So yesterday totally was incredible and emotional and the beginning of an entirely new and hopeful chapter of history and everything else that your facebook status updates mentioned.  But for me, it was also a reality check of sorts.  Up until yesterday, I believed that Obama was kind of magic.  (Not creepy David Blaine magic…just that he has a way of making amazing things happen.)  For example, I was pretty convinced that yesterday, the weather would miraculously shoot up to 60 degrees for the Inauguration ceremony because of Obama magic.  Obviously, that didn’t happen.  

This reality check reminds of the time when I was about six years old.  I was at the movies with my mom and had brought a fun sized bag of M&Ms with me.  During the movie, I ate a few, but held on to most of them so I could save them for dessert after dinner.  After the movie, I realized that the M&Ms had melted into a mushy mud of liquid chocolate and broken candy coating because I’d held them so tightly.  I started crying.  My mom calmed me down and told me that we could put the bag in the refrigerator when we got home and the chocolate would harden again.  After dinner when I went to take my dessert from the fridge, I saw that the chocolate had hardened into a log, not back into M&M shaped candies.  I showed it to my mom and said,  ”Mom, I wanted you to turn this back into M&Ms.”  She explained that she couldn’t and this was the best she could do.  It was then, looking from my turd of chocolate and multi-colored shells up to my mom’s face and back again, that I realized she wasn’t Superwoman, just a super mom.  And I have the same feeling as I look up from my still tingling from possible frost-bite toes up to the YouTube replays of the Inauguration speech that I’m watching.  He’s not magic, just a barrier-breaking, nation-unifying, awe-inspiring, hope-building super president.