The morning after the election . . .

I’m feeling pretty discouraged right now.  I’ve been thinking about all the time I’ve wasted watching depressing and stressful news, much of which turned out to be wrong or at least irrelevant, and at all the time I spent worrying about “what if.”

I didn’t sleep last night.  At first I kept checking the election returns and calculating electoral votes, waiting, waiting, waiting for Hillary to pull ahead. Then when it became obvious that she wouldn’t, I began to think about all the implications of such an angry, violent, and bigoted man being permitted to represent the people of our country on the world stage.

And I fretted about the future of my grandchildren.

I normally begin every morning with the Today show and schedule around Nightly News. This morning I wondered if I’d ever watch another news program.

I wondered how I would explain my sadness to my oldest granddaughter, and what the world would be like when my youngest granddaughter, the one sleeping in my arms as I type this post, starts school, becomes a young woman, enters a career.

I wondered how I could go forward in any meaningful way, if I could do anything at all to make our troubled nation safer for her and her cousins.

Then I turned to Facebook, to see how my family and friends were taking the news.

My friend Cathy, an eternal optimist and a spiritual woman (could those be related?), wrote a long and thoughtful piece that contained these nuggets:

10) The silver lining feels far away.
11) But there has to be one because there always is.

19) You can only heal what you see. You can only heal what you feel. We are now seeing. I am now feeling.

I’m not quite there yet, but I offer her thoughts to you in case they might help somehow.

What helped me the most was reading my eldest daughter’s post.  She wrote this about Bean:

“The first thing she asked me this morning was, “Did Hilary get elected?” and I had to tell her “No, the angry man did.” We talked a little about what the President’s job actually is, and while I moped in the shower she went to get dressed and came back looking like this.

“This is why we move forward today, even in our disbelief and anxiety.  Because we are raising little girls who believe they can be superheroes and children who believe they can change the world.  Let’s keep teaching them how to do it.  I have hope that good will prevail in the end.”

Thank you, my wise daughter.

One son-in-law posted his concerns about his wife and daughter flying today: “I suddenly don’t want them to leave now.  The world just got to be an uncertain place.”

My other son-in-law posted “Last night was hard. Trying to get some sleep was harder.  Looking into my daughter’s beautiful eyes this morning. That was the hardest of all.”

His wife, my youngest daughter, wrote “And love is love is love is love is love is love is love is love; cannot be killed or swept aside.”

Reading all of these and other hopeful posts and emails as the day progresses, I have decided my grandchildren are in good hands.

Love will prevail.  It always does.

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