Picture this: It is almost midnight on a Thursday night. A woman is seated in her spotless kitchen without a hair out of place wearing a teal silk blouse and a gold cross around her neck. Her two children are presumably asleep in their bedrooms. She is a working mother, and every working mother knows about burning the midnight oil. In spite of the hour, she looks wide awake. Perky. She has been chosen, so to speak, as the Republican Party's sacrificial lamb. She looks straight into the camera and flashes perfect pearly whites at anyone in the country who is still awake and some in other countries just waking up. I secretly hope that she is wearing her pink fluffy slippers and PJ bottoms. I ask myself, who does this Senator from Alabama actually represent? Many Alabamans could hardly stay up this late when facing an early morning shift in one of the meat packing plants located in her home state, but I digress . . .
Senator Katie Britt is the only mother of young children currently working in the United States Senate. She is the first woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate from Alabama and the youngest Republican woman ever elected to the Senate. She represents many constituencies by that fact alone: women, mothers, working mothers, parents, single parents, single mothers. She ought to speak for those people who face myriad choices between child care and work each day, just for starters. Those choices are complicated and never easy for any working mother and parents because in many places in America, like Alabama, the required resources are not adequate to make reasonable choices between the work world and home. Some people have to opt out of the work force altogether or are forced to take jobs on the night shift to cover household expenses. Some defer bearing children; others in states like Alabama who find themselves pregnant do not have any choice. Who was Senator Britt really talking to in her awkward larger than life Barbie-ism in the midnight hour?
Scratching my mussed hair while rubbing my weary eyes in disbelief at this fictional 1950's T.V. program when women with perfectly coiffed hair wore high heels and earrings while pushing a vacuum cleaner around their suburban homes is a wake up call. Senator Britt is too young to remember how back in the day, she herself would not have had the option to make her dream come true of becoming a Senator in her home state. There is nothing in her demeanor and even less in her spoken words that celebrate such progressive change.
"She's a housewife", said the former college football coach turned Senior Senator of Alabama, Tommy Tuberville. The two are work colleagues holding the same job title. Yet following her moonlighting gig that is what he said in her defense! She, for all her smiling and straining, had left everyone else speechless. The best that Tommy could manage was a shrug, and his patronizing comment about this woman with whom he serves in the esteemed chamber. C'mon, would he have said something so demoralizing to his football team? No, because he, too, knows something about making dreams comes true.
Two Senators, duly elected, representing the same constinuency fell short in the glare of day in front of the people they are supposed to serve. These two pursued their own dreams, but leave little for their own citizens to reach for especially if the dream is to have a family but need help doing so with invitro fertilization, or conversely, when the positive pregnancy test is not a dream come true. (I'll skip all the worst case scenario non-allowable exceptions for another day.) Suffice it to say, dreams are made up of choices that we make freely, like becoming a U.S. Senator, just because you can. Britt is "living the dream", HER dream, as the first and only woman in the Alabama Senate thanks to progress made by those who came before her. She could champion that progress by passing on what she has inherited: her own right to choose her own dream. Sitting behind the kitchen counter sends the signal that the dream is ever elusive, unless it happens that you wish to become one of two senators in your home state. Do the math. The remainder of unfulfilled dreams is far greater for anyone who finds herself within these Senators' domain.
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