American

 

My whole life, I have often felt lucky and grateful to be an American, but never very proud.  I often feel like America is my bully older brother - someone who I love, who maybe keeps me relatively safe, but whom I'm slightly distrustful of because I see how mean he can be to other people.  I am apt to describe myself as an Oregonian or a New Yorker - but rarely as an American.  Chants of "U.S.A!  U.S.A!" give me the cold shivers in an unpleasantly nationalistic way.  And the American flag has always been suspect to me - -something that I often felt like belonged to them - not me or mine. 

But this morning I woke up fairly certain that an African American man named Barack Hussein Obama was going to be elected as our next president.  That the America I have always longed for but never really believed in would finally make its presence known.  That we would finally live up to our potential.  And I finally had that moment - that "This could only happen here, in America," moment. 

And so, my husband and I, we took our children to the polling station.

 

And I held my daughter, herself a new American, as I entered the voting booth, and I put her hand on the lever, and I wept as we pulled it for this great man. 

And later, in the dark of our living room, with our children sleeping on either side of us, I sat with my husband and I wept again as I listened to President Elect Obama make his incredible speech, as I saw the unadulterated joy and hope on all those people's faces in the crowd.   And I thought about what this will mean for my children, I thought about how this honestly changes everything.  And I was proud.  Proud to be American.  Truly proud of America, without hesitation.  Maybe for the first time in my life.