How My Daughter Saved Me on November 6
Like many Americans, when I woke up post-election day, I experienced a powerful urge to remain cloaked in blankets and spend the day in tears. I occupied much of my morning that way, crying on the phone with women friends, trying to process my grief and disbelief that more than 72 million Americans had apparently voted in favor of trying to dismantle much of the architecture of a 248-year-old democracy.
As has often been the case in my life, my daughter saved me from despair. But not the way she did when she was little–those days when death, divorce, major life setbacks and disappointments failed to ravage me only because I knew I had to keep going for the sake of the little one who relied on me for guidance and support.
This time it was a 17-year-old near woman who, though she’d raged at the television screen the previous night, seemed decidedly nonplussed the next morning as she readied herself for school. As I struggled to even brush my hair or put on makeup, wondering why I should even bother on this day, she dressed neatly, prepped her breakfast, packed up her backpack and instrument case, expressed some concern about being too distracted on this day to perform well in her honors band and All-State auditions that afternoon, and went to her car.
I never expected she’d truly listen to the advice I gave her before she left for school: “Breathe. Push through it. Focus on your audition today.” Words I could not practice myself that morning.
Seven hours later she called me to say she’d not only held it together during auditions but performed pretty well, earning a compliment from her director. I could hear the unexpected joy in her voice, and it occurred to me suddenly that she’d transcended her grief to “keep on keeping on,” as my dad used to say.
And not because, as one might expect, she’d resumed her life as a self-absorbed, oblivious teenager.
In the evening, she joined some of her high school cohorts to work a “Coats for Kids” event at the mall, helping local children pick out and try on warm clothes for the coming winter. I texted her, “Have fun. Do good work. This is how we fight. We keep lifting each other up. We don’t become apathetic and hopeless.”
“REAL,” she replied in the teenage slang I sometimes struggle to understand.
When she returned home a few hours later, telling me stories of the little girls who were so excited to pick out coats covered in rainbows and butterflies, I said, “I’m so proud of you. 70% of this county voted in a way that jeopardizes your future, but you helped many of them get warm clothes tonight.”
My daughter responded instantaneously: “How people vote and how an election goes doesn’t have any impact on whether or not I volunteer.”
And I was reminded for a moment of Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address and his directive that the nation move forward “with malice toward none and charity for all.” Before 24 hours had passed since her tremendous disappointment with an election outcome that seemed to suggest more unfettered gun violence in the nation’s schools, fewer protections for the food we eat, the water we drink, and the land upon which we live, as well as less safety for American minorities and women, my daughter had already moved into “finishing the work we are in.”
As should we all.
Deborah Huso is an internationally published, award-winning journalist and book author as well as founding partner of niche communications firm WWM and ag brand studio TILL.
