We are the children. We are the children who woke up on a Wednesday morning after listening to our parents fighting for hours the night before. Except, make that, “fighting for more than a year.” That’s what this election felt like.

Since as far back as October 2015, when Hillary Clinton, during a Democratic primary debate, boasted that she had made enemies out of Republican colleagues, and as recently as when Donald Trump called Clinton a “nasty woman,” we Americans, on the left or the right, have been pawns in a political fight. Just like children.

And like children who witness their parents’ disagreements, we’ve absorbed all the energy, emotions and anxiety that come with it. It was put into us by the candidates themselves, and then the media and the political campaigns fanned the flames until each side felt that the other was support- ing a monster.

I witnessed this myself when I watched a primary debate with my own children, and the youngest son asked, “Who’s the good guy and who’s the bad guy?”

“It’s never as simple as that,” I told him. Life is not a children’s movie.

In fact, a year ago, I wrote this in a column:

There are far less purely evil people in the world than Disney would have us believe. There is, instead, humanity — people who usually have the best of intentions, even when they make enormous mistakes. What’s good and what’s bad is not so clearly defined as a princess in white and a hunched-back ogre with a cackling laugh. Sometimes, what’s good and what’s bad co-exist together. … Unfortunately, today’s political climate isn’t much better than a simple Disney plot. Issues are separated into everyone’s own opinion of what’s good and what’s bad. People on either side of the aisle sling insults and all-or-nothing labels, as if taking a stand on one particular issue necessarily colors the entirety of a person’s moral makeup.

And then, as the year went on, the national conversation among adults devolved into who is the biggest monster.

Now, we wake up with the residual anger and frustration, and our “parents,” who have long since made amends overnight and gone about their business, are whistling in the kitchen while they make breakfast.

In case you aren’t following, those “parents” are both camps and both candidates now telling an electrified electorate that what we’ve emerged from is “just politics.” Politics is nasty, they tell us, but now it’s time to move on. Even Trump said on “60 Minutes” last week that Bill and Hillary Clinton are “good people.”

And we’re like, “Did we not just stay up late listening to how horrible each parent, I mean, side is and how our lives would be over if the other candidate was elected?”

All of this fervor and whiplash was never more apparent than in the text of a column titled “Donald Trump’s Victory Proves That America Hates Women” written for Slate by Michelle Goldberg. “All of us are grieving,” writes Goldberg, “trying to make sense of the worst thing to happen to our country in modern history.”

Really? The worst thing to happen to our country in modern history? Is Sept. 11, 2001, not “modern history”? Because that is still the worst thing that has ever happened to this country in my lifetime.

The leftover anxiety and emotion also was never more apparent than when throngs of people proclaimed to leave the United States if Trump was elected, only to turn around and change their minds a few days later. Throughout the years, I’ve watched my own sons threaten to runaway, too, and even as I humored their emotion, I asked them to stay and work through the problems, not leave them behind.

To be sure, there would have been some motivated runaways had Clinton been elected, too.

And the residual effects are apparent on social media where families are taking sides and friends are no more. All of which makes you wonder how awkward Thanksgiving might be this week.

But the truth is, on Nov. 9, 2016, we still woke up in the greatest country in the world and with freedoms for which millions would die.

And if we take the family metaphor full circle, perhaps we find wisdom in “Uncle Joe,” also known as Vice President Joe Biden, who after Hillary claimed to be making in-house enemies said, “I don’t think we should look at Republicans as our enemies. They’re our opposition, not our enemies.”

The same could be said of Democrats, too.