I was going to write my own assessment of the first 100 days of this awful new presidency. I struggled and sputtered and wound up posting something short and bitter for friends and family on facebook, noting I’d been totally justified in melting down on November 9th. It’s all I could come up with, without meandering all over the place.

In the weeks before my brief flirtation with a “100 Days” assessment, I was going to try to document all the travesties and lies and obfuscation and cruelty as I saw them unfolding each day. But it unfolded so fast, and my jaw was hitting the floor so often, that I couldn’t keep up.  I didn’t really make it even one day.

Before that I was going to try to articulate my rage about the election, and my joy at seeing the uprising, starting with the Women’s Marches, and going on from there. And I found my rage sparked again and again in an ongoing cycle, and couldn’t keep up. And likewise, constant stories have fed my joy and gratitude for the uprising, the Resistance, the pussy hats and great signs and love of science and reason, but coming so fast I couldn’t respond to everything.  It’s all been happening moment to moment, and I haven’t found time for record keeping.

What I have done each day is absorb it as it unfolds.  And maybe that’s enough. Maybe it’s enough just to keep standing, to not crawl in a hole and hope it’s all gone the next time I raise my head. Maybe it’s enough just to live through it.

I work hard to fend off the meltdowns and the ranting; so much material to fuel so much rage.  But I can’t live in a state of rage, so I retreat into humor, or sarcasm, or distractions on Netflix. I’ve been reasonably successful; I have a lot of bitter moments, but life moves on around the bitter obstacles. I’ve channeled some of that energy into answering my granddaughter’s questions about what happening to our country. She’s only seven, and a lot of it is explaining how politics work in the simplest ways I can; like most children she has a strong sense of fairness, and the politics of the time defy that. 

I feel her frustration. I channel the tension of this chaotic time into bitching and theorizing, into listening to my friends and my clients process and vent, into commiserating with them, into consoling them and allaying their fears. I seem to come out with bursts of thought, rather than cohesive assessment.  Thus, my most frequent expressions in writing appear quite regularly in comment sections at my favorite mommy blog, recipe hub, and snarkified political commentary. Wonkette has, indeed, become a sanctuary of sorts for me, a place to release the pent up anger and sorrow in somewhere between 4 words and 3 paragraphs at a shot.

My goals of writing more extensively have been lost in just getting through it all.  Is that terrible? I don’t know.  I don’t want it to be permanent; just musing about my own process here is helpful, and I don’t want to lose that release.  But, I have to stop giving myself the assignments I think I should be pursuing, and roll with the waves in front of me instead.  Plenty of waves, no doubt there.