Texas Lady Longhorns fans Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, Governor Ann Richards, and Lily Adams. They were regular and relentless cheerleaders.
Our tiny New York apartment is crammed with folding tables and enough chairs to seat twenty-six (one year there were twenty-eight—the more the merrier—except that no one had enough room to get up for more pie). All three kids are home, because this is our holiday, the one where everyone shows up, no matter what. More than a few girlfriends and boyfriends have heard from my kids, “Nope, can’t go to your place for Thanksgiving.” It’s been this way for as long as I can remember. We plan for months, and after one Thanksgiving finishes, we start thinking about whether we should switch up the pies for next year. Were the two pecan pies really necessary, or should we do something wild and have a pumpkin cheesecake? Before we get together, recipes are dug out, swapped, and edited. The cheese grits recipe that my friend Jill dictated twenty-five years ago is still written in felt-tip pen on a note card. I hate to think what would happen if we lost it.
Our Thanksgiving might not be the fanciest, but it’s the best time—a time when all are welcome. We have regulars, folks who have become part of our extended family, and occasionally my siblings will arrive from Texas, or island friends will come down from Maine. We play charades and often our favorite game, where everyone has the name of a famous (or infamous) person taped to their back and has to guess who it is before we can eat. Sometimes my sister brings tamales from back home. My friend Joe Armstrong, who lived nearby, used to prepare the bird and do an annual turkey handoff to Kirk at the corner of Eighty-first Street and Central Park. From one Thanksgiving to the next, you never know exactly what’s going to happen.
On Thanksgiving or any other day of the year it doesn’t take much for our family to have a great time—all we need is a campsite and decent weather. I swore no child of mine would leave home without being able to pitch a tent, catch and clean a fish, and make a campfire, so whenever we could, we’ve squeezed in camping out and cooking over an open fire, from the Shenandoah Mountains to Big Bend National Park. To make sure they’d never starve, the kids learned to deep-fry, a dying art that we southerners are determined to preserve, and to make their own pie crust from scratch. All three kids are great cooks. Our most common group text is to figure out who has the recipe for barbecue shrimp.
• • •
When I discovered I was pregnant with Lily, I worried how on earth I was going to work as a union organizer and also be a mom. Kirk and I were living in California, both working eighteen-hour days. We had planned on having kids, but just not then. Like so many people, I was using birth control, but it wasn’t always reliable, nor was I. When I told Kirk I was pregnant, we both just sort of sat there, excited and stunned. How could we make this work? Was I going to drive across Los Angeles visiting janitors and walking picket lines with a baby strapped to my back? (The answer, as it turned out, was yes.) In the end we came to the same conclusion millions of people do: there was never going to be a “perfect” time to have kids, but just like everything else, we’d figure it out. Just as folks have done for centuries.
I was enthralled with the idea of natural childbirth, but a home birth was 100 percent out of the question. How could we birth a baby in our one-room, chaotic apartment? So I visited a natural birthing center. I was okay until I saw the birthing stool that was used to help the baby drop out. It looked like some kind of medieval torture device.
The wonderful midwife giving the tour said, “You know, sometimes everything doesn’t go as planned, so we also have a doctor for backup.”
Between the birthing stool and the image of being frantically rushed to the hospital if things went wrong, I was starting to question this whole notion. I thought fast. “Okay, well, who is the doctor?” His name was Dr. Wu, just like the Steely Dan song. I wasn’t interested in leaving anything to chance, so I immediately made an appointment with Dr. Wu, and he became my obstetrician.
There were several points of contention between Kirk and me, and naming this new baby was one of them. We didn’t know whether we were having a boy or a girl, but I loved the name Georgia. Georgia Landry was one of my favorite nursing home leaders in Beaumont—loving but tough as a boot. Kirk, the Massachusetts native who had married into some major southern influences, put his foot down. I was equally alarmed that he wanted to name a boy Derek. All I could picture was a hockey player who had lost all his teeth. No way.
