Wheat

She’s not what you expect. There’s a judgement made when you see her, Trump 2016 sticker on her minivan and the tell tale signs of a face lift around her temples … you’ve already made the judgement, you made it when you read Trump, when you caught a glimpse of her dark roots as the wind shifted her hair in an unpredicted direction. She walks across the mall parking lot and you judge, the corners of your mouth pulling down toward your chin. She is privilege and shallowness and insular and xenophobic, she is everything that is wrong right now. Her existence causes you pain. Maybe you even hate her a little bit thinking, what I could do with the opportunity she has!

Let me tell you what you won’t ever see, because you may never take the time to know or to look.

You do not see that her daughter is married to an Hispanic man. That over Christmas they all celebrated together uproariously and with so much warmth. You do not see that she intentionally avoids political conversations with them because she knows what it will bring and she wants nothing but peace and warmth. You do not see the way her eyes soften and light up at the sight of her beige grandchild and you do not see how SHE DOES NOT SEE the cognitive dissonance in which she survives.

She does see how her daughter tries to engage with her on the subject and she does not see how the walls drop so quickly in her own mind. She does not see how her eyes grow foggy, dim almost and how she wants, more than anything, for everything to be simple and easy – as it was when she was a child.

You do not see the absurdity of that statement as you couldn’t possibly know the domestic tensions in which she grew up – but they were known and they were familiar and everything since then has moved so quickly and changed so much.

She tries, so very hard, to live in her simple white easy world and to just love her family and to just navigate growing older with a modicum of acceptance and limited fury.

She does not see that every moment in which she rallies behind such a divisive leader hurts everyone whom she loves. She does not see how the sticker is a slap in her grandson’s face and how her daughter wonders at what silent and hidden hatred her mother might harbor toward her husband or her son.

No one predicted this. No one thought that the message of an American president could take hold so thoroughly in a mind that just simply wants to feel safe again, like she did when she was a child. No one thought that the foothold he had would root and grow inside her mind and that she would chant ‘lock her up’ at a rally and laugh at the mimicry of disabilities and seethe with hatred at the common enemy of brown skin. No one predicted that the smallness of care would feel like a kind of home to her.

That’s because no one remembered when her parents ruled everything with an iron fist and her mother had a place and her father had a place and EVERYONE knew what was expected of them and everyone knew that place. It was cruel and cold but most importantly it was CLEAR … and that clarity is safe.

Now? Now she’s being told that her lifetime of caring for her child and staying fit isn’t good enough for a woman, that she somehow failed leaning on her husband’s success as an attorney and knowing how to get red wine out of the rug. Now she’s being told that she must learn to refer to her niece as ‘they’ since she no longer wants to be considered female (or even male) but something else – something foreign . Now everything is fluid and changeable and complex and she’s being told she MUST adapt and when she struggles and fights for some familiar footing she is met with eyerolls and ‘ok Boomer’ and dismissal and goddamn if that doesn’t piss her off.

She’s paid her dues, just like her mother did. She’s done everything as she was supposed to and it’s STILL not enough.

You do not see that she tries. You do not see her on Tik Tok trying to make some sense of the world and left overwhelmed by choices and inputs that seem like another language to her. You do not see her, at night, reading Huffington Post, trying to figure out why they hate her so much.

If you are lucky, you might get to see her smile at the way her son-in-law kisses his wife and you might realize that despite her anger and her small drips of generosity she loves him with the same ferocity with which she has hollared ‘Send Her Back’ at the television in time with the rest of the crowd. The crowd, her people, the ones who understand her frustration and disgust and disdain for this world that seems unwilling to make space for her anymore.

On Christmas morning she held her grandson and sipped her coffee and noticed the white of her hand against the tiny golden foot and she thought it beautiful. On that magical morning, when families come together and try to be a community, no matter their differences … on that morning her eyes brimmed with happy tears to have her daughter back under her roof and her grandson breathing sweetly against her cheek … on that morning everything made sense and everything felt safe. On Christmas, everything was great again.