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Trust Issues
New Motherhood in the Age of Trump
Learning to trust myself as a parent has been one thing, but I don’t trust the world with my son
In October 2016, I found out I was pregnant. In November, I felt a thrill upon taking my unborn child into the booth with me to vote for the first female president of the United States.
After voting, I arranged the Hillary paraphernalia I’d collected over the years on the coffee table, like a kid at show-and-tell. I cooked black bean burgers for dinner, floating happily around the kitchen. My husband and I settled in on the sofa as if we were about to watch a favorite movie, one we’d seen a dozen times before. As the returns came in, he kept trying to make the math work: Okay, we lost Florida, but if Pennsylvania goes blue, there’s still a chance.
More than a year earlier, while visiting my mother-in-law in Des Moines, I saw my first pro-Trump sign planted on someone’s lawn and massive crowds waiting to catch a glimpse of him at a college football game. I had a sickening feeling. But as the election drew closer, my ritual of checking the New York Times and FiveThirtyEight polls first thing each morning helped assuage my fears. The experts assured me all would be well, and I took them at their word.
On election night, we stayed up watching TV until the bitter end. Both of us cried when the Trump family walked onstage, looking just about as stunned as we were. I was furious at myself for not doing more, for ignoring my intuition.
I was pregnant at the Women’s March and at JFK Airport to protest the detainment of immigrants there. I wanted somehow to convey to our child that this was not the world he would inherit, that we would insist upon a better one.
I feel sad to leave this little cocoon, where there is no world but brand-new babies and their parents.
As the opinion pages bemoaned the polarized state of national politics, I got my first glimpses into how parenting decisions are often just as divisive. Some friends said it was essential to swear off caffeine. Others said a large coffee each morning was the only thing that got them through…