Then one day Mom met me in San Francisco, where we went to see Lily Tomlin in her one-woman play, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. Her play touched me in a way that can only happen when you are seven months pregnant. Her brilliant collaborator (and now wife) Jane Wagner wrote the script, which included such gems as “I made some studies, and reality is the leading cause of stress amongst those in touch with it.” Kirk and I agreed: Lily was the perfect name for a daughter. If it was a son, I was holding out for Woodrow. But as fate would have it, we put that argument off for the next go-around.
The arrival of our Lily was lifesaving. Until then we were round-the-clock activists and organizers. We didn’t even have a goldfish or a guinea pig. We barely owned a potted plant. For the first time we had to think about something other than a union meeting or staying at the office until the wee hours of the morning. When the twins came along three years later, we had three somethings to think about.
Parenting isn’t for everyone, and I will fight to my last breath to protect every person’s right to decide whether or not to have children. But raising our three kids—Lily, Hannah, and Daniel—is, bar none, the absolute best thing I’ve ever done. I give it my highest recommendation. Suddenly everything made more sense: my work, my life, the world around me, even my own parents. And my priorities changed to accommodate this new, awesome responsibility.
As every parent learns, so much about raising kids is out of your control. Kirk and I were fortunate that all of our kids were healthy, even if each of them managed to make a trip to the emergency room for stitches before their second birthday. Many people have so much more on their parental plate than I ever did that all of the following must be taken with a grain of salt. I didn’t know—and never quite figured out—how to get my kids to make good grades, keep their rooms clean, or stick with piano lessons. Instead, these are the lessons I learned while trying to give them self-confidence and encourage them to chart their own paths and stand up for what they believe.
Nothing could have prepared me for how humbling the experience of parenting would be. It was a big transition to go from running an organizing campaign to having these three little people running just about everything else in my life. Time is precious, and I couldn’t be everywhere at once. The biggest lesson I’ve learned from raising three kids is that you never do it on your own.
For all Kirk’s and my luck, I was slightly jealous of folks who had grandparents who would take the kids for a week—or even for a night! My mom often reminded us, “I’m not the baking-cookies kind of grandma,” and she was right. And by the time Lily arrived, my father was remarried and had a newborn of his own. Take it from me: there are few weirder conversations with your father than comparing your respective success and failure at toilet training.
Fortunately we had other options. Lily grew up at the campaign office, surrounded by a clan of staff and volunteers. Legions of folks helped raise her—in fact I learned recently that one of her earliest sitters is now a nurse at Planned Parenthood—and after that she never met a stranger. Our three kids, like most, were raised by a community of caregivers—family, friends, coworkers—all of whom influenced them at least as much as their parents did.
One summer, when the twins were barely tall enough to see above the kitchen table, our friends Jennifer and Dawn were cooking hamburgers on the stove, something my kids had never seen since I don’t eat meat and do pretty much all the cooking. Hannah and Daniel peered up at the frying pan as if its contents were an exotic food from a foreign land and moments later sunk their teeth into their very first burger. They cried out in unison, “Mom, you have to try this!” I like to think having so many people around all the time expanded their horizons.
Once you have kids, you are never not a parent again—if you are fortunate, this child-raising stuff is pretty much a lifelong activity. You know that feeling, like you have no idea what you’re doing? In my experience, it never goes away. Half the time you realize you are falling back on some deeply ingrained, often bizarre and inexplicable memories from your own childhood. Honestly, are mothers and daughters genetically programmed to fight about hairstyles? I think not, but if I didn’t catch myself, it was easy to repeat verbatim things my mother said to me. “You look so pretty when I can see your eyes!” Meaning: If you don’t get your hair out of your face, I’m going to go nuts.
My mom had a lot of rules to obey when she was a child. After a hardscrabble beginning, my grandmother was determined to make sure Mom fit in with the rich kids at her school. Which included wearing the “right clothes.” My grandmother had taken in sewing during the Depression, and she made much of what Mom wore, making sure that the seams matched and that everything fit just so.
Mom carried on this tradition with me, making sure I always had the right outfit. Once, when I was in fifth grade, she relented and agreed to take me shopping to get something that looked more like what other girls my age wore for an upcoming slumber party. The red bell-bottom jeans with white polka dots and a robin’s-egg-blue jumpsuit I picked out were my first expressions of liberation. But special occasions still were her purview, and many of those outfits are permanently etched into my brain—including a truly hideous orange Christmas jacket-and-skirt combo in junior high made of what can only be described as faux Naugahyde.
