So here's why I've always liked Hillary Clinton, and it has a lot to do with my mom.
For a bit of age perspective, I turned twelve a month after Bill Clinton's first inaguration. The '92 campaign was the first election I really had the age and experience to give a shit about -- and was the point where I realized, in sixth grade, that my best friend since third grade was a Republican from a Dittohead family. It was also about the time I started clueing into a lot of things. (I got my first period a week before that inaguration. Ah, memories.)
My mom got married when she was twenty. My dad's a year older than she is, so she booked it through her undergraduate degree in three years so she could go through law school with him. Twenty-seven, she had her first kid; thirty, her second. Thirty-three, she was divorced. Her divorce papers were signed on their wedding anniversary.
She started her law career in a firm with four names, all of whom were old white guys. She made partner at thirty, the first woman to do so. After the divorce, she took her own last name back and kept it. She worked long hours, including going into the office the (Sunday) night before I was born (6AM Monday morning). She went back to work as soon as she could. A year into the Clinton/Gore era, she and two of her (male) co-partners left the firm and started their own.
One Christmas, she and my aunt (her older sister) each gave the other a copy of Backlash.
She had a good friend on the Board of Directors for our local Planned Parenthood, and she brought us to do volunteer shifts at their basketball-toss booth at the local festival every year. It took me years to understand why so many people passing by not only declined to play, but gave us downright dirty looks.
She was as anti-femme as she could be while still being feminine enough not to be rejected by corporate culture. She wore grey and ivory, navy blue and white, rarely bright colors, never pink. She wore heels, but not too high. She wore stud pearl earrings that came from a multi-pair card from the department store.
She rejected girly things herself and was suitably horrified (but lenient) whenever her daughters turned that direction. In a moment of eight-year-old genius, I demanded my room be painted pink ('Scherezade' was the name of the particular shade). She didn't object, but the relief was clear when only a few weeks later, I realized I'd made a terrible mistake. We had Barbies and trucks. We had gender-neutral building toys. Now that she has grandkids, she embraces this same anti-princess attitude toward her granddaughters, but falls easily into a boys-will-be-boys permissibility with her grandsons.
She is still the only female partner in her law firm, which does not offer significant maternity leave to its employees. Nearly every non-attorney employee of the firm is female. She is the one in charge of organizing anything the firm does collectively -- holiday parties, staff gifts, etc. She has never been sexually harrassed, and as such, there have been times in her past she hasn't believed women who have been.
She married my father, a yellow dog Democrat if ever there was one. She was engaged after that, to a man who broke it off; she and a friend traveled to his house in the middle of the night to leave the ring and run away. Later, she married a man who was very conservative (fiscal, much less so social); when she did, she considered taking his last name, and what was probably the major thing that stopped her was that she'd have to change her law firm's name as well. She made friends with a lot of his friends, many of whom were also very conservative (fiscal, some also social). She says someone's politics are not a dealbreaker in a romantic relationship. She remains fiercely, staunchly liberal, but at the same time will often walk away from conservative bullshit rather than challenge it.
She was not immediately comfortable when I came out. I'm still not sure she's entirely wrapped her head around my bisexuality (let alone the possibility of her own). She has two gay best friends. She and the aforementioned aunt had a semi-scoffing conversation in my earshot when my cousin began dating someone who identified as female during the first several months of their relationship, then switched to they/them pronouns. She refused for a long time to let her partnered-but-unmarried children sleep in the same bed with those partners in her house. She sent me to a (mercifully reasonable) Puberty 101 class at my church instead of doing The Talk. She didn't hesitate to approve of my being on birth control pills to control period pain.
I have watched, pretty much from the moment I knew what I was looking at, how shit it is for her to navigate a system that doesn't want her there, that never prepared her to be there. I've seen her make decisions and comments that make me cringe. I've seen her have to do stuff, sit through stuff, allow stuff, even endorse stuff that made her skin crawl -- and then stuff that made my skin crawl, while she didn't notice there was a problem.
And I know this isn't going to stop anytime soon. She's going to make shitty decisions. She's going to be insufficiently radical, if she's even radical at all. She's going to be friends with stupidly wealthy people -- closer to the .1% than the 1% -- who make financial decisions that hurt other people. She's going to participate in charity efforts that respond to immediate need without taking steps to correct systematic inequality. She's going to embarrass me and disappoint me with her views. She's going to say things that make me pray the floor will open wide and swallow me down.
But as I've watched her, I've seen her plow through shit so I don't have to. I've never seen her be cruel, only thoughtless. I've watched her change, and change her mind. I've seen her work herself into a certain place in her life by making loads of uncomfortable compromises, then I've seen her turn around and do what she can to make sure other young women never have to make the same compromises. Sometimes it's not enough, but she doesn't stop trying, or learning, or listening.
So yeah. I'll vote to put this country into the hands of an imperfect woman with a great brain and good intentions, someone who's made tough choices and big mistakes but has grown to where she's not holding the same against other women who made different ones. I can only hope that when I'm my mother's age, somebody has the grace to do half as much for me. |
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