I just have to figure out the most effective way to help get our country back on the track it was on under Obama, to raise my kid into a kind, thoughtful person, and believe once again in a tomorrow that's better than yesterday.
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