In keeping with her family tradition, on holidays Mom was hell-bent on ensuring that all three of my kids would be decked out in perfectly coordinated matching outfits, from their hats to their socks. When she was governor, it was hard to object when she wanted every child in a denim jumper with a matching red cowboy hat for the photos with the pony. At Christmas she would try to get them all in a photo looking nice. That lasted about three years.
The rest of the time I was adamant that they be able to wear whatever they wanted. That resulted in some bold fashion choices, like Hannah wearing a pair of red cowboy boots with white stars nonstop for at least a year before moving on to a phase of tucking sweatshirts into her leggings. That’s how she got the nickname “Tuck” from my friend Jennifer. Lily always wanted to have long flowing hair, which she did not. So she took to wearing elastic-banded skirts on her head, which was the closest she could get to golden tresses. This was a unique look when we went to the grocery store. And then there was Daniel, who wound up wearing little to no clothing pretty much whenever he felt like it. Why do boys like to run around naked and pee outside? I’m not sure, but that was his preference. There is an infamous photo of Daniel on an early camping trip, riding a bike and wearing only a helmet and sneakers. At least we did enforce necessary safety measures.
Beyond some basic standards, it was live and let live when it came to wardrobe decisions. I like to think it freed up some mental space for us all to focus on other things.
One of the other mantras drilled into me as a child was you must try everything on your plate. Why? I have no idea. But it seemed like an immutable rule that I needed to preserve in order to raise well-rounded children. There was an unforgettable standoff between Daniel and me one evening, when I insisted that he at least try the just-picked-from-the-garden homegrown tomato at dinner. (If you have not eaten a homegrown Texas tomato, you must before you die. Or at least listen to Guy Clark’s ode to the same, which is aptly titled “Homegrown Tomatoes.”) When Daniel refused, I was going to show him who was boss! “Well then, we are just going to sit here at the table until you try it,” I declared. The girls exchanged a “Who does she think she is kidding?” look. We all ate dinner, and everyone else finished. The rest of the family was excused and went to wash up, but Daniel and I remained, locked in a celebrity death match.
Daniel was five, loved staying up all night, and didn’t have anything else to do. As far as he was concerned, this was great. So we sat there for another two hours. Finally I said something really stupid like, “Well, I have to go to work in the morning to take care of the family, so we’re just going to see next time.”
Daniel didn’t gloat—he never was that kind of kid—but he had definitely gotten the better of me. It helped me learn that arbitrary rules are made to be broken or, at the very least, questioned.
We tried hard to let the kids express themselves at an early age and to challenge convention and rules that exist just because “we’ve always done it that way.” This is how kids learn independence and to stand up for what they believe—even if they’re standing up to a tomato.
One lesson I learned immediately was how little impact parenting can have. You can do everything right, provide love and encouragement, and yet still raise a child who becomes a right-wing fanatic just to spite you—every progressive parent’s nightmare. Luckily, unless someone’s life takes a dramatic turn, I managed to avoid dealing with that particular scenario.
Having girl and boy twins is an ongoing social experiment. How could two children raised in the same family, with the same values, turn out so differently? It’s true they are fraternal twins, though if I had a nickel for every person who has asked Hannah and Daniel if they are identical twins I’d be a rich woman! (That’s actually not possible for a girl and boy. Think about it.) I quickly saw that they also had their own unique approaches to life.
Hannah was, from the jump, a thoughtful observer. She still is to this day, which makes her a great organizer. She was always strategizing, figuring out how to make her ice-cream cone last the entire car ride home, while her brother and sister scarfed theirs down in the first few minutes. She worked hard at school and was up for anything. My friend Sandra Castellanos said on practically the day she was born, “Hannah is an old soul. This is not her first time around in the world.”
Daniel, on the other hand, wanted to do only what he wanted to do, which mainly consisted of running around outside and watching TV. In fact it seemed like there was a microchip in his brain that directly connected to the television, and for several years before he decided to read, this was his source of all information. One morning he walked into the kitchen while I was getting breakfast ready and asked, “Mom, did you know there is a chocolate cereal?”
