I had a vision, in 2016, that I’ve had a hard time letting go of. I imagined walking into my 9-month-old son’s bedroom the morning after the election, newspaper in hand, and saying softly, “Madame President.” I wanted those words to be imprinted in his young brain from before his memories began, to flow from his lips as naturally as breathing.
It didn’t, of course, work out that way. Equity was not my son’s birthright. We have lost less than others in these past two years. We have our passports, our health insurance, our rights, our lives. Clean water flows from our taps. We walk down the street peacefully, smiling at our neighbors. What we have lost is something less tangible: complacency. A sense of easy belonging. Trust.
In his two and a half years of life, my older son has gone to the polls five times. He has learned to wave signs at rallies, to cheer and to march, and to knock on his neighbor’s doors and hand them flyers. He has learned to yell at the radio, too, to echo his parents in asking, “what happened to those babies?” Equity is not his birthright. But he will know, naturally as breathing, that compassion is his duty.
My son has never heard the words “Madame President.” But he has gone door-to-door with his town’s state representative and seen her photograph in the newspaper. The first governor he remembers will be a woman he helped elect. Yesterday morning, my husband said to him, “This is it, kiddo! Democracy day!”
“I’m ready, Dada!” he replied. “My hands are free.”