The Day After

I do not know who will win the election...

I do not know who’s going to win the election, but, God willing, I know I will wake up the following morning to at least one child snuggled next to me in bed. The air is getting crisp. Lately, the morning, if you catch it early enough, winks at us through the window wrapped in a white blanket. “Look mama,” my oldest daughter says as we walk the dogs, “It’s snow!” I laugh. How does she not know about frost? When did I first learn about it? Everything that I know, I learned at some point. But I don’t remember anyone explaining to me how the dew freezes on the blades of grass, making the morning something you can hear under your feet; the small crystals of frost bending and breaking, softly crunching under our shoes.

I do not know who will win the election, but the morning after, I will pull whichever child has found her way into my bed close. I will marvel at her eyes that are shut, study the lashes that fall to her cheeks like a curtain, and my faith in a Creator will rise. Because look at this perfect face. I feel the same way when I stare at a pansy, the velvet wings of a butterfly, the cotton candy pink streaks in a sky lit by a sunset that is violently wreaking havoc on any notion I may have that life is no longer something to be in awe of; that beauty and mystery no longer beckon to my imagination, my bones, my curiosity.

I don’t know who will be celebrating after the election, but I know when half the country is celebrating, my children will simply be hungry. They will ask for waffles and chocolate chips. They will demand milk and a straw and will blow bubbles into their glasses of milk so big that it will pour over. Their sisters will laugh at the small white volcanic explosion and I will smile and remind myself to wipe it up later.

I don’t know who will be mourning after this election, but I know I will be thinking of my friend whose baby finally just came home from the NICU, after having spent the past month there. “Do they call you often and tell you how your daughter is?” I asked her before she brought her baby home. “No,” she answered, “Never. They finally put up a camera, so we can check her from home, but every time I go online to see her, the camera is on the floor.” My friend rolls her eyes and I tell her to set the oven at 375 to heat up the meal I brought. I am not sure how my friend is voting this election. She has been spending all of her time thinking about her baby in the NICU, her toddler at home, her body that is still healing. For the past month, my friend has been up pumping through the night, trying to make sure she has milk to drop off at the hospital, despite being miles away from her baby. She is tired.

I don’t know who will win the election, but recently I sat in a living room full of people who love each other and they all marched around with small American flags chanting one candidate’s name. I smiled and watched and nobody pressured me to march or chant. I got the feeling they were happy I was there, whether I marched and chanted or not. About a week later, I stood in a different room full of different people who laughed and danced about. They all cheered a different candidate’s name—cheered one and booed the other. I sat and smiled and neither cheered nor booed and if anybody noticed my lack of participation, they didn’t say anything.

I don’t know who will win the election, but I know there are some things that will not change, regardless. My children will have no idea where their socks are. Politicians, though powerful, will remain people I do not know personally. I will continue to invest in the people I do know. I will wash the dishes for the thousandth time, a ritual that I have, for the most part, come to embrace, a kind of liturgy for the hands. I will ask God what He is doing. I will listen in a daring way, squint so as to make out maybe a tiny corner of the picture. I have no idea how corrupt the government is; I have no idea how good the good guys are and how bad the bad guys are and I suspect nobody is ever one thing (surely even Goliath once decided to step over a toad or loved a dog or kissed his mother before leaving for war). I will think about freedom—how it is not simply freedom from something, but more notably, it is freedom for something. Professor, lecturer, and author Bishop Robert Barron says, “Freedom is not the ability to do whatever you want. Freedom is the disciplining of desire so as to make the achievement of the good first possible and then effortless.”

I do not know who will win the election, but I do wonder how I can discipline my desire until I am free to do the most good to those around me. Until it first becomes even possible and then becomes effortless. This is true today, before I cast my vote, and this will be true the day after I cast my vote. And I have to believe there are many, many others doing the exact same thing.