img-20161031-wa0008This election season has left me depleted. It’s been ugly, and the aching divisions in this country — a country I’m still learning to call my own — are painful and sad. I counted down the days to November 8 because then it’d be over. And I believed the polls and felt reasonably confident that “my” candidate would win. I bought champagne in preparation. I anticipated the joy of knowing the first woman president had been elected. It felt so tangible, so inevitable. 

I don’t need to fill you in on the outcome. 

Some of you will be feeling vindicated and jubilant. Many, like me, are wandering around in a fog of disbelief. That election day was two days after daylight savings seems an extra cruel trick — adding to the exhaustion and bringing tears closer to the surface. For me, a Brit in America, the parallels with Brexit are all too clear, the ensuing pain all too familiar. 

One person who is blissfully unaware of the election (except perhaps an awareness that his mom spends way too much time scrolling through identical articles on her phone) is my toddler. He has no concept of the presidency or even of America. To him, I may as well be president. At first I found it hard — coping with my emotions while wrangling this tiny human who was entirely unwilling to let me stew on the couch with coffee and self-pity. There’s only so much Peppa Pig I can, in good conscience, allow him to watch. He was bouncing off the walls, exploring every “no” in our house on repeat, while I got increasingly frustrated with him and myself and the world.

So we went for a walk. 

I’ve only just started letting him walk beside me as we wander down the street. I casually hook a finger into his jacket hood so he can’t dart out into traffic, and we walk. He delights in this new freedom, and, while it causes problems when I really need him in the stroller, I delight in his delight. 

With my head full of foreboding and regret, I held his hand as we made our way down our street. We stopped every two steps to look at a new stick or leaf. We talked about the difference between sticks and logs and branches. At least two truck drivers slowed and waved at him — surely feeling like kings as he looked on in awe and wonderment. A green dump truck drove past and he tried to chase it, excitedly trying to form a sentence to explain to me that a green dump truck just drove past, but his excitement meant his words stumbled and tripped over each other in their eagerness to be heard. 

Slowly, I found myself drawn out of my despair and into the immediacy and wonder of his world. We “walked” for half an hour — a lifetime in toddler time. I crouched down and examined leaves with him. We talked about fall and the different colors. We watched an ant make its way across the sidewalk. I showed him how to walk along kicking up leaves, and I’m pretty sure I had more fun than he did. I found my way out of the fog and into a world made new. 

For those of you feeling as I do about this election result, I’m not saying the answer is to tune it all out. There are concrete, meaningful things we can do to ensure the issues we care about aren’t set back 100 years. But healing needs to start somewhere. Bridges need to be built and anger put aside. And seeing the world through the eyes of a toddler might just help with that. There’s beauty and wonder out there, every two steps.