I remember…

Enduring Trump.

I remember sitting on the bathroom floor, on the hideous dusty rose pink tile we’d sworn we would replace so many years before and never did. Looking back it doesn’t even feel like I was sitting, as my body felt like more of a shapeless heap than anything else. I was a pile of gutted emptiness, a motionless lump on the cold tile, staring into oblivion for what seemed like an eternity.

And then I heard the footsteps approaching and suddenly I snapped into frantic action. Gathering the spent tissues streaked with mascara, wildly wiping my cheeks with my already soaked sleeves. I needed to stand up, I needed to get myself off the floor, I steadied myself on the edge of the toilet, but it was too late.

Leo was standing in the hallway. Looking at me. He knew. He already knew. He knew the second he saw me. He was only 7 years old, but he was incredibly perceptive. Not that he’d have to have been in that moment. His mom’s eyes were bright red. Her face was puffy and streaked with makeup. She was on the bathroom floor.

She was supposed to wake them with the news. The country had just elected their first female president. Right had prevailed. The good guys won.

She didn’t wake them. She wasn’t smiling. She wasn’t happy. She was sad. She was very, very sad.

I didn’t speak. I couldn’t speak. I didn’t have any words. Nothing would come out.

“How?” He began softly.

“How did this happen?” He continued.

His little face was all scrunched up. Head titled. His great, big, beautiful, bronze eyes were searching mine for clarity. For comfort. For assurances I simply could not give.

He recognized instantly that I couldn’t tell him everything was going to be ok. “But you said the good guys would win? How did this happen mom?”

How did this happen mom?

That moment is forever seared into my mind. My young son was searching for an answer to a seemingly simple question. But it was anything but simple. His foundational understanding of what is “supposed” to happen was turned on its head. Everything I had ever tried to teach him about being kind, about doing the right things, about being a good person, was dismantled in the span of a single second.

And I couldn’t answer his question. I didn’t have an answer. I didn’t know the answer. That’s what I had been grappling with all night long on that stupid pink tile.

How could this happen?

The bad guy won. Everything I had ever taught my kids not to be… won. Donald Trump’s awfulness was rewarded with the highest political office in the world. This was the wrong outcome. This was all wrong.

And I knew then that I would have to spend the next four years or however long it took, fighting to make it right.

I remember telling myself that I would give everything I had to make it right.

Friends and family who had “held their noses” and voted for Trump because he was “the lesser of two evils”, kept trying to tell me to “relax.”

“Calm down.” They said.

“You’re being dramatic.” They said.

“The Generals will check his worst impulses.” They said.

“He’ll grow into the office.” They said.

“Roe is settled law.” They said.

They. Were. Wrong.

So much of what we lived through feels more like a haze than a clear experience. Huge swaths of time feel distant, they feel black and white yet vivid, like fragments of a bad dream that I can’t quite shake off.

But I do remember…

I remember, waking up every single morning bracing for the new crazy. What had he done? What had he said? Who had he attacked, mocked, demeaned or made fun of? What new layer of awfulness was on display that day?

I remember what it felt like to watch Republican after Republican, bending the knee to a bully. Excusing an idiot. Watching them accommodate, embolden and excuse the worst behavior possible. Watching them abandon democracy for a wannabe despot. Genuflecting for a mind-numbingly stupid, autocrat-curious, reality tv star who painted himself orange.

He’s fucking orange.

I remember what it felt like to see Air Force One used as a political prop. How sad it made me feel. For an airplane. I’d never imagined I could feel sad for an airplane, but there we were.

I remember the disgust I felt listening to him say there were “very fine people on both sides” after Heather Heyer was mowed down by a Nazi sympathizer in Charlottesville.

I remember feeling perpetually trapped inside an insane asylum with a monster. I remember feeling like there was no escape.

I remember feeling as if half of the country had lost its damn mind. That people I loved had lost their damn minds. Like I was surrounded by racists and sexists, bigots and xenophobes.

I remember my heart pounding in my chest while watching Brett Kavanaugh’s angry furrowed brow as he sat there defensively denying credible accusations of sexual assault. I remember how the shattered pieces of recollection from my own rape kept flashing across my mind. I remember not being able to push those thoughts away. They wouldn’t tuck back down into that dark corner where they had for so long dwelled. They kept punching me in the gut, over and over again every time I heard him speak.

I remember watching Trump downplaying Covid in the earliest days. I remember how untethered from reality it felt to have someone so inept at the helm during such an unprecedented crises.

And then I remember how that feeling changed, how it evolved from my belief that he was merely incompetent, to my dark understanding of the depths of his depravity.

I remember a dear friend getting a phone call from the senior home that his father had died. That he was gone. That they’d essentially “packaged” him up to “contain the spread.” I remember thinking how cold and disconnected from humanity one would have to be to simply call someone and say flatly “Your dad died. You can’t have a funeral. We don’t allow those.”

