My state’s legislature is just 17 percent female. I’m running to help change that.
PERSPECTIVE | This campaign is how I provide purpose to my kids
“Look, I’m Josie Raymond,” my 2-year-old tells me as he attaches a magnetic “Josie Raymond for State Representative” button to his tiny T-shirt. He waddles into the bathroom to show his dad. “Dad, I’m Josie Raymond.”
He doesn’t say, “Look, I’m mommy.”
For him, mommy and the candidate are separate creatures. At a speech I gave recently, he watched for about a minute before going back to his crayons.
If only I could separate the roles so easily.
When I launched my campaign for Kentucky State Representative last summer, I knew a few things: that it was worth doing, that I could do it well, and that it would be incredibly demanding for my family, which includes 2-year-old Kurt and 4-year-old Pippy.
But the very things that make it hard for me and other mothers — the structural reasons that so many of our elected officials are wealthy, white, older male lawyers — are good reasons to run for office. And record numbers of women are running.
We need representatives who pay for childcare and birth control, who have to ask off work to file paperwork to get on the ballot, who are tackling their own students loans before thinking about college savings for their children. In Kentucky, less than 17 percent of our state legislature is female, and even fewer are mothering small children.
There have been comments along the way. One young woman advised me to freeze casseroles so my children would have hearty meals during the harried days of the campaign.
My deadpan reply: “I’m not the one who cooks for them as it is.”
At a political cookout, the retiring incumbent, who was in office when his children were young, wanted to make absolutely sure I knew that the job would require long days and nights during the legislative session. “Not a problem,” I told him.
A helpful campaign operative who gave me advice about fundraising didn’t like that I was doing my “call time” — calling friends and acquaintances to ask for contributions — on my 20-minute drive from work to daycare. “You need to be in front of a computer, where you can track the donation and send the follow-up email immediately.”
Oh, I realized, this person doesn’t have children. A parent can quickly tell someone who has excused herself from a conference call to wipe a butt from someone who hasn’t.
What has surprised and delighted me is that, at the thousands of doors we’ve knocked on so far, not one voter has asked who’s taking care of my children or how they’re coping with the campaign. If anything, people are not focusing enough on my kids. Can’t they tell how fantastically cute they are and what a good job I do brushing their teeth?
More than anyone else, I’m the one thinking about balancing a political campaign with motherhood (and a full-time job and my marriage).
I think about how to talk about and photograph my children so it’s enough, but not too much. They’re on my website, but not the homepage. They’re on the card I hand out to voters and tuck into crevices around mailboxes and screen doors, but they’re on the back.
I think about how to dress them, cute but not too cute, because in a campaign centered around engagement and authentic conversations I don’t want to pretend that one of them doesn’t have crumbs in their hair. I think about how my mission in this campaign is to create a more inclusive and equitable Kentucky for their generation, but I also just hope they call me once a week after they move out.
The kids of course don’t care at all that their mom is campaigning. They’re used to me having meetings and missing dinner and bedtime. Dad is funnier, anyway, and makes the best cheesy eggs. They’re tickled to imagine me tiptoeing into their rooms to kiss them while they sleep. “Did you tell them I was trying to help people?” I ask my husband when I get home. “Oh, yeah, yeah, definitely,” he says.
So much runs through my mind as I drive from one apartment building to the next. I remember the adult children of Hillary Clinton and Wendy Davis putting out statements reassuring voters that their mothers were present and loving; the false hope I gave my daughter (and myself) on Nov. 8, 2016 when I told her we were about to have our first female president; that time Leslie Knope on “Parks and Recreation” preempted the question about whether she missed her kids while she was at work and said: “Yes, of course I do. Everybody does. And then, you know, sometimes I don’t.”
I often find that when I’m campaigning I want to be with my kids and when I’m watching a princess dance show I’m itching to map out our next round of campaign Facebook ads. It’s the same pull I know many feel when a work meeting overlaps with a Christmas pageant or a doctor’s visit.
We carry on, despite the pangs of guilt and the missed storytime, because working, campaigning, volunteering — that is how we provide for our ourselves and our children. Not just sustenance, but purpose.
