After I had my babies, I noticed something about my body. I still had everything I had before giving birth. Just…nothing was where I left it. I had to adjust my expectations for the new landscape of my skin and joints.

This is not to say my body wasn’t great after having kids. It works just fine. It’s just really different than it was before.

That’s where we are as a country. We are in a period of radical and unstoppable change. Shit is going down, it has been going down for three years, and it will continue to go down. When progressives get the chance to take control again, nothing is going to be where we left it.

We all need to dispense with notions of taking our country back. There will be no return to the America of 2016. That American is in the past and we cannot restore it. We can look at old photos of and remember those times fondly but that’s not the body politic and body sociological that we will have in 2020.

Every single one of us needs to thinking about reinventing America. Treat this process like we would treat renovating a house that’s been neglected and pillaged. Just leave the framework and re-built everything inside.

Because, let’s face it, the old wiring in our country was going to burn the house down at some point. The Constitution was written without the input of women, enslaved persons, or people from the indigenous nations. The changes we have made along the way were generally white male interpretations of what other groups of people want. To torture this analogy further, we didn’t really do the necessary repairs: we just kind of painted over the old wallpaper and hoped it wouldn’t all come peeling off later.

It’s later and it’s all peeling off.

As we look to the future, imagine what we could do with fresh drywall and framing that is up to current code (I can’t let this analogy go, I’m sorry). Imagine new plumbing that isn’t tainting the water as it comes into the house, like in Flint. Dream of eco-friendly heating and air conditioning that is more efficient that what we had before. Pick new colors and new styles and a soundsystem that allows everyone to be heard.

I have come this far and now I can’t stop with the home repairs to loop this back to the pregnancy analogy I started with. This is turning into a writing fail. OMFG.

Anyway, as screwed up as my literary techniques are here, the basic soundness of my argument should be unquestionable. We cannot go back. We can go forward and we must go forward. Plan for that instead of worrying about everything that has been broken these past three years.

To awkwardly and imperfectly finally return to the pregnancy idea, there’s no use crying over spilled breastmilk. We just need to wipe it up, pump the next batch and keep going.