My late mother and I would often talk politics, especially before dinner while we cooked together, or afterwards as we delayed getting up to wash the dishes. I miss her painfully, every single day, but even more so this during this election. I want her back, I want those kitchen hours, and I want to ask her opinions on this year’s election.
In 2008, she was a strong and enthusiastic supporter of Hillary Clinton, but she felt crushed that Clinton did not receive the nomination. With her usual sharp way of expressing things, she told me that she had been thrilled that at last we might have a woman president, but then “this cute young Senator from Illinois came along and spoiled the whole thing!” I want to ask her how she feels now that Clinton’s election is almost a sure thing, but I cannot: she died not long after Obama was elected but before his inauguration.
I also want to ask how she would react to those who voted for Sanders but have not come around to support Clinton. I think she would have something to say. I have this suspicion that she, too, might not have voted for Obama in her disappointment about Clinton, and that she cast her vote for McCain or did not vote at all.
I’m sure I would not even have to ask about her reaction to the sexism and misogyny so openly expressed in this campaign. She often got angry, especially towards the end of her working career, about the million small sexist and ageist things she had to experience. She was always a feminist, she once told me, but didn’t realize it until going back to a paying job after staying at home to raise her children. Then she realized that there were words for the struggles she encountered and for the disagreeable actions of others, and knowing those words gave her power and balance.
I would, though, be careful not to ask about triggered memories, such as the ones may women have experienced after reading the accusations against Trump. Once we were watching TV news, and something or another released a long-buried memory. My mother got up and went back to her room for about a half hour, then came out, turned off the TV, and told me in the softest voice about the time her grandfather tried to rape her (those are her words). She was 16, about a year younger than when her picture (above) was taken. She never brought up the subject ever again. I believe I was the first person ever to know. Not even my father knew, I think.
So tonight I made one of her favorite dinners, and I’m writing this to delay getting up to do the dishes, and when I cast my vote in a few days I will do it thinking of her first and foremost. It will be my vote, sure, but also hers, and through my fingers she will be casting her vote for our first woman president.