Fathers (and mothers) of daughters

                                                                      

Ocasio-Cortez

The one thing it's probably best to avoid when you're writing a humorous blog about your mother is politics, not that the current state of things doesn't scream "write, write, write!" or just make you want to scream, period. I'm hardly qualified to address the topic, and there's nothing side-splittingly funny about where we are in this country today. But as I watched Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez address the House this week in a superb but measured take down of a boorish colleague who called her a fucking bitch, I thought of my two sons, who wouldn't think of talking to a woman that way, and not just because they have a mother or girlfriend or wife or grandmothers or aunts, blah, blah, blah. It's because they've been raised to have respect for everyone, and they grew up in an era and in a community where diversity was commonplace and gender roles had long been upended.

I also thought of my mother and father as I watched the Congresswoman, who is young enough to be my daughter. I'm the oldest of five, three of us girls. My parents raised us in an era when it was still expected that fathers went to work and mothers stayed home. That was not a hardship for my mother, who never wanted to do anything else. My father never expected to do anything but support his family, something he did in back-breaking fashion for more than 30 years. My parents encouraged college and supported my having a career before I had kids. I married a man who respected that I could take care of myself. (And who, frankly, does most of the cooking.)  

My father wasn't overtly political, but he would not have stood for his daughters being treated the way Ocasio-Cortez was. Once, as a kid, my mom sent me to the drugstore for some batteries. Make sure they're fresh, she said. So when I asked the drugstore clerk if the batteries were indeed fresh, he replied, "I don't know, squeeze 'em!" When I got home and told my parents about that, my father ran out of the house and to the drugstore so fast, I thought he would trip on the pavement. I'm not sure what Dad said to the guy, but I can imagine it wasn't about the price of batteries. I also had a maternal grandmother, God love her, who would have verbally throttled the guy. So in general, we learned to stand up for ourselves. 

So as I watched the Congresswoman, I could almost hear my mom say, "She's got guts." As you might imagine, given her propensity for malaprops, Mom is not likely to get Ocasio-Cortez's name right. She has trouble with Trump. This is the same woman who, when my nephew didn't move fast enough to help her out of the car recently, told him, "Don't just stand there with your teeth in your mouth!" I've never deigned to find out what that phrase means exactly; I'm not sure it even exists outside of Mom's tortured English. But she pays more attention to politics today than she did, or could, when we were kids. She doesn't always understand or like current events -- "I hate these damn masks! -- but she questions me constantly about "Why this?" or "Why that?"

 

She spent some time at my house recently, and when she does that, she always wants to watch TV programming I tell her I can get by talking into my remote. "Why can't I  see that?" she'll ask. I try to explain that you have to have more than three channels to watch these things. Besides back-to-back episodes of "I Love Lucy," which anyone could bond over, she asked me to show her a documentary about the late civil rights giant, John Lewis. And we watched both a feature movie and documentary about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (who I am secretly praying does not die until at least November. Oops, that was political). 

Mom is eager to learn things she hadn't thought about before. She'll watch the Decades history channel and see events she lived through, but hadn't really paid much attention to at the time. Now, she's hungry for knowledge, so I feed her.

It's better than standing there with my teeth in my mouth.