"A Dialogue With The People Before I Run For President of the United States"

~excerpt from the essay

...I was young, immature and unprepared to take care of me, let alone a baby. I was going to a community college at the time. I was trying to get enough credits to transfer to a university. No one else in my family had finished college. Most of them didn’t even start. I wanted to finish. I wanted to be educated. I wanted to go somewhere. I didn’t know where, but I knew I wanted to go somewhere different. My boyfriend was in college too. He wanted to go somewhere. He was smarter than me, though. I would have carried the pregnancy if he hadn’t pushed. The truth is I didn’t want a child either. I just wanted him to love me. At nineteen, I would have done anything to get him to love me. Even have a baby. But, he didn’t want a baby, so I didn’t have a baby.

I was thirty-two, married with two kids, living in a big new house. I had a Master’s degree and good health insurance. What more could a woman ask for? After working three years in a tenured-track teaching position for a community college in Chicago, I had just accepted a fellowship doing policy work at a non-profit organization working on reproductive justice. I had a lot going on. I had a lot of options. I was finally doing some of the things I wanted to do. I was finally becoming me again. Ironically, I found myself at a reproductive rights conference several weeks pregnant, and I didn’t want to be. I remember an older sister in the Movement saying that she couldn’t understand how so many young sisters in the Movement find themselves with unwanted or unplanned pregnancies, especially since they work educating other women about family planning and contraceptives. I had birth control at my fingertips. There was no excuse for me having an unwanted pregnancy.

The excuse that I did have, most women, particularly feminists, couldn’t understand. Of course, a major tenet of feminism is that women should have control of their reproduction. And, many women do, thanks to the work of the women in the first, second, and now the third wave of the feminist Movement. But for me it wasn’t just about having control as an independent entity; it was about my husband understanding the responsibility he shared in our relationship.

Consequently, I found myself pregnant. He didn’t see birth control as his responsibility. Despite the fact that I had birthed two children and had depended on hormonal contraceptives for many years prior to giving birth, he did not take the position that it might be time to give my body a break and carry some of the burden and stress that comes along with constantly thinking about the possibility of being with child. No he didn’t do that. And, for some silly reason, I believed that willing him to think this way and continuing to fight for the reproductive rights of marginalized women and girls would somehow change his mind and prevent an unwanted pregnancy. In the meantime, of course, he still wanted sex, even during those times when I said I was close to ovulation and could possibly get pregnant. And, he got it. Because that is what a good wife does.

What I didn’t know then is that I was one of the marginalized women. We are all marginalized. We crawl along the margins of his world until we demand a space in the center. Back then, I never demanded a space in the center. I thought the work was enough. I thought my ideology was enough. I was fighting for the cause, but my activism was for them, those other women—the unemployed, uninsured or underinsured, the uneducated, the uninformed and the misinformed. They needed an advocate for their rights. Not me. I was not fighting for me. I should have been fighting for me. I couldn’t have a third child at that time. There was a lot of work to be done. I made an appointment, and I used my PPO. I don’t judge anymore.

I don’t judge anymore because I realize life happens to all of us. No matter our politics or positions. We live in the real world with real world experiences. Our lives don’t mirror the “talking points.” Talking points are just that, talk. No one in our bogus two-party system has a monopoly on morality or family values. All of our lives are, quite frankly, messy. If you want an elected official without flaws and a human history, call God. And if the current state of religious affairs is any indicator, He’s a hot-mess too, or She. I am banking on God having a little man in the boat.

-the constant sweetness within