“No, Daniel, I guess not.”
“Well, there is, and it’s part of a complete breakfast.” Kellogg’s advertising was created for Daniel.
Later that year we were buying Christmas presents for a family we had adopted for the holidays. Reading through the list of what their kids were hoping for, I asked, “Hannah and Daniel, the girl in this family wants a Teacher Barbie—have you heard of that?”
Daniel didn’t miss a beat. “Yes, I have! Teacher Barbie comes with two outfits, batteries sold separately.”
Once they started school, it was abundantly clear Hannah was made for kindergarten, and Daniel wasn’t quite ready for so many rules. Sitting in one place and paying attention ran contrary to every instinct he had. When I was called in for Daniel’s parent-teacher conference I was told there was a big problem: Daniel refused to learn his colors. He was five.
I don’t know why she felt so strongly, but his teacher was definitely disturbed. I was amused. “Well,” I said, “I’m pretty sure he is going to learn them when he wants to, and definitely before he goes to college.” The same was true with learning to read, doing homework, and paying attention in class. All the way through high school. Daniel just did things in his own sweet time. Eventually he did learn his colors. Not only that—he became a chemist, and he’s now studying for his PhD. The irony is not lost on any of us that he’s the most educated person in the family.
My mother grew up in a time when most women didn’t have many options; you could be a teacher, a secretary, a domestic worker, or a nurse, and that was pretty much it. My kids, though, grew up seeing women in charge. Our life was such a matriarchy that when Daniel was three he said, “When I grow up, I want to be a woman.” This was less gender confusion than gender envy. The women he knew were in power, doing important and cool things.
While I grew up playing half-court basketball, the twins were nine months old and in a Snugli when they began going to see the University of Texas Lady Longhorns basketball team. Lily and her friend Amanda even had the honor of wiping up the basketball court floor during time-outs. At the time, the longest-serving women’s basketball coach, Jody Conradt, had the winningest record for a college women’s team. We were season ticket holders, as was everyone we knew. In those days, if they had dropped a bomb on the Erwin Center during a Lady Longhorns game, every lesbian and progressive in Austin would have perished.
Mom and her friend Barbara Jordan, then in a wheelchair, would sit courtside and cheer like teenagers. Barbara took the sport seriously and did not go easy on the women when their game was off. You could hear her voice thundering from the sidelines, just as if she were back in the middle of the Watergate hearings: “Women, can we not shoot any better than this?” It wasn’t until they were much older that the twins learned men played basketball too.
Still, as far as we had come, the stereotyping of boys and girls from the earliest age was heartbreaking. The teacher in Hannah and Daniel’s kindergarten class gave out “awards” at the end of the year. For the girls? “Most helpful to the teacher” and “Friendliest student.” The boys’ diplomas were very different: “Most likely to invent something” and “Best in math.” It was maddening, part of a pattern we fought hard to break.
Texas Lady Longhorns fans Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, Governor Ann Richards, and Lily Adams. They were regular and relentless cheerleaders.
When we moved to Washington, DC, Hannah joined the Girl Scouts. I too had been a member back in the day, and my memories were of camping and working for badges, in addition to sewing baby blankets for the local hospital. Hannah, though, spent the Girl Scout year doing three things: getting ready for the cookie sale, selling the cookies, and tabulating the sales. I’m sure this is not the experience of every Girl Scout troop, but meanwhile Daniel was in the Cub Scouts, and he didn’t have to sell a thing. Daniel and I carved a car for the Pinewood Derby and competed with Cub Scouts from all around the area. His den was taking bike rides along the C&O Canal, learning about rocket ships from astronauts, and volunteering at Loaves and Fishes, the local soup kitchen. When the Cub Scouts decided to discriminate against LGBTQ kids and leaders and we decided to drop out, Daniel was disappointed, but I was devastated—I lived for those Pinewood Derby competitions!
Finally one day I’d had it. I said to Hannah, “What if we started our own organization, one where we didn’t have to sell cookies and could do the cool kinds of things the Cub Scouts do?”
