Election 2016

On Tuesday morning, I woke up after a good night’s sleep. When I got dressed I donned my favorite white tee shirt, the one from the Little Rock Corn Bread Festival of 2014. White because I read on FB that people were wearing white in honor of Hillary’s election. It also seemed right because I bought it when we visited the first President Clinton Museum. We moved the camper from the parking lot at Margaritaville Casino in Bossier, LA over to Diamond Jacks Casino RV Park so we could have electricity to run our television all night and wi-fi. Bossier is the city across the river from Shreveport. Then, we took a road trip on the Boom and Bust Trail around northwest Louisiana stopping at the State Oil and Gas Museum in Oil City, Louisiana. On the way back, we picked up our favorite pizza from Papa Murphy’s for dinner while we watched the returns. We got back to Diamond Jacks around 4:00 PM and I took a long walk finding the way over to the Boardwalk Outlet Stores by foot. As I walked, I was feeling good about participating in this historic day when we would elect our first woman President. It was a beautiful day.

When I got back it was about 5:30 and Don had turned on the television and set it up so that he could switch from CBS to PBS to Fox. I took out a fresh bottle of 2-Buck-Chuck and poured myself a glass of celebratory wine for the occasion. I turned on my new computer so that I could stay abreast on Facebook. Then we watched as the talking heads chattered about election news. By about 8:00 PM here, election returns were coming in from the East Coast. I baked the pizza in 2 batches. I have to cut the family size pizza in half, tray and all, in order to fit it into my Convection-Microwave oven. At first, the news was focused on Florida. Everyone was waiting for the returns to come in that would reverse the Republican lead. Then they were looking at the other “swing states” and we were watching the same trends. When the returns from the population centers came in…. then we would see the change. 

As I took out the second half of the pizza, I noticed that the CBS news team were looking alarmed as one by one the swing states swung wrong. I’ve watched this news team all year. I’d never seen them look like this. I began to be concerned. After dinner I began to pace and at one point I found myself flapping my hands. I remembered that this is a symptom of agitation and extreme anxiety. I cleared the table and washed the dishes and sat down with my laptop and began to play solitaire. I played and lost over and over again until I realized the returns weren’t going to change. At 10:14 PM I posted, “How can this be happening?” on Facebook. At that point I couldn’t tolerate the television. I went into my bedroom closed the door and pulled the covers over my head. I tried to read. I tried to breathe to calm myself. I had only had 2 glasses of wine and I knew that more wine would not be helpful. Don continued to say that there was still hope. When he turned off the television and came to bed at 10:30, I knew that even he had given up. That began one of the longest nights of my life as I grappled with this new reality that I could not tolerate. I compared it to the time my mother died but even that was more acceptable. She had been sick for a long time. I compared it to 9/11 but that made more sense than this. Ever since he descended on the escalator to announce his candidacy, I was positive that the citizens of our country would not elect this misogynistic, xenophobic, racist, homophobic, narcissistic sociopath to the presidency. It was completely and totally not acceptable. It didn’t make any sense to me. I took some of the sleep aid we have and tried to sleep. I got up. I tried to read. I played more solitaire and solved a Sudoku and a crossword puzzle and took some more sleep aid. I did a 15 minute mindfulness practice and tried to focus on breathing. At 1:17 PM I asked on FB if anyone else was able to sleep. It helped that many of my friends were also still awake. I knew that I was not alone. At about 3:30 AM I finally was able to sleep for a couple of hours until I woke up and realized that not only was the nightmare real but that Don had my favorite pillow. I gave up and got up. I couldn’t stand to look at the news. I looked at Facebook but even though I could tell that many others felt like I did, I still could not stand to spend much time reading about it.

For all the next day I stayed away from the news and from Facebook. We spent a couple of hours walking around the Louisiana State Exhibit Museum and in the afternoon walked over to the outlet stores to buy Don some shoes. I saw a little of the news and it seemed like both the President and Hillary were treating this man like he was the President-Elect and it helped to normalize this very abnormal event. Many of my wonderful friends posted uplifting and positive messages. I read those and avoided the extreme ones. I talked to Brother Bob and like the good political person he is, he talked about the things the Democrats can learn from this fiasco. I saw a clip of Hillary’s speech and I realized that she probably handled the loss better than I did. I realized that this man it totally unpredictable and that we really don’t know if he is as bad as I think. I don’t have much faith that he will be any good but maybe he won’t be so horrible. What choice do any of us have but to continue to live our lives from goodness and love while actively standing up for everything that is good about our country. Someone suggested that the Cub’s World Series win took up all the good juju for the year. I’m sorry Cubs fans but I would trade that World Series trophy for a different election outcome any day.

The good thing is that this horrible election is over. I only hope that we don’t have another one like it in my lifetime. I continue to be judicious about what news I can tolerate and maybe will take a break from news for a while. This is how grief is.