This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Near the end of my daughter's last school year, her father and I entered the narrow conference room in the school's front office and joined the 10 educators and staff already crowded around it. I pulled out the ream of bound paper they'd mailed me — her most recently updated individualized education plan (or IEP) report — and held a pen over the first page, poised to annotate it as they each discussed the sections they'd written about my kid.
I've never felt as much a part of a bureaucracy as I did when I started attending IEP meetings. I didn't consider myself a creature of politics before becoming a parent. I'd vote my conscience and interests during election seasons and keep my distance from the particulars of policy, promises and rhetoric otherwise.
But then my child was assessed as having learning and developmental differences, and scores of educational decision-makers came into our lives, immediately making clear just how much sway they would hold over her long-term fate. Quarterly, they delivered reams of paper with progress percentages, policies and recommendations for future action. And I had to become fluent in that policy, at once authoritative, influential, sympathetic and protective.
That's when it hit me: Motherhood is politics. It draws you out of any ideological hiding place you may have, makes you responsible not just for the physical health and well-being of other people but also for their actual governance.
For 18 to 21 years, I will likely be entering conference and board rooms, lobbying for the best academic placements and supports for my daughter, occasionally against the recommendations of everyone else in the room. I'll have to persuade people with influence to see what I see when I look at her: someone capable of greater challenges than she's being given, someone who is as prepared — though she may not seem it — for self-advocacy at school as she is when she's vocal and adamant on her own behalf at home, someone more dynamic than a public school system may be ready to give her credit for.
It has made sense to me, then, while watching this year's Democratic National Convention, that so many people have focused on Hillary Clinton's strengths as a mother in their campaign speeches and testimonials. Both first lady Michelle Obama, who declared that Clinton had raised her daughter "to perfection," and former President Bill Clinton, who made a point of stating that his wife had done a "pretty fine job of being a mother," deemed it essential to give Clinton's parenting particular emphasis in their speeches. That theme has echoed through anecdotes from Jelani Freeman, a lawyer who first met Hillary Clinton after a harrowing childhood in foster care, and Ryan Moore, who first met Clinton at age 7 and shared that she was attentive enough as a nurturer to remember small details of the frequent surgeries he underwent as a result of a rare form of dwarfism.
This campaign-level emphasis on Hillary Clinton as Exceptional Maternal Figure is relatively new. During her 2008 presidential run, she and her team focused on her considerable professional experience and impressive work résumé. Given the achievements she could cite then, that should've been enough. But now that she's clinched the Democratic nomination, now that she's closer than ever to becoming the first woman to hold the highest office in U.S. government, her experience as a mother is being given attention that is equal to, if not greater than, her career record.
As a woman, I see how that could rankle many female voters. Since the era of women's suffrage, we've been asking that our intellect and agency be considered at least alongside — if not above — our emotion and our relational connections to men and to children.
But as a mother, I get it. The campaign feels the need to remind us of Clinton's wins as a mom because those gains are every bit as political as her office and fieldwork. The Clinton campaign needs the public to consider the venerable, overqualified, brilliant legal eagle as a woman capable of simultaneously excelling at remembering when a little boy's back brace will be removed, hovering in a daughter's freshman dorm room at drop-off, having fiercely protected that daughter's privacy at the most difficult time in their family's lives. Those are also venerable accomplishments. They're ones that, admittedly, are never emphasized in most men's political campaigns, but then, most male candidates don't have as strong a record of hands-on, school-and-schoolyard-bureaucracy-fighting, stroke-a-sobbing-daughter's-hair-after-a 14-hour-day-fighting-the-system parenting.
Clinton's mothering experience isn't a main reason I'd vote for her, but it's comforting to be reminded of it. It's validating to know that the often invisible labor mothers perform, in tandem with highly visible, equally taxing labor, is considered valuable. It does belong to the same women-in-governance conversation. Excelling at it should be listed among other essential career achievements. Motherhood is as political a position as any elected office.