Stay tender. Stay together.

We try to comfort and distract ourselves.

John makes a silly dinner—green apples with peanut butter, popcorn with coconut oil and sugar drizzled over it, chocolate milkshakes. It’s something his babysitter used to make him growing up and he finds it deeply comforting. My dad gets chocolate milkshake in his very white moustache and we all laugh. Then we watch old episodes of The Voice, reveling in Snoop’s little bounces and sweetness, tearing up for the girl from Oakland who didn’t make it through, falling for all the perfectly constructed TV stories about hardship and overcoming. My dad and I work on a puzzle—an old timey drive-in movie theater scene. He can only do 500 pieces or less these days with his dementia advancing, and he seems to be less and less interested in them at all. We high five every time he gets a piece in. He can’t believe how many I get in. He actually says, “You’re a genius,” and sounds like he means it.

But then the texts started pouring in. I start refreshing The New York Times home page. I feel my tentative hope withering in the midst of the girls fighting over their favorite spot on the couch and my dad’s hyperbolic praise. He can feel the withering—mine and my mom’s. “What is going?” he asks, a worried look on his face.

“The presidential election, Dad,” I say, barely mustering the energy to explain. “Remember how there is a president of the United States?”

He nods, but I could tell the words aren’t landing anywhere.

“Well, today is the election and it’s looking like Trump is going to win. Remember Donald Trump?”

“Bad guy,” he says. This he remembers. I don’t bother complicating this narrative with him anymore. His dad is also a “bad guy.” God, I don’t believe “bad guys” exist, but this country is making it so hard to rebel against the simplification.

My brother texts: Masculinity is so fathomlessly mediocre.

Apparently mediocrity makes people feel safe? “It looks like he may win,” I tell my Dad. “We’re just sad about that. But everything is okay.”

I tell both my dad, whose brain is full of holes, but whose heart can still pick up on signals of sadness impeccably, I tell my daughters, whose brains and hearts are firing bigger and brighter and more independently every single day, that “everything is okay.”

But I don’t know if they believe me. I hardly believe myself. Short-term, we will be okay. We are White and economically secure. We were born in this country and straight and cis-gendered. None of the four women in this house are of child bearing age (I’m the closest and the ship has sailed now that I’m taking care of so many people). Then again, a man just became president (again!) who objectively believes that women are sub-human, and soft men—like my husband, disabled, aging men, like my father, are, perhaps, even worse than sub-human.

And long-term, we are most definitely not okay. The climate. The global instability. Potential pandemics. Our public education system. This man is not to be trusted with any of our generational health.

John spends the evening building a piece of furniture for Stella, sweating and weeping alone in her room while the rest of us watch TV. I am reminded of 2016, when Maya was about to turn three years old, and Stella was brand new, and he sanded a tiny rocking chair outside our front door late into the night, sweating and weeping. Whenever I look at that purple rocking chair, the size of a little girl, I think of his broken heart, the way he could barely get out of bed the next morning, how he wants, so badly, to believe this country is kinder and less afraid than it really is.

I go into Stella’s room and hug him and start crying. I say, “He thinks I’m subhuman.”

“I know,” he replies. “It’s not okay.” He is wearing one of his many Kamala t-shirts. He has already bought and hung up a framed poster of her in our eldest daughter’s room. Like I said, he wants, so badly, to believe this country is kinder and less afraid than it really is.

I wander back to my parents’ room and say with fake cheer in my voice, “Time for bed, Dad.”

I just want him to go to bed. So I won’t have to clumsily explain why he can feel the women around him deflating. His broken brain knows something is very wrong and I don’t want to try to convince it of an untruth. The world is confusing enough to him right now. (Me too.)

I take off his shoes and set them where he can’t see them next to the couch. I unzip his coat—his armor—and hang it in the closet. I grab his hand and led him to his bed, pull back the comforter and say, “The day is done, Dad. Time to sleep. I love you so much.”

“Love you, too,” he says. I take off his ball cap and set it on the bedside table. I take off his reading glasses and set them there, too.

I hug my mom, long and hard. I feel a shudder run through her body. I want to hug her forever. In so many ways, I am most sad on her behalf. She fought sexism her whole life, and now she has to watch her granddaughters processing the election of a misogynist. Her husband is fragile and fading next to her in the bed, and she has to grieve that, alongside the enduring strongman delusion of her nation. How fucking cruel.

I brush my teeth. I drink a glass of water. And then there is this moment, sandwiched in my too small bed with my getting bigger daughters on either side of me, each reading (Jeff Kinney for 8-year-old Stella, John Greene for 10-year-old Maya), when I feel something clean and clear in my chest, and without pre-cognition, I say, “We are going to move through our lives being as different from him as we can—looking for those who feel scared or left out, welcoming them in, respecting people’s bodies and inherent worthiness, noticing the tenderness in ourselves and embracing it. We have to be as different from him as possible.”

They nod diligently, meditatively almost. My 10-year-old, who is experimenting with eye rolling at my speeches says solemnly, “Got it.” And we go back to reading. Eventually John squeezes in, too—a pile of appendages and disappointment, four bodies in a queen sized bed. Eventually, Maya drifts off to her own bedroom. She likes her own space. Always has. Stella puts both John and I in her favorite bedtime headlock and, eventually, we all drift off to sleep.

I dream about a baby girl being born—pudgy and perfect. I wake up in the night and look at the dark sky out the window and don’t reach for my phone. I already know. I don’t need to see it. I listen to the sounds of my people breathing. The wind is tearing through the trees, like Mother Earth is pissed. I’m with her.

Today I will move my body next to beautiful, brilliant women friends (so wildly not mediocre) in the sunshine and I will hug my mom, who deserves a better story, and I will double down on my conviction that it is our softness and our ability to see beyond ourselves, beyond our time, that makes us safe. I will double down on my conviction to make the future I desire irresistible. I will continue to make visible the inevitable deterioration of our bodies and our minds, our hearts and our ability to care for one another the only lasting things.

My dad woke up with no clue that Trump is going to be president in January. The only lasting thing is his love for us, his ability to marvel at the sunset or a puzzle piece falling into place, the chocolate milkshake on his white moustache.

Today, I will imagine scared men dying, yes, in part, because this means a natural and unstoppable evolution of this country, but also because I know that in aging and illness and death there is the ripping off of the scales from the eyes. The final humility will come for Trump, will come for all these men.

There is no winning life, just like there is no winning elections. There is only inhabiting the present, reaching for your people, taking the weight of moral deliberation for people you will never meet seriously. There is, in other words, being a good ancestor, which is not a matter of winning or losing, but nourishing that which is life-giving and tender and loving in yourself and those around you, and doing your best, being your bravest, at evolving, evolving, evolving. Admitting your own limitations. Asking for help. Wondering at what you don’t know. Knowing what you know in your bones and honoring it no matter the noise around you. Tucking old men and little girls into bed.

I am neither good, nor bad. I am a daughter, a mother, a sister, a wife, a friend, a neighbor, a warrior for care, an American with so many questions about who we are and who we want to be. I feel you with me. There are so many of us this morning, tending fragile bodies, making the coffee, checking in on our friends. Shuddering and reaching out. My only ask: stay tender and stay together.

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I very much wish this, a poster I made with

Wendy MacNaughton

in 2016, was antiquated. Sadly it isn’t. You can order one here.