My husband was the first one to notice.

“It’s in the shape of a W,” he said.

“I have a W on my thigh?” I asked.

“Yes,” he replied. “It’s definitely a W.”

On the morning of January 20, 2005, we found four red stripes crisscrossing my thigh. At the time of our discovery, the president was preparing to take the oath of office for the second time. George W. Bush had won the election with a mandate. I had voted for the other guy. Now, it appeared, I had been branded.

This wasn’t the first time national politics had gotten personal with me. The Monica Lewinsky scandal hit the airwaves during the first year of my daughter’s life, and the two of us tuned in fervidly to the most intriguing soap opera on television. The scandal unfolded like a road map to my daughter’s development. The day she rolled from her back to her side for the first time, Kenneth Starr’s report was released to the world. My daughter lunged for a stuffed ladybug that dangled near her head, and to our mutual delight, caught it while the House Judiciary Committee debated whether to begin an impeachment inquiry. Crawling coincided with the resignations of Newt Gingrich and Bob Livingston. Then on the day the president was impeached, she uttered her first “Ma-Ma.” The night I stayed up to watch pornographer Larry Flynt threaten to expose congressional hypocrisy, my daughter slept soundly through the night for the first time.

National politics and my personal life hadn’t intersected during President Bush’s first term. I never expected the kind of close-knit relationship I had had with his predecessor. After all, times had changed. But then the W appeared. The W burned. The W itched. The W was inflamed. Its ever-increasing size frightened me enough to send me to the hospital.

The week that the blizzard essentially shut down the Island was the same week that the president settled in with his mandate and I started commuting to the hospital. After my first checkup, I went home with a course of antibiotics and diagnosis of cellulitis, a bacterial infection. That evening, after the inevitable yet never recommended online search, I found out that cellulitis can spread quickly and is potentially fatal. I raced back to the hospital.

My friend Jennifer, an EMT, was standing outside the emergency room in the snow.

“Why are you here?” she asked.

“I have a W and I’m scared it’s growing,” I said while pulling down my pants. Jennifer examined the W. Snow pelted us but the W was still visible in the whiteout conditions.

I told the emergency room doctor that the W was spreading. The infection was growing. I felt sick to my stomach.

He told me that the antibiotics were causing my nausea and that the W wasn’t angry.

After several repeat performances and a change of course of antibiotics, the infection under the W started to subside, but the W remained.

“It’s not an angry rash,” doctors kept telling me.

I started dropping my pants for anyone who seemed the least bit interested in seeing the none-too-angry W that showed up on Inauguration Day. Then a friend suggested that perhaps the W wasn’t disappearing because I was angry. Maybe I was still mad because my guy had lost. Perhaps I had held out hope until Inauguration Day, when my hope was
finally squelched. I was mad at W.

And so in an attempt to heal, I have decided to make peace.

Dear Mr. President,

Thanks for the letter. But next time, there’s no need to write."