My father likes to talk about the day I learned that no woman had ever become President of the United States. According to family lore, I turned to him and commented, “Wow, but that’s a coincidence, right?”
I don’t remember when that story became less funny and more sad. I do remember the 2017 Women’s March in New York City, on a windy day during a frigid January, crowds spilled onto the streets in a sprawling sea of people. We ran into a group of teachers on the subway, clutching hastily scrawled signs and pink hats, including my homeroom teacher, Eric Landgren, who is now the principal of the Ethical Culture School. He talked to me about the protest in our classroom the day after, pausing in the middle of second-grade chaos to ask: “How did you feel? What did it feel like, to march?”
I told him it felt cold.
“No, how did you really feel, inside?”
“Cold,” I repeated. “I felt cold.”
He frowned, and I went back to stringing beads on plastic wire.
There was no massive Women’s March in 2025. There were no pink hats, signs, or chanting in the streets. We stayed home on the inauguration day; my mother and I watched it on TV. We listened to: the withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, the WHO, the 1,500 insurrectionist pardons, the threats to birthright citizenship.
Donald Trump is sitting in the White House again, but I will spare you the radical lecture, the woke monologue. Not because I fear controversy or because I am afraid of articulating threatening beliefs on immigrants or gender or war. I will not create a liberal manifesto because my seven-year-old self said it better.
Sometimes, I wish I had a sign or a pink hat, but I don’t think we did anything, even in that massive march, except assuage our consciences. We elected this man, and now we must sit and watch, even as it aches. No signs, just stares.
Watch the executive orders, the slurs, the attacks, the nominations. Don’t look away. Listen to the speeches, read the articles, read the laws passed and the bills signed. There are no coincidences. Your daughters need to understand, no matter how young, that nothing is a coincidence, that there is a frost on this Earth that may linger no matter how many years pass.
If I look outside at night through my window, the glass reflection turns New York into a kind of illuminated paradise, the apartments and snow melding together into shining orbs in a dancing glow. Sometimes, I wish I could step out onto the gilded skyline and soak in the glittering haze. But it’s a trick of the light.
To see the real city, I have to open the balcony door, suck in my breath, and walk into the dry air. And then the cold hits, a gripping chill under the skin, migrating to the bones and settling in the carpals, familiar.
I didn’t have an answer for my second-grade teacher, and I don’t have one now. I only know this: I will bear witness to the next 4 years. I will stand in the cold.