Hannah was game, so along with a half dozen of her friends from her fourth grade class, we got ourselves organized. The girls met and determined they needed a name and a T-shirt. They decided to call themselves the Future Women Presidents, and one of the artistic moms in the group, Cindy Jaffe, designed the shirts. They went camping and learned how to make a fire and cook outdoors. They painted a mural at a community center. They hiked, recycled, visited the Museum of Women in the Arts, and then, through a miraculous series of events, got to visit the White House and even the press briefing room. It seemed only fitting for the Future Women Presidents!
As the girls moved out of elementary school and into junior high, the FWP dissolved. I still think if we had stuck with it, we could have gone national. I recently came across an old photo of the Future Women Presidents, now all women in their twenties. It’s nice to think that early on they had the chance to think big thoughts, learn some self-sufficiency, and be proud of the women they would become. One just received her master’s degree in public health, working on reproductive health care. Another is working with a food kitchen. They are scattered from San Francisco to South Africa, and it has been wonderful to see them grow into confident women. And the Girl Scouts? These days they’re on the move, teaching girls math and science, business and leadership skills.
I know all three kids secretly wished that at least once, on “career day” at Lafayette Elementary School, one of their parents was a firefighter or librarian or something they knew how to explain to their friends. By that time Kirk was neck-deep in labor organizing and I was fighting for reproductive rights. We were always going up against some tough adversary, and the dinner table conversation was usually about some injustice somewhere or our overwhelming frustration with the political scene in Washington. George W. Bush was president, and had recently nominated Samuel Alito and John Roberts to the Supreme Court, so we were in constant battle.
One day Daniel came home and announced that his third grade classroom had been talking about what they wanted to be when they grew up. He had decided he wanted to be a potter.
Daniel had not shown the slightest talent or interest in anything artistic. “That’s great, Daniel!” I said. “What a fascinating thing to do. How did you decide that?”
“Because, Mom, nobody doesn’t like a potter.”
A little bit of my heart broke that night, and I realized how much he and his sisters had internalized some of the toughest parts of life as an activist. Daniel was learning that going up against the powers that be means there will always be someone who doesn’t like what you’re doing. That’s the life Kirk and I chose. As a result the kids learned that not everyone is going to love you, and that’s okay.
Years later, instead of becoming a potter, Daniel headed off to Allegheny College in rural western Pennsylvania. He also became an activist and learned to stand up for his beliefs, which didn’t always match up with the beliefs of his classmates or the campus administration. I’m pretty sure he is the first and only Allegheny student to both chair his fraternity’s social committee and serve as the vice president of the reproductive rights organization. One of his proudest moments (and mine) was his fight to get reproductive health services on campus. Daniel called me to say he’d met with the head of the school clinic. “We went in to talk to her, because, Mom, they won’t even prescribe birth control for students, and it’s hard to get it off campus. I told her that, honestly, kids weren’t breaking their legs every weekend, but they were having sex.”
Eventually the campus agreed to provide prescriptions for birth control for students, a major win. Daniel went on to help organize “slut walks” and the sex fair at Allegheny, where they attracted the attention of the Drudge Report for holding a session on female orgasm in the school chapel. I called Daniel to congratulate him when I saw the headline. His explanation? “She was the most popular speaker, and the chapel was the biggest meeting space we could find.” That’s my boy!
My life as a mom did not break neatly into “work” and “parenting.” For many years it was just one big blur. Like so many parents, I put my kids in day care the minute it was a possibility. Working for the union, I had three months of unpaid leave, though Kirk had none. As soon as my leave ended, I had to go back to work. I wasn’t ready. In fact driving away after dropping Lily off at the sitter that first morning, I wept uncontrollably. And I was one of the lucky ones. It is unconscionable that this country still has no paid parental leave.
I remember leaving the twins at day care one morning, only to hear on NPR as I drove away about a new study confirming that 90 percent of how your kids will turn out is determined in the first three years of life. I slammed on the brakes, thinking, “I’ve got to go back and get them right now, before it’s too late to make a difference!” But then I realized that because they were then nearly three and a half, it was likely a lost cause already.
Kirk and I moved to Washington in 1998 because we both agreed it was time to see something other than Texas. (The children wept when we said we were moving across the country, but after we moved, they had a whole new set of friends and experiences, and it was fine.) There wasn’t an obvious job for me in DC. One day I sat all three kids down and asked, “What do you guys think about me maybe not going back to work? I could be here in the afternoon when you got off from school. We could do stuff together!”
