I am still walking around on clouds.  It feels like I am living in a dream, now that Barack Obama has “sailed to victory” as the headlines proclaimed last night.

“All of this happened because of you,” wrote Obama in a mass-email that I read this morning.  And here I was, feeling so guilty because I couldn’t do more for the campaign…overwhelmed and overburdened as I was with full-time career and full-time single motherhood, and trying to take care of us both.  I told myself that it was ok that I donated what I could.  That I waited in line with Sami for an hour yesterday morning to vote.  (My son was uncharacteristically cool and calm.  He even shared his playdough with a cute kindergarten girl waiting in line with her mother just ahead of us.)  I have been so apathetic, so hopeless about this country.  And now I am energized.  I am proud. 

It feels completely weird to say that I am proud to be an American, after so many years of shame.  But I feel nothing but pride that our country could elect a person like Barack Obama (and by a landslide, no less).  What a message this sends to people around the world: that a person can be elected based not on their political class or pedigree, but on brilliance and perseverence and hard work.  That the son of a Kansas woman and a Kenyan immigrant could have come this far.  I cry every time I consider this.

I heard someone comment on the radio today that Obama’s election has the potential to inspire not only American youth, but youth around the world.  They will observe how the same old elite get elected to political office in their country, and question why that should be.  A man like Obama has the potential to speak not just to the elite of the ruling class, but to average, ordinary people around the world.  Unlike any other American president, he has “street cred” on this entire planet.

Thanks to Skype, I got to share the incredible historic moment with Man on the Horizon, who causes me to collapse into silly little cliches when I try to write about him.  I wrote a “love list” a while back and eerily enough, he meets ALL of the criteria on that list, down to specific physical physical characteristics like “thick eyebrows.”  Then he has a whole of lot qualities that I did not list but that are beyond my imaginings: like the fact that he is a single parent, for example.  For some reason, I just did not envision a single dad, but it’s beautiful how sometimes things can happen that are even beyond our wildest imaginings. 

(Like Obama’s victory!)

It’s odd and amazing and bewildering and exciting and scary and delightful all at the same time, and I am just letting myself be with these feelings.  How to not grasp on to something this delicious?  How not to cling and try to convince myself that it will never end, never change?  How to be equanimous when I am completely falling for this man?  How to hold my center?

But when I sit in silence, even for a few moments of practice, I can step back and be the observing awareness of all these biochemical reactions, all these synapses firing, all this warm goey-ness in my heart, this crazy, crazy stuff called falling in love. 

Which brings me back to happiness and these clouds upon which my feet lightly tread.  When I practice, there is a container- a container big enough to house all my exhaustion, all my confusion as to how to meet my obligations in this life, yet find time to care for myself. 

This morning, for example, was insane.  I had to keep Sami home from school today due to a strep infection, and so I left him with a friend.  He wept bitterly as I tried to leave the house:

“Please don’t go to work, mommy.  Please stay!!” 

Like a little terrified monkey, he clung to me.  But I had to leave.  Against all my instincts, I left.  Sami, of course, was fine within five minutes, but I cried all the way to work, all the while thinking, I can’t go into work looking like this, like I have been sobbing my eyes out, which I have.  Somehow I pulled myself together, sucked the snot into my nose, and walked into the office to work for a half day before going home to relieve my friend from the child care. 

No one has said anything, but I struggle with feeling like the “slacker employee” in the office.  What choice do I have?  I am doing this all on my own.  When my son is sick, I don’t have a partner to share childcare duty with.  It is always my job to leave the office to care for my son, even when there is tons of work, and it is my job to find a way to finish the work I have abandoned.  I know I should make the work up at home but by the time I get my son to bed, I have no energy for anything at all.  So I simply don’t pull my weight like the other employees in my organization.  This is an uneasy feeling that I constantly carry around.  I wonder if they have regretted hiring me.

“I’m so happy!” Sami declared tonight. 

“I’m so happy, too!” I found myself responding, and I meant it.

I sense this container, vast and spacious, large enough to contain all this sorrow and uneasiness, this exhilaration, falling in love, falling over with exhaustion, propelling myself through the days on a mixture of caffeine and adrenaline.  The wheel upon which the days turn.  “Groundhog Day,” as another single parent remarked.

But yesterday was a stopping place.  A place to celebrate and dream, to be foolish and drunk on hope and pride and good red wine.  I will always hold the memory of Obama’s victory yesterday, or, as he reminds us — our victory.