make elections boring again, please

Hello, friends. Please vote if you haven’t already. I’ll keep this brief, because I know we all have limited bandwidth today.

Yesterday morning I was talking to my kids about the election. I asked them if they’d been learning about it in school. The two kindergarteners said they hadn’t, which gets a bit of a side-eye from me. But my 11-year-old trans daughter (who I last wrote about here) let out a deep, long-suffering sigh and said, “We’ve been talking about it SO much. Too much. I’m sooooo bored of talking about it. Can we not?”

I’m not proud of myself for what happened next, which is that I said, “Are you bored of having rights? Because that’s literally what’s at stake here.”

I KNOW. Rule #1 of dealing with an anxious child, according to

Melinda Wenner Moyer

, is to assure them that they’re safe. But I’m not my best self right now and even in the best of times I struggle to resist a good comeback when I see an opening.

I did apologize for my sharpness, and then we talked a little bit about how trans rights are probably pretty safe in California and what we can do to help trans kids in other states if things get bad.

But later, as I was reflecting on that exchange, I thought: what a gift and a privilege, to be bored right now.

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash

I remember being bored of Donald Trump in the fall of 2016. And then he won, and since then I’ve only been terrified and exhausted, anxious and despairing, sad and furious, but never bored.

A thing I think about sometimes, like a sore on my tongue that I can’t stop rubbing against the backs of my teeth, is that Donald Trump has been on the ballot during every single presidential election of my daughter’s life. As far as she knows, this is what our elections are. Every four years, there’s a raving fascist threatening more than half the country with violence, and tens of millions of people go, “Yeah, I want this guy to lead us.”

But I remember being a kid, and the presidential elections were honestly kind of boring for me. I remember Bob Dole. I was pretty bored during that election. I wish all kids — including all trans kids — in this country could be as bored about presidential elections as I was as a kid.

My six-year-old son believes in kindness so deeply that he doesn’t believe Trump could win. I told him that kindness doesn’t necessarily win elections. But I also I told my children that, while the polls are close, I’m still holding onto hope in my heart that this election delivers a stinging rebuke to everyone who thought it was good tactics to stir up voters by attacking reproductive and queer rights. I hope abortion rights stay undefeated on the ballot across the country. I hope white women, who were instrumental in delivering the 2016 election to Trump, do the right thing this time.

I hope we can be bored again, and that we can rest and get back our energy. I hope we can use that energy, not on fighting to get back rights we used to have, but on truly making the world better than it is now. I hope I can use my bandwidth on parenting my children with intention and empathy instead of being consumed with existential terror for them and their safety.

Wouldn’t that be something.