7 Days of Grieving - 1

November 6, Wednesday

My son's text woke me up at 5 pm: "Really tried to brace for this but I'm shocked still."

"Did you stay up all night?" I ask, as I had been in and out of sleep the whole night and finally just dropped exhausted at around 3:30 am.

"Going to sleep some now." I text him a "heart." No way I fall back to sleep now, so I'm scrolling through the news and the Kornaki Cam. He won. The pit in my stomach is the size of a water melon.

I get out of bed at 5:30 am and start getting ready for a hard day. On MWF, I teach three classes and audit one back to back, from 9 am to 1 pm, with 10-min breaks in between. So, I am trying to brace myself to go to work even though I'm so depressed I'd rather stay in bed all day. I know some of my colleagues and many of my Gen Z male students voted for him, so it's going to be hard.

Stretching exercises help, the daily morning routine helps a little. I get to work an hour earlier than usual and go over my class materials. Need to be ready. I'm wearing the same RBG blouse I wore while voting, for confidence. I'm OK, I can do this, I tell myself. I need to do this for my female students who I know will be just as crushed as I am.

In my first class of seven students (two guys only) I have the best rapport. A female student comes in, clearly upset, with puffy eyes from crying, and I just can't start the class without saying something. They know my political views, but I still tell them that I proudly voted for Harris and feel crushed and disappointed. We live in a red county that went 65% for Trump. "I only hope that those who voted for Trump will not regret their choice," I said. I was later told that this phrase was bounced around the campus as "a snowflake professor crying" (I did not cry even though I really wanted to).

After I aired that out, I was able to teach all my classes. Half of my students did not show up and emailed me asking for a "mental day." I checked in with my like-minded colleagues after my classes, including on Facebook, wrote lots of supportive short messages to my FB friends, and did some grading and prep for the next day. I also had a couple of meetings with my advisees to help them register for the spring semester (life still goes on!) and a venting session with a senior student from our department who just needed to unload her concerns about democracy and her classmates' reactions. I also took a walk while Skyping a dear friend from Virginia.

At 4 pm, I went for my own venting session with a colleague who teaches history. We hugged and ranted about fascism, putinism, trumpism, and where the US is heading now. Came up with a couple of catchy phrases that described the current situation. Told each other that even though we are both horribly depressed and defeated right now, we will pick up pieces and start our activism just like we did in 2016. Do we still have the energy? - We'll see. Doing nothing is not an option.

I went to my office and worked more. As I was finishing my last Moscow's Calling story, a dear friend from Texas called. We go back 20 years, immigrants from the same country, both burnt badly by Putin, and ran together an opposition online newspaper. He is a brilliant IT specialist, so we were talking about where Putin could have hacked into the US election system. "He definitely rigged Pennsylvania," my friend concluded after I described the enthusiasm and door-to-door activities here and the discrepancies between the expected and actual results. "There's something fishy and nefarious here. But Dems play by the rules, so I'm not sure they will contest this."

As a point of distraction, I wrote this drabble:

By the time I post my Moscow's Calling story, it's 8 pm. I head home, and call my son from the car. I finally break down and cry. I vent and he just listens. He is a good listener, my son. One of the best I know. Through sobbing, I tell him all my theories and facts of the defeat, and everything that strains credulity. He agrees, I can hear him nodding on the phone. I finally ask for his forgiveness, "Was it a mistake for me to bring you here, son? This is the second country that is screwed up by Putin for us, where else can we run?"

"We'll get through this, mama," he says. "I'm still a proud American. We'll be vindicated. They don't know what they are getting in him." We hang up and I miss him intently. That melon in my stomach is back, moving up my throat. I want to be close to my son right now, want to hug him and cry on his shoulder. We are 750 miles apart, so I'll have to wait until the winter break. I cry some more, letting my tears stream freely.

I am finally home, have a light snack, go for my long evening walk with the Pod Save America's pre-election podcast, doom-scroll on my phone for about half an hour and go to bed at 11 pm, completely exhausted.

But my brain is working on the loss even through my sleep...