Broken

“There is no final victory, as there is no final defeat. There is just the same battle. To be fought over and over again. So toughen up, bloody toughen up.” —Tony Benn, long-serving UK MP

I broke my left leg on December 27th, 2016. I was trying to sneak away from my mom’s house after a visit since saying goodbye made her sad. I fell down the stairs carrying all our bags, and my leg was behind me, my ankle by my head. I didn’t just simply break my leg, but with a pilon fracture, that means you smash your bones into pieces, and you can’t walk for months. The name derives from a French word for a cooking instrument that smashes things.

I was supposed to be a monitor on a bus bound for Washington for the Women’s March protesting the election of Donald Trump, but instead, I was sitting on my couch with my happy cat, leg in a cast, stoned to the eyeballs on pain meds.

photo by Dewet Willemse

This accident made the previous election of Trump oddly less awful. I couldn’t walk, I was on drugs, and it was possible to focus more on the injury to my body rather than the injury to my country. I felt it, but it failed to reach that part of me that knew how terrible it was to have elected a rapist, racist, ignorant, bad, bad person to run the country. I went to physical therapy three times a week and somehow distanced myself from the smashing of every value I’d ever held dear.

This time there are no drugs. This time the man I am married to is not a caretaker, a hero who drove for thirteen hours from New Jersey to Illinois to bring me home but merely my husband who believes in the lies and atrocities of the current Republican Party, someone I love but don’t trust because they are heartless.

The list is long: asylum seekers, women, immigrants, people of color, LGBTQ people, the physically challenged, and anyone who needs help or has failed to be a billionaire. He is a slum lord, a liar, a rapist, a would-be dictator who talks about “the enemy within” and can barely pronounce words that any self-respecting third grader would find easy. This person inspires violence and shows contempt for education, diversity, and kindness.

I am so sad, so angry, and so at a loss it’s hard to imagine co-existing with the enemy, my husband of twenty years who picked up his badly injured wife with so much tenderness and brought her to the hospital.

—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach