January 22, 2017

I went to the Women’s March on Washington yesterday with my 19-year old daughter and my 80-something year old mother. Though I’ve lost track of how many demonstrations I’ve been to in Washington, this one was different for me, a 50-year old woman. We got back this morning around 3:30 am and I still feel that raw, tired, slightly hungover feeling you get when you have not had enough sleep.

Like most of these gatherings, the Women’s March was a chaotic, disorganized, wild affair. This one featured a highly diverse mix of women and men, the former outnumbering the latter by probably 4 to 1. This gave the rally a very distinct, and pink, sensibility. While there was anger, there was also a sense of celebration and confidence. I wondered if it would be less restrained, less hopeful had the ratio of “minorities” to white, straight woman had also been 4 to 1. Restraint and politeness are luxuries, easily accessible to the privileged. And while white women are not universally privileged, it’s probably fair to say that most of us at the march have pretty intact lives, at least for the moment. As one of the endless string of speakers said in relation to all us middle class white woman suddenly waking up to the nightmare of oppression and unfairness that is America under DJT, ‘welcome to my world.’

Unlike other marches I remember, there was hardly a police officer to be seen, and then only at the far periphery of the march where they seemed more concerned about vehicular traffic than human. We were remarkably self-organized and self-regulated and only a little bit impatient about the utter lack of bathrooms or the fact that there wasn’t really a march, at least where we were on Constitution Ave. The march was to walking like rush hour traffic is to commuting. In other words, we stayed put. Which for this claustrophobe was not always calming. For the first time in my life, and you can read this figuratively as well as literally, I was more concerned about losing my mother in the crowd, or failing to protect her from getting trampled, than I was worried about losing my daughter.

At 19, Haley wished she could hear the speakers and the music better, and wondered for three hours, when the march was going to start. I think she was impressed by the size and scale and scope of it all, if slightly confused about the larger point. And while I wasn’t worried about losing her yesterday, and knew there were others in our group who would see her back to the bus if mom and I got separated, it pisses me off that she is facing a potential future in which religious extremists get to impose their version of morality on her. It’s not just her reproductive rights and access to health care that I worry about, but her entire future. I keep wondering how we could collectively let this happen.

It’s been 45 years, nearly my whole life, since my mother went to work for New Hampshire’s Family Planning, a federally-funded state-administered program for poor women enacted under Title X of the Public Health Service Act back in 1970s. Yeah, back then. These are the funds are used to support everything but abortions at Planned Parenthood, which is one of the only organizations that operates at scale anywhere in the country. Family Planning funding will be lucky to survive the first year of the Republican controlled Congress, because if they ‘de-fund’ Planned Parenthood, there are not enough other service providers to fill the gap. And this should concern not only women’s health and reproductive rights advocates but pro-life advocates, as well. Studies have shown a very clear link between access to family planning education and contraception, and abortion rates. In other words, if you don’t provide supports to women during their reproductive years, they tend to get pregnant by accident more often, and those pregnancies tend to get terminated more frequently.

My mother was born in England during the depression, trained as a midwife and employed as an Ob-Gyn nurse in both England and the US. She was my school nurse before she started working for the State of NH, surviving in the gubernatorial reign of Meldrim Thomson, who served as NH’s chief executive from 1973 to 1979 and who makes Gov. Paul LePage of Maine look like a liberal by comparