The first election that broke my heart, I was forty, standing at my kitchen counter in Pennsylvania with the coffee going cold. For most of my life before that, politics was something other people seemed to have the stamina for.
I came to civic life late, and through the door of motherhood. Once there were children in the house, the news stopped being things that happened to other people.
This is a hub for the writing where the political stopped being abstract: the elections and their long mornings after, and the argument with myself about how to stay engaged and still be good for anything at home.
The Mornings After
Some of these were written the day after, when the result had hardened into fact and the morning still wanted breakfast made. Election Day 2020 and Sitting With the Pain came out of one such week. The years rhyme: I wrote my way through November 2016 in real time, and through November 2024 the same way, the second set of essays a grim echo of the first.
Angst Into Action
Despair is easy. It asks nothing. The harder pieces are the ones about what to do with it. Translating Angst Into Activism and Stand Up And Be Counted are me working out, in public, how a woman who would rather be reading shows up anyway.
Joy as Resistance
The most recent turn in this writing is the one I least expected: that refusing to give up joy is itself a civic act. Joy As Resistance and The Politics of Joy make the case that a woman who keeps laughing through a hard year is not looking away. She is holding a line somewhere quieter.