They looked horrified. I’m sure they could count on one hand the days I had taken off from work to be with them, and the thought of my being at home was crazy. They had been raised to be independent and take care of each other, and they weren’t interested in giving up their freedom. I certainly couldn’t blame them for that. Besides, I think they knew, even at that young age, that it was in nobody’s best interest for me to have extra time on my hands. So that answered that.
Still, until I found a job, it was hard to be an organizer with nothing to organize. So I volunteered to make the costumes for the sixth grade play, The Wiz. Every sixth grader had to be in it—it was not optional. Since she could sing, Lily scored a plum role as Glinda and would share the stage with about sixty other kids. Everyone had multiple roles (requiring multiple costumes), which meant, among other feats, securing ten leather jackets for the Winged Monkeys and hot-gluing glitter and felt stars to dozens of T-shirts for the grand finale. I was in organizing heaven!
Just a week before the performance, I got a call from former senator Tim Wirth of Colorado, asking if I could meet with him and a couple of people about a possible job. I didn’t know him and had no idea how he’d gotten my number, but as they say, the show must go on. “Sure, that would be great,” I replied, “but it would need to be Thursday, because today I’m getting ready for dress rehearsal, and the Munchkin costumes aren’t finished.”
There was silence on the other end of the line. “Well, I guess we can wait. We’ll see you tomorrow then,” said the senator.
I rushed downtown Thursday right after a less-than-perfect dress rehearsal. There was still glitter all over my hands from last-minute touch-up work, and I realized too late that I didn’t have a pair of panty hose without a run in them. Looking pretty much the worse for wear, and still preoccupied with how I was going to attach all those wings to the leather jackets for the monkeys, I walked into Wirth’s office. Sitting in the room with him were Ted Turner and Jane Fonda. They were looking for an organizer to work on reproductive rights for their foundation. I’m not certain whether the organizing skills I’d demonstrated by corralling all those sixth graders into costumes clinched it, but that couldn’t have hurt, because they hired me on the spot. That crazy day confirmed one of my mom’s favorite admonishments: Never turn down a new opportunity. And for every parent who has organized a PTA meeting or coordinated volunteer shifts for the silent auction, know this: Those skills will serve you well.
I know even as I write this that some people aren’t going to like it. But this is the truth: No matter how evolved you are, no matter your family makeup or the gender roles in your home, in any family with kids, someone has to remember birthdays, make lunches, keep track of doctor’s appointments, give pep talks, and coordinate after-school activities and holidays. For most of history, and often to this day, the default expectation has been that those responsibilities are women’s work.
There are all kinds of families. Sometimes “the mom” isn’t a mom at all. Sometimes it’s a dad or a grandparent, an uncle, an older brother, or a sister. The point is, someone has to keep the wheels on the whole operation. If you’re a man reading this and thinking, That has nothing to do with gender, ask the women in your life if it sounds familiar.
Kirk and I agreed from the get-go that we were going to take turns, and for the most part it has worked. At different junctures in our careers, one of us has been the one to work regular hours, uproot their life for the other one’s job, rush to pick up a sick kid from school. And honestly, more often than not it has been Kirk. Those responsibilities are always there, and someone is always going to assume the lion’s share. And if you can find someone who recognizes that and is willing to trade off with you, you’ve got it made.
Lily never had a choice. At age three she went straight from janitors’ picket lines in Los Angeles to the middle of Mom’s campaign for governor. Our life was at work with her grandmother, or Mammy, as she called her. Letters to the Tooth Fairy were written on a typewriter in the campaign office, and she was probably the only preschooler who entertained herself by signing “Ann Richards” over and over again with the autopen.
Though Hannah and Daniel didn’t arrive until after Mom’s election, they made up for lost time, as everyone around them either worked for the governor or on an issue she was embroiled in. By the time they were old enough to read, they were helping out at the Texas Freedom Network office, stuffing envelopes or making copies. Campaign offices are chaotic places, and so was TFN; there were always volunteers dropping by, mailings to be sent out, or lists of people to call.
