Notes to my daughter

What if this really is the beginning of the end?

By Laura Paull

Point Richmond

     Been dealing with the chaos and fallout of the Nov. 8 coup — shall we start calling it what it really is? Like everyone. I’m not special. But as a writer, it also affects me this way: since that day I’ve had no more use for elegant or even revelatory words. Looking at the campaign year? They all failed. So now what?
     
     Yesterday, with the news of Trump’s oil-executive pick for Secretary of State, combined with the CIA report that the Russians really did hack the “election” — my spirit finally tripped and sprawled, ungracefully, in a rut I couldn’t get out of. All my piss and vinegar spilled out.
     
     In the evening when I met with my millennial daughter I was unable to get the funk off my face. I felt badly about it. A few sentences into my answer to “What’s wrong?” I had to stop myself.
     
     The meat of her life is still ahead of her. She still labors daily toward fulfillment; has an expectation — above all — of freedom; longs to plant a child of her own in this world. For how many years have I educated, guided, inspired her so that she might successfully launch? In how many ways have I planted in her the seeds of hope, the basic presumption of a sane society?
    
      And now? I see what is bearing down on us and am for the first time at a loss as to how to ‘present’ to her — to all the lovely youth of her generation and after — a view of the future that does not completely smother the natural impulses of a healthy young life.

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NOTES TO MY DAUGHTER.)