During this election season, I’ve been playing emotional gymnastics with my heart and soul while reflecting on the world of possibilities based on the outcome.
I am not OK. I’m not going to pretend to be OK. I won’t be OK until we have a decent human being in the White House.
Credit: c + a studio
Credit: c + a studio
Business is not as usual. To this point, at least we’ve known our nation’s shortcomings, atrocities and chasms. I believe our country, as we’ve known it, will become increasingly unfamiliar as we anticipate the unknown and await what the plans are (Project 2025 or something else) for our democracy and how every policy decision and law (national or state) will impact our daily lives. We’ll find out as a nation if electing Donald Trump president again was worth the exchange of cheaper eggs and bread for the lives of women.
I grew up in the 1970s through the 1990s and have experienced sexism and racism, but I also witnessed progress for women and people of color along the way. Now, the country is becoming unfamiliar and foreign for my daughter, who has known only progress — until nine years ago when Trump emerged on the political scene.
On election night, as I said goodnight to my 17-year-old daughter, who went off to bed with a hopeful spirit, I was holding on to hope for her future, and I stayed up as long as I could to get a clue of what the outcome might be. When the Harris-Walz campaign lost Georgia, my heart sank, and I turned the TV off. At 3:39 a.m. I woke up out of a dead sleep with my heart racing, and I feared turning on the news. I resisted. I wanted to wait a little longer before finding out if what my gut was telling me was true. I also wanted my daughter to sleep a little longer with peace of mind before facing a country that elected a person who is emotionally bankrupt and who is a sexual assaulter and convicted felon and who supports women not having autonomy over their bodies.
In the morning, my daughter bounced into my bedroom to celebrate. But when she saw the news, she could hardly believe her eyes. She exclaimed, “No! No! This can’t be true. I really believed she was going to win.” In disbelief and awe, she had to process the impact this election might have on her life as a young Black woman in America before heading off to take her precalculus test. Seeing her drive off alone, without the proper time to comfort her, was hard. If many adults suffered through the day with sadness and thankful for supportive text messages among friend groups, imagine how the children felt. Think about what the election mirrored for them about values, leadership and decency, and what might have been unleashed in bigots and misogynistic boys.
When my daughter came home from school, Vice President Kamala Harris was about to take the stage to give her concession speech. Harris took the stage with strength in her voice and poise. But when my daughter heard the pain as Harris’ voice cracked a little and witnessed the disappointment on the faces of the supportive crowd, she broke down in tears of disbelief. She kept saying, “She should be president over him. Look at how she’s presenting herself. She is what we deserve. I just can’t believe that America picked a person with his character over Kamala, regardless of the economy. And doesn’t America realize this is how it started in Europe? People didn’t believe it could happen, but we’re headed for a dictatorship.”
She concluded, as tears rolled down her face and onto my T-shirt, that money was more valuable than her freedom as a woman. That a woman, and a woman of color like her, was not seen as a viable candidate to run this country. She then went to hug her father as tears were running down his face. He felt the sadness in his daughter and understood her fears for people of color in America, including him, to be stopped and frisked at a law enforcement officer’s whim, as outlined in Project 2025.
Our daughter shifted into planning mode, mentally scratching off some colleges she had applied to in states that don’t offer full health care for women. She now wants to look at more colleges out of the country. She even said it would be OK if we wanted to move out of the country if, instead, she had to stay and go to college in the United States. Then her emotions shifted to anger. She exclaimed, similar to something I had said to my husband earlier in the day, “For those who didn’t vote at all, sat out in protest or voted for him, I don’t want to hear one single complaint about anything that comes of this, including the loss of a loved one who needed reproductive care and was denied, the deportation of family members, the loss of Social Security, or being stopped and frisked just because! Don’t say a word. You will not get my sympathy. You had your chance.” She was going through her emotional gymnastics routine, too. I was not prepared to coach her through the intense emotions. I could barely manage all of mine, so I just let them flow, not offering excuses or explanations. I had none.
I then had one final reflection for my 83-year-old white mother, with whom I marched side by side for the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s. I realized she now might not live long enough to see a woman president. It saddens me to know that in her later years in life, she will be witnessing the rights of her two granddaughters be trampled on as if their existence is second-class, and that their health and lives don’t matter, while having fewer rights than she did.
I hope we make it through the next four years and can remain strong and resistant and rebound unscathed emotionally and physically. Unfortunately, the knot in my stomach continues to get tighter and tighter. My gut tells me this is not a good sign, but only time will tell.
Betsy Helgager Hughes is a local entrepreneur and a longtime resident of Atlanta.
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