When you think about it, a campaign is a great place to pick up new skills. Early on, kids can learn to alphabetize, since there is nothing like sorting a mailing list to nail the ABCs. And then there are the essential etiquette and people skills. As Daniel, an experienced phone-banker, will tell you, people may not always be happy to hear from you if you’re the twelfth call they have gotten reminding them to vote. Remaining cheerful and persistent, despite verbal abuse, will always come in handy. And recruiting volunteers and raising money are evergreen skills no matter your future path.
I believe every kid should know how to speak in front of people, especially at their door, about supporting a candidate or cause they believe in. When Hannah was in high school she and I went door to door for President Obama during the final week of the 2008 campaign in Florida. It was an hour before the polls closed on Election Day, and Hannah had just one more door to knock on. The man who answered told her Barack Obama was born in Africa, and he was not getting his vote. Hannah’s eyes welled up with tears as she explained that he was actually born in Hawaii.
“Well, I’m not going to vote for him anyway,” he said, and stomped back inside. Nothing like a door slamming in your face to toughen you up.
Campaigning teaches you about winning and losing and, probably most important, that you never get ahead unless you try. Lily still says it was Mom’s first campaign that taught her anything is possible if you’re willing to step up and give it a shot. No one thought Ann Richards could overcome the odds and become governor. The only reason she did is because she, and a bunch of others, never gave up. From her second campaign we learned that you don’t always win, but it’s worth the fight. And of course the greatest thing about working on campaigns, marching, and organizing is getting to do something important with people who share your passion.
One of my best memories is marching with my mom and kids in Washington with the Texas delegation at the national March for Women’s Lives in 2004. Today there is nothing much better than seeing parents at a Planned Parenthood rally with a little kid in tow. I can’t help but smile to think of the stories that kid will be able to tell one day about learning to take a stand even before they could walk. Children learn not from what you tell them, but from what they see you do, how you spend your days and what you do with your life. I’m glad Lily, Hannah, and Daniel got to see early on that politics works best when it’s not a spectator sport.
Having a mom who worked for Planned Parenthood came in handy for my kids more than once. At the very least, by the time they were in high school, our apartment was where one could always find condoms.
It was also Planned Parenthood that provided the twins their first organizing opportunities. In 2011, when Congress turned on us and the efforts to shut down Planned Parenthood really took off in Washington (with a little help from Congressman Mike Pence, who will always have a special place in my heart), both Hannah and Daniel were in college.
Hannah called me, agitated. “Everyone at school is really upset about this defunding of Planned Parenthood, but I don’t really know what to do. We just have to do something.”
“Students all over the country are getting involved right now. How about you organize something on campus?” I suggested.
We hung up, and the next week I got a notice that the students at Wesleyan were holding a rally of support for Planned Parenthood. I knew right away: that was Hannah. She’d just gotten it together—created a Facebook event, hung posters around campus, told everyone she knew, and remembered to call some reporters a day or two before the event. Hundreds of people packed into a hall on campus, plus overflow rooms. Senator Richard Blumenthal and the school president, Michael Roth, even showed up to speak. After the rally a bunch of Wesleyan students made an amazing video in support of Planned Parenthood, titled I Have Sex—you better believe it went viral.
Daniel knew what was happening from the news, but that was about all I was sure of. One Saturday I was racing downtown in New York to speak at a Planned Parenthood rally when I got a text. “Hey Mom, I’m in a car with some kids from Allegheny. We’re driving to Ohio to a rally for Planned Parenthood. I love you.” It was from Daniel.
My first reaction was totally emotional: here was my happy-go-lucky son, getting in a car to spend his weekend fighting for Planned Parenthood. But my second thought was Wow, if Daniel is driving to Ohio, then this is a movement, and we are going to win. (Which we did, thanks in no small part to young people who organized on campuses across the country.) Today Daniel is a chemist, but also a lifelong political activist, and proud of it.
Hannah decided to become a full-time organizer, working on environmental justice and commonsense gun reform, among other causes. If anyone is taking up the family business, it’s her. She’s experienced the pains of coalition building just as Kirk and I did when we were trying to organize New Orleans back in the day. How do you get groups to see their shared interest on some issue when they may have nothing else in common? Every now and then I get a call from her ahead of some big community hearing or after an organizing mishap, and my heart skips a beat. We are constantly brainstorming organizing strategies, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I have such enormous love and respect for her.
