Today in Lake

A guest essay by Deborah Siegel-Acevedo about the morning after

“[Name I can’t write yet] won,” says my girl as she enters our bedroom.

I pull down the covers and scootch toward my husband to make room for her next to me. The other night, in response to my attempt at pre-emptive reassurance, she’d said with perfect 15-year-old sarcasm, “Yeah, sure, if he wins, I just won’t be gay or half Puerto Rican or Jewish for the next four years.” Now, lying next to me, she sobs into my pillow. “What’s my future going to be?” 

Her twin brother enters the room.

“I’ll be 19 when that bitch leaves office,” he says.

Bitch being the operative word, a sexist word, one that I’d chastise him for on another morning. But today, my desire to hold space for his anguish overrides the feminist grammarian. He knows the score. The kid’s been designing a trilogy of games based on dystopian lore to show what will happen if we don’t get our act together to end global warming and war.

I’d spent the past few weeks spitting mad at my husband for being out of work for so long. I’d told him that I was losing patience, that I was exhausted from being resilient. I’d had so little room for the possible larger tragedy that in anticipation of the election, I went numb.

But this morning after, I do what a mother does. I wrap my wings around my girl and tell her she’s safe right now in our community, in our state, in my love. I validate my son’s anger. I get them Starbucks breakfast—two-pump chai and bagel with two butters for her, hot chocolate and a turkey bacon sandwich for him—and drive them to the lake before school. I pull up to the entrance where there’s an opening in the fence, drive my car as close to the water as I can get, and say, “Look, the lake’s still there.”

This lake. I come here every morning that I can and snap a photo.

For years, I’ve posted “Today in Lake” on Facebook, my pointed attempt at a gratitude practice: Today in lake, misty mama crying edition. Today in lake, heart verklempt with the ending of kindergarten edition. Today in lake, three shades of blue edition. Today in lake, is this pandemic over or not over edition. Today in lake, hell if I'm getting out of my car because it's eight degrees out edition. Today in lake, full on summer hallelujah the kids made it to camp edition. Today in lake, rise edition. Today in lake, I didn’t make it for the sunrise edition. Today in lake, literally standing in it edition. 

My and I husband drive back to the lake after dropping them off. “Look,” he says. “Geese.” And I spot them, swooping south fast and low, almost skimming the waves. My anger at him tempers as I move a few steps closer to each other in shared despair. Personal hardship takes on perspective when it’s the world, and not you, that breaks.

Deborah Siegel-Acevedo, PhD is a Visiting Scholar at Northwestern University; author of Sisterhood, Interrupted: From Radical Women to Grrls Gone Wild (Palgrave Macmillan), and co-editor of Only Child (Harmony/Random House). Her writing on motherhood, politics, gender, and culture has appeared in litmags including TriQuarterly; anthologies including The Good Mother Myth, Click, and When We Were Free to Be; and media venues including Slate, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and many more. Find her at her website.

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