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How Did Voting Bring Me To Tears?
no one could be as surprised as I was
I don’t cry often. Partly that’s because I’m a happy person, someone who has reached an age where I know contentment and I’ve achieved much of what I wanted to achieve, whether or not it’s been precisely what I originally planned.
But today, as I filled in the blanks on my early ballot in New York, I was surprised by tears that came out of nowhere, it seemed. I was so choked up when I went to have my ballot scanned that I could hardly speak to the woman who was there to help. I’ve been thinking about that ever since.
At first I thought it was pent-up emotion from having not seen my son and his family in France for almost 2 years. We were supposed to have gone in April, but everyone knows what happened instead. I pushed the tickets back to December. Now we don’t know when we might be able to go, and it’s too hard for them, with two children under six, two full-time jobs, and the house they are still rehabbing, to get to us, even if it didn’t mean that they would have to isolate themselves when they got back to France. I’m sure that had something to do with it.
But the more I think about it, the more I understand that all those tears came from a different place: I was weeping for my country, for my hopes, for the dread the last four years have…