And Lily? Well, she picked up where her grandmother left off. I tease her that her public profile peaked at age one and a half, when Mom mentioned her in the Democratic keynote speech in Atlanta. That night Kirk was wandering around the convention hall wearing a homemade button that said “Lily’s Dad.” Mom, meanwhile, was eager to pass on all the important life skills she had spent years learning: If you can’t remember someone’s name, you can always call them “honey.” Never wear patterns on TV. And for heaven’s sake, before you name your kid, think about how it will look on a bumper sticker or billboard.
Lily remembers those Ann Richards lessons like nobody I know, and they’ve served her well in politics. She’s worked for US senators, worked on campaigns, won and lost. And who could have guessed that her early experience at Baylor would turn out to be such good training when, in her twenties, she found herself a target of Rush Limbaugh on his radio show. Now that’s a story. Limbaugh had said that men shouldn’t be criticized for ogling women’s breasts, but should instead tell women, “Will you please ask your breasts to stop staring at my eyes?” Lily was working at the Democratic National Committee and sent an email calling on Republican leaders to stop going on Limbaugh’s show. Next thing we knew, Rush was yelling about Lily Adams, even reading her email on the air in a mocking little-girl voice. Lily was unfazed; she couldn’t believe he took the bait.
The best is when we all join forces for a cause. President Obama’s historic campaign in 2008 was a family project. All three kids volunteered, even though the twins weren’t old enough to vote. Like millions of other young people, they got a front-row seat to the power of grassroots organizing and the importance of elections. Kirk and I and the kids were scattered across the country in the last week of the campaign. On Election Day, Hannah and I were in Florida, Lily was door-knocking in New Hampshire, Kirk was in Virginia, and Daniel was back home in New York City. Every few hours Kirk managed to organize a family-wide check-in to compare notes. I’m not sure how many other families were getting on a recurring conference call. On our last call of the night, when we realized Obama had won, Daniel ran out into the streets of New York City with thousands of others to celebrate. Of all the marches and campaigns we’ve done as a family, nothing will ever match being at Obama’s first inauguration together, watching history unfold.
We were back at it in 2012, each of us in a different state for the reelection campaign. Lily was working on Tim Kaine’s senate race in Virginia, and I wound up in Richmond on Election Day, on leave from Planned Parenthood to help get out the vote. Along with my friend Shamina Singh, I spent the day phone-banking as if my life depended on it. After we got through our call lists, we headed out to knock on doors in the suburbs, where women were getting their neighbors to watch their kids so they could run over and vote after work. As the polls closed, we stopped at campaign headquarters to check in on Lily.
“We finished our walk lists and phones calls—is there anything else we can do?” I asked.
Lily looked around. “Is there anything else?” she called over to the field team.
“Well, there are a few polling places where people are still outside, waiting to vote,” someone answered. “The election officers have to keep the polls open if folks are in line.”
Before they could finish, Shamina and I were getting our coats on. First we headed to the closest Krispy Kreme and bought ten dozen donuts and some boxes of coffee. Then we drove to the closest polling place, where we poured coffee and handed out donuts to the people who were standing out in the cold, waiting for their turn to vote. They were elderly folks, women with kids in their arms, students doing their homework as they held the line. We sent a picture back to Lily at the office. It was the perfect election night.
Kirk and I have been really lucky. Despite the fact that our kids grew up on picket lines, in campaign offices, and at day care—or, I like to believe, because of it—they’re good people, and each is working in their own way to make a difference. They are funny and kind, and they are patient with their parents, who have often put organizing ahead of clean clothes or sitting down for dinner at regularly scheduled times.
At the end of the day all we can do is make sure that once our kids are launched, they have the basic life skills that are necessary for survival and joy.
Most of all, I hope my kids, and all kids, have the confidence and opportunity to follow their own path in life—to take risks and do what makes them happy. And if, in the meantime, they change the world along the way, so much the better.
On one of countless adventures with Daniel, Hannah, Lily, and Kirk. Cape of Good Hope, 2016.