The 44th

Last night at 11pm I watched the world, as I have known it, how I have feared it to be and what I’ve envisioned for it, change radically before my eyes. I watched as we as a nation embraced our hope and faith and cast a vote for a man that no one really thought or held back their excitment in the quiet reservation of years of disappointment, would become the 44th in a line of men that have been distinguished to be leader of this dynamic nation.

I listened to my father’s tears, who came to this country during the civil rights movement, has the nerve to be equally liberal and Catholic, who believes in the separation of church and state say, “praise the Lord”. This same man who raised me to have a social conscious where race wasn’t a hindrance but an empowerment and to believe that not only was I able to be anything that I wanted to be, but I better be.

I felt my own chest fill with pride, relief, fear and joy as the tears broke around the rims of my eyes and those of everyone glued to the television with me. And as I curled into my husband’s lap and cried into him, I remembered what I had written about some of his extended family and the dynamics of race and our cultural backgrounds being different and I felt compelled to write a little more…

I felt a new sense of pride for “mom,” my mother-in-law that is, and a love for her that was too big just to be our common love of her son. It was one that stretched to something vastly different and hard for me to describe. It is and has always been a love as if she had birthed me herself, because I know what she has endured, I know that even in her son and I getting married what she fought from her own family and shielded me from was a pure act of love. I know that this seemingly frail woman who stands barely over 5 feet and weights roughly 100lbs with piercing blue eyes and her modernly cut short blonde hair, and her small town America address is the demographic that the Republican ticket thought that they owned. I know it as well as I know that she cast a vote for Barack without reservations about his color, his age or his character and clung to new hope for her future. A future that the day before yesterday was mired with questions that no one who has worked as long and as hard as she has should have to ask and today know in her heart not only is anything possible, but that what ever we have to face in this life the answer is always, yes we can.

As my sister searched the Internet and played that speech again (Yes We Can) and I listened, I realized that in one night America hadn’t gone colorless, it went boundless and stretched itself beyond expectation and defied even my own cynicism. For this woman who for the last 10 years has voted almost exclusively Republican, which pit me at diametric odds with my father and most of my favorite family members, to have an opportunity to say that a place of agreement is able to be found between my immigrant West Indian father, my Caucasian mother-in-law, my Christian faith and my dreams for my children, words cannot begin to describe the elation that I feel.

At midnight we joined hands, and prayed for our nation, for our new president and thanked God for being alive to see this day. And as our circle broke and I rubbed my stomach, a stomach that carries a child of mixed race and culture, I repeated the words to myself over and over again. Yes we can, yes we can, yes we can, yes we did!