How to Talk to Your Mom When She's Not Sure if She's #WithHer
For months, I'd managed to avoid talking with my mom about the election. The topic felt as panic-inducing as her talking about having sex with my dad. I knew it had to happen at some point, just as I knew she was probably voting for Donald Trump, but I didn't want to hear her say the words.
We'd disagreed on past presidential elections and party affiliations, but this year felt more fraught, more personal, more a test of core principles. By early September, it was no longer cliché to disagree with your parents over politics, it was disturbing.
She'd returned from a cocktail party wearing a button with a 'NO' symbol over Hillary Clinton's face.
Sensing this, she'd skirted the topic and left me to my assumptions. I knew, for example, that when I was home from college, she'd returned from a cocktail party wearing a button with a 'NO' symbol over Hillary Clinton's face. (Clinton was running for the Senate at the time.) I knew she was a registered Republican who usually supported her party. I knew she thought Rudy Giuliani cleaned up New York City and Ivanka Trump's poise reflected her father's capabilities. When she was sent mass emails with suspiciously colorful fonts linking tax hikes, widespread terrorism, and anti-Semitism to the current administration, she was concerned enough to pass those emails along.
I also knew that in early September, when her friends and family talked of Trump's demagoguery at the Rosh Hashanah dinner table, she remained silent.
"You know mom's voting for Trump," my older sister later said with the authority of her birth order. "She's undecided," I countered, repeating my mother's dinner table stance, just as unconvincingly as she'd delivered it.
Then, the Saturday after Rosh Hashanah, the country awoke to Donald Trump's boasts about groping women in a 2005 Access Hollywood tape.
So many potentially discrediting moments barely made a dint in this campaign: his racist rhetoric about Muslim-Americans and Mexican immigrants, mocking the disabled, retweeting anti-Semitic sentiments, dismissing African-American voters, attacking a Gold Star family, creepy comments about his daughter, not releasing his tax forms, the housing discrimination settlement, Trump University, reports of sexism on The Apprentice set, the entire Birtherism movement, and on and on. In the past, Trump had been excused, sheltered even, under the "tell it like it is" canopy, and I hadn't expected that to change, no matter what he'd said on a hot mic. I was wrong.
"I wanted you to be the first to know, I won't be giving that man my vote," my mom said, over the phone, the weekend that the tapes surfaced, as her TV hummed in the background.
Later, as Trump's polls were diving, I asked her what had changed for her. "It was hearing him, off-camera-not just reading a quote, but actually hearing how he talked to other men about women," she said over the phone, days before the final debate. "I just had a gut reaction, it triggered me." In fact, it triggered many women to share stories of sexual assault and harassment, and brought to light new allegations against Trump.
For my mother, the video reminded her of a buried childhood memory. "I was a little girl walking down the street with my mother and this man was following us in his car. He was harassing my mother, but I remember she didn't say anything. She just clutched her groceries to her chest, frightened."
I asked her why that memory, in particular, resurfaced.
"I guess hearing Trump's comments just reminded me how I grew up in a world like that-where men could say or do anything to women and women weren't encouraged to speak up," she said. "It's what made fathers say 'get married,' because then you had a man to protect you from other men."
If you ask my mother whether she's a feminist, she will confirm that she is, only after clarifying that she doesn't like to fight. Raised in Queens, New York, in the late '50s and early '60s, she defied her parents' urges to marry after high school, and instead, attended a four-year college. ("They didn't think I needed to go to college, because I was girl.")
But by the early '70s, as the women's movement began to reshape the country, she was already married to my dad and starting a family. By then, she'd experienced her share of sexism in the workplace and rather than fighting it, she'd put her stock in my father's career.
"People didn't hire me for long-term work, because it was expected you'd be making babies soon and you accepted it, or I did."
She described herself as "on the cusp" of the women's movement-she believed in it, but also believed in her parents' perceptions of gender roles. As she put it, "I still respected a strong-willed man."
I asked if that was why she was initially intrigued by Trump.
"I don't trust politicians and with Trump, I thought, finally somebody was outing them all."
"I don't trust politicians and with Trump, I thought, finally somebody was outing them all," she said. "But in that minute I heard his comments with Billy Bush, I saw that he would change the whole dialogue of this country. I thought, he's really incapable of seeing a woman as a person. He sees her as flesh. If he were President, he could take women back maybe 50 years and put us all back in a box."
I had never, before this phone-call, heard her speak passionately about women's equality, particularly with respect to politics. But perhaps I just hadn't been listening or asking the right questions. If I had, I would have learned that we shared some opinions-she's pro-choice, for paid family leave and closing the wage gap-but she hadn't prioritized gender-related issues when it came to backing a candidate, or felt her rights as a woman were under attack, until now. For her, it wasn't Clinton who prompted this change, but Trump.
"Mom," I said. "One more question. Do you feel like I don't listen to you?"
"Well, I try to not talk about politics with you because it's very unsettling," she said. "I just want to have a nice time. But I do feel censored. I feel like our voices diminish constantly as we get older, nobody wants to hear what we have to say."
"I try to not talk about politics with you because it's very unsettling."
At this point, she was referencing herself and my father, both now in their seventies, but it called to mind another "we." Those Boomer women, like my mother, who've been dismissed by political candidates, entertainment and media executives, daughters at dinner tables. Those who grew up on the cusp of the women's movement without benefiting from its lasting impact, whose choices straddled two different Americas, whose voices were long stifled, overridden or labeled "nasty" if they spoke passionately of their opinions, and who, by their sixties and seventies, were treated as invisible by the world at large. As The Washington Post's Petula Dvorak wrote in October, Hillary Clinton, herself in her late sixties, "is confounding America because she represents a demographic that our culture secretly dislikes: older women."
And yet, their opinions matter greatly to this race. "Older women voters-particularly women of the Boomer Generation-could help decide this election," AARP's executive vice president Nancy LeaMond said in a statement released just before Trump's lewd tape surfaced. "Yet many of their real concerns are being ignored and their questions overlooked in a largely issueless campaign."
Retirement, taxes, care-giving, education were among those concerns, according to the September AARP poll, which also reflected Clinton's strong lead with women voters over 50. After the tape was released and gender-related issues moved to the forefront of the debates, Clinton's lead among women overall increased, with independent voters and even some Trump supporters helping to close the gap.
In a CBS News poll released shortly after the tape aired, 46 percent of women and almost half of women age 65 or older, thought Trump didn't respect women. The week following the tape's release, Clinton had taken a 20 point lead among women, according to a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. In a closer look at the numbers, Clinton took a six-point lead in swing states, largely due to Republican women who'd dropped their support of Trump in the wake of the tape's release.
My mother's reaction coincided with a larger shift in support for Clinton, one that could determine this election. I hadn't expected that. I hadn't expected her to be open to changing her views at all. For so long, I'd dismissed her opinion because I disagreed with it. But her opinion matters in this election, and after hearing the way sexism has both influenced and informed her life, I realize how much it matters to me. Dismissing her follows a pattern she's experienced far too long. And if this race has taught me anything, it's that women still have to fight to be heard.
While she remains wary of Clinton, my mom was impressed by her debate performances and recognizes now there is too much at stake in this election to vote against her. And perhaps, she said during our call, having a woman in the White House, will open more doors for other women.
"Don't you and your sister count me out," she said. "I know some things." Then she asked if we were all done talking. "I need to go make Daddy some coffee."
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