I remember watching the country turning on itself. George Floyd’s murder. Kyle Rittenhouse’s murders. I remember it feeling like we were being ripped apart from the inside. All while a madman held court from a goddamn golf course.

I remember living in fear. What crazy person might call me to say they were coming to “Paul Pelosi” me next?

I remember watching him send our National Guard on horseback to tear gas protestors in Lafayette Square. Watching him shaking a fucking Bible that wasn’t his in front of a boarded up church. I remember feeling helpless and hopeless. All the fucking time.

I remember wishing there was some superhero somewhere who would swoop in and save us.

I remember feeling like we were all trapped on the inside of a 2 year old’s tantrum and we didn’t have any fucking snacks.

I remember being at my job at an elementary school when the news came across my phone that the Capitol was being attacked. I remember how shocking it was. I remember telling my coworkers and I remember one of them saying “good.”

I remember knowing that Trump had sent them immediately.

I remember going to the house where my children were doing their virtual instruction and finding them crying in front of the TV as those scenes played out for what seemed like an eternity. I remember not being able to answer when they asked why Donald Trump wouldn’t stop the mob.

I remember imagining him watching the attack unfold and smiling like a scene out of Game of Thrones.

I remember putting my kids to bed that night as they asked me questions about whether or not those bad guys who attacked our Capitol would come to our house next.

I remember thinking his party would finally jettison him.

I remember all of it like it was yesterday.

But I also remember what it felt like to hug my daughter who was crying tears of joy when Joe Biden was announced as the winner of the 2020 election. I also remember what it felt like to be able to look at my children and tell them that right had prevailed. That sometimes you have to take a longer road to get there, but that you have to believe that you will get there in the end. And that sometimes you have to fight for it.

I also remember how proud I was to watch Kamala Harris being sworn in as our first female vice president.

I remember how proud I was to be an American.

How empowering it felt to have triumphed over evil.

How gratifying it felt to know that we had fired that melon-hued motherfucker.

I remember, hoping he would just go away. That he would disappear, you know “with the warmer weather”.

That we would get to the work of healing and moving forward.

He never went away of course, and neither did the stress, anxiety and angst that comes with him.

He’s only gotten worse. The anxiety has only increased. The worry is far more acute now than it’s ever been. The threats are more palpable.

The so-called “adults in the room” who checked his worst impulses are gone now, and what we endured, what we survived, during his four years in office will look like child’s play if he somehow returns to power.

Women are dying all over this country already because of him. Preventable pregnancy related deaths are the price tag of a rapist appointing another rapist who would help the Supreme Court strip women of a fundamental human right we had enjoyed for 50 years.

Anyone who is paying attention understands that what Donald Trump is promising is the end of democracy. What he is promising is fascism. He’s out there saying he’ll be a dictator on day one. He’s opining about “his” generals being “more like Hitler’s”.

And he means all of it. He wants to be a dictator. He wants the power to do whatever the hell he wants.

And that is exactly what his craven, feckless cult of a party will give him if he is not stopped in this moment.

The past is painful. What we have endured under Trump has been and is still, traumatic.

I’ve been through some shit in my life, and I understand what trauma can do to a person. I understand how we can pack things away and hide them from view. Hide them from others and hide them from ourselves.

I also understand that just because we can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s gone. Just because we don’t think about it every day, or at all doesn’t mean we have reconciled it. What I’ve learned in my life, particularly over the last few years, is that there’s no such thing as “forgetting” trauma. The body doesn’t let us do that. So, very often, nearly always, the mind plays tricks to make us think we’ve forgotten. To make us think we’ve healed.

When we haven’t.

So, we have to remember. We have to let it come out. We have to pull it out of ourselves and each other. We have to if we really want to heal. If we really want to move forward.

Donald Trump has inflicted some incredibly deep trauma on all of us. A metric fuckton of it. I know for a fact that we’ve tucked a lot of it away. We’ve had to. That’s what human beings do in order to survive. To get through each day. It’s been like living with an abusive parent or spouse. One you cannot seem to escape.

I understand what the mind does when confronting those kinds of evil. Well, I should say that I’m still trying to understand as I navigate all of it myself.

But I do know that we must remember how it felt to be forced to endure Trump.

Because we are not going back.

We cannot go back.

So, we will not go back.

No one is coming to save us. We are going to save ourselves.

We will move forward stronger than ever. Together.

We will learn from this moment. We will learn about who we are and who we want to be.

And we will heal. Not at first, and not all at once. And not easily. But day by day. Little by little.

I believe it in my soul.

When it comes to Trump, we have to remember who he is and everything he has done. And we must make sure he never gets the chance to do any of it, ever again.

We must defeat him.

We can do it.

We WILL.

The bad guy is going to lose. Again.

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This week I’m going to combine a podcast I recorded with my friend

Reed Galen

that I feel encapsulates so much of where we are in this moment.

If you’re not already reading Reed’s Substack and subscribing to his podcast The Home Front, you really should. His insight is invaluable in navigating all of this craziness. I am so grateful to get to have these conversations with him.