When the unthinkable becomes reality.

A few days ago, my husband and I went to see his mother, who over the past eight months has endured a series of life-altering health issues. She’s one of the most politically astute and opinionated people I know, but for some time, she couldn’t keep up with the national news.

And now that she’s feeling a little better, she finds she doesn’t want to. She’s avoiding the network and cable news programs that used to fuel her days in favor of cooking shows and the Travel Channel.

“I watch the cooking shows because they don’t upset me,” she says, as Andrew Zimmern’s Bizarre Foods played in the background. She’s relieved, she adds, that the upsetting part would all be over on Tuesday night, after the Nov. 8 election.

“It won’t be over,” my husband tells her. “We’ll just be moving on to Chapter 2.”

Yeah. About that.

We’ve certainly moved on to Chapter 2, but here in our beloved bubble of liberal California and the Central Coast, we thought we’d be reading a different plotline. We grossly underestimated how distasteful Hillary Clinton’s politics and gender are to the rest of the country. We grossly underestimated the white nationalist rage of southern and middle America; people who normally don’t vote voted this time in droves – they just voted in a way most of us never anticipated could be real.

We are about to say goodbye to one of the most rational, measured and intellectually astute presidents in U.S. history and, as Salon.com put it, we’re going to be led “by a pathologically dishonest, unqualified, inexperienced, temperamental, ignorant flim-flam man.” We are about to endure four years of a president who has said he doesn’t believe global warming is real, four years of a tacky Cheetos-colored charlatan who ran on a platform of rounding up brown people and shipping them out of the country. We are about to hand the keys to the greatest office in the world, the place meant to represent the greatest ideals in the world, to President-elect Pussy Grabber.

I woke up Wednesday morning Nov. 9 and one of the first things I saw online was a picture of robed Ku Klux Klan members gathering on a bridge somewhere in North Carolina, no longer hidden under cover of night or somewhere deep in the woods, but out in the daylight for the world to see. This is my new America. Every ugly thing we didn’t think was possible is about to crawl out from under a rock.

The Chapter 2 that I’d envisioned had been on my mind for weeks, and no doubt it had been on most of yours too. I had envisioned it to the point that I actually wrote a different version of this column the day before Election Day, premised on the idea that Hillary Clinton would be swept into office and the dream that a post-misogynist world would be possible. My husband and I had an election night viewing party – about a dozen people gathered in our living room and dining room to eat, drink, watch returns and celebrate. We watched in disbelief as state after state turned red and tried to reassure each other that it wasn’t over quite yet. One of my guests gave me a sedative; I popped it and was asleep by 11pm, figuring Clinton could still pull it off if a few things went her way.

Nothing like a little chemical delusion to get you through a rough night.

I woke up to text messages from friends – fathers, grandmothers – wondering how they’re going to get themselves and their kids through. “We all need to understand the masses do not think as we do,” one writes. “We don’t need to join them or succumb. We need to persevere and bring people to our way of thinking. That’s a slow process.”

Another sent me the thoughts of her 13-year-old granddaughter: “The fact that he’s going to be president scares the living crap out of me,” she writes. “Hearing all this stuff he says and the stuff he does is crazy.”

Not just you, 13-year-old friend. And not just my 72-year-old mother-in-law avoiding the news in favor of cable cooking shows.

We have entered Chapter 2, our new normal, in stunned disbelief.

MARY DUAN writes The Local Spin for Monterey County Weekly. Reach her at mary@mcweekly.com.