Yes, you read me right. No, I am not out of my mind. In fact when I filled out my ballot and sent it in, I felt better about that decision than I have about pretty much any decision since I married my wife.
But it’s true. I didn’t vote for Barack Obama.
Well, who did I vote for?
You’ll have to come inside and hear the story to find out . . .
Meet Meredith*. She’s bright, funny, intelligent, irreverent, sometimes lazy, occasionally makes mistakes and has me wrapped around her finger.
I voted for Meredith She is eleven years old, and my wife and I are her legal guardians.
Merry’s mother Brittney was a cousin of some people who used to live in our apartment complex. My son Jeff started dating her when she was 15. As time went on, we started to learn a bit more about Britney. Her mother was murdered when Brittney was very young. She didn’t know her father. She passed from relative to relative, never staying with any one relative for any length of time. She never really had a sense of family or stable home. As I understand it, it’s not uncommon for girls in situations like that to have babies so they can have someone who will love them and they can feel a family bond with. I don’t know if that was in Brittney’s mind, but one day our son came to us with a couple of startling facts:
First, Brittney was pregnant.
Second, he wasn’t the father.
Third, there was “a good chance” the baby’s father was black.
Needless to say we hadn’t been expecting news like this, but we coped. We took Brittney in, gave her a place to stay, went to the hospital with her. The picture of Jeff holding this newborn girl in his arms is still on our wall. Brittney named the baby after her slain mother.
Merry spent the first eighteen moths of her life in our house. Even after Jeff and Brittney broke up, Brittney lived in our basement and raised Merry there. Merry called us “Grandpa” and “Grandma.” But eventually Brittney’s rootlessness caught up with her, and she moved on, but we still saw Merry almost every weekend for years. At the start it was just a visit for a few hours. Then she would stay the weekend. Then she stayed three days, four days at a time. And on a May day about six years ago, she came to visit and just stayed. We did’t mind at all. In fact we enjoyed having her, but we were concerned because she was there with no legal status. What if she needed medical care? What if our whitebread family decided to take her on vacation and had to try to explain the presence of this dark-skinned girl with a different last name?
One day Merry and I were walking home from the library, a distance of a little over a quarter mile. I had just gotten inside the house and we’d taken our shoes off when there was a knock on the door. I opened it and found myself face to face with one of Seattle’s finest. I don’t remember exactly what questions he asked, but the basis for his visit was that someone had seen us walking and was “concerned” that I might . . . well let’s not put too fine a point on it, they were worried that I had kidnapped Merry. I don’t remember what I said to the officer, but it satisfied him and he went about his business. But I still worried what would have happened if he had decided I had something nefarious in mind.
In those days Brittney would come visit on the weekends. Sometimes she’d show up every weekend, sometimes she would skip a week, and as time went on her visits grew less and less regular. Finally my wife and I spoke to a lawyer friend who agreed to draw up non-parental custodial papers. We would be responsible for Merry and could legally put her on our insurance, but in no way did we want to take Merry away from Brittney, because in some way I think we realized she was about all Brittney had left. We were careful to say no, we were not adopting Merry, we loved having her in our home, but we needed to do this to provide legal protection for ourselves, for Merry, and for Brittney. Brittney would still be her mother and we would never block access to her, and if Brittney ever was in a situation where she could take Merry and care for her again, we would go back to being weekends-only grandparents.
Brittney signed the custodial papers. She visited twice after that, and from the day of that second visit to this we have not seen her again.
So Merry has grown up in our house, with our values. She thinks George Bush is “stupid,” which is a catch-all phrase for “I don’t like this.” She doesn’t like John McCain either. See, I told you she was smart! She is as much our daughter as our own daughter, who she knows as Auntie Lizzie. She still thinks of Jeff as “Daddy,” and in fact is a very lucky girl because through the non-custodial parent process we got to meet her biological father, who has turned into a family man with two other children. He lives about 50 miles away and comes to see Merry whenever he can. So she has two daddies!
Now, you may wonder why I dragged you through Merry’s history and what this has to do with the election.
Merry is the daughter of a teen mother with a troubled childhood of her own. Statistics say that children with a background like that often fall into similar circumstances. We did not want that to happen to Merry. She is very bright and very talented and a natural-born leader in school and on the playground. (We call her “Merry, Your Cruise Director,” a hat tip to Lauren Tewes’ character on the TV series The Love Boat because she’s always organizing some kind of activity among her peers.) It would be a complete shame to lose her to the streets when we had it in our power to do something about it.
Yes, I filled in the little oval next to Barack Obama’s name, but I was really voting for Merry. I was voting so she could look at the president of the United States, who also had a black father and a white mother, and could see a role model who could show her that, yes, she can be anything she wants to be if she works for it. So far she has luckily been spared the sting of racism in her personal life, and I want her to grow up in a country where that is the norm rather than something that has to be qualified by saying, “but maybe that’s because we live in Seattle and we don’t have much of that here.” I want her to grow up in a world where neither her origins, nor her gender, nor the color of her skin, nor anything else about her holds her back.
I’m casting my vote for Barack Obama, but I’m doing it for Merry, so she will grow up in a better world than I’ve had, even though in many ways my life has been pretty good.
And I’m voting for Max, Jeff’s oldest son. He’s seven years old and loves to come up with reasons why I can’t just turn into a zombie and eat his brains if I feel like it. (“It has to be night outside!” is his favorite so far.) Max is a great kid, but he has some anger management issues that he’s working through. I’m voting for Max so he can receive the help he needs when he needs it to grow out of the anger.
And I’m voting for Janice and Rita, my sons’ daughters, both four years old. Not only did I fill in the oval for Obama and Biden, I did the same for Christine Gregoire for Washington governor. I want my granddaughters — all three of them — to grow up with strong woman who can serve as role models for them. Women like Gregoire, or Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, our two senators, or Darcy Burner, who excelled at Microsoft before she decided to take on Dave Reichert. Or, of course, Michelle Obama, a successful woman in her own right.
And I’m voting for DJ, my youngest grandchild. He’s barely a year old and doesn’t do much of anything but eat, sleep, cry, walk a little and soil his diapers a lot, so we have no idea what his future is going to be like, but whatever it is, I want it to be the best possible.
And I’m voting for Sam, one of my co-workers, who just took the oath of American citizenship a few days ago. Unfortunately due to some bureaucratic snafu she was not able to register to vote, which she was very much looking forward to. So this vote is for Sam too, in the hope that people won’t look down on her or her daughters just because Sam was born thousands of miles away and doesn’t speak fluent, idiomatic English.
And I’m voting for Rita, my mother. She passed away just before New Years’ after being in a nursing home for over a year because of a stroke she was never going to recover from. We knew it, she knew it, the people at the nursing home knew it. This vote is in her memory so that people in her situation can get the health care they need and not have to put my sister through financial hell to figure out how to pay for the care. It could be me someday. It could be you.
And finally, I’ll admit to voting for myself. I got out of apathy and into the political process because I could see the damage Bush and his crime family were doing to the country. So I can’t wait for us to get started undoing the damage of the last eight years. But I’m also doing it because I have diabetes. I’ve had it for years, and while I haven’t suffered anything worse than a bit of diminished sensation in my feet so far, I know that in some ways I’m living on borrowed time. Even if we start on January 21st to open up lines of stem cell research and other therapies that are currently blocked by our Luddite administration, I have to hope sufficient progress will be made toward a cure before the diabetes irreversibly damages my body. I would like to be able to bore DJ’s grandkids with stories of what it was like in the old days. I don’t know if I’ll get the chance, but I know that under Republican rule the odds go down every day.
Yes, I cast my ballot to elect Barack Obama the next President of the United States. And yes, I voted for myself, but I also voted for those I know and those I love who can’t do it for themselves.
* All the names in this story have been changed to protect the privacy of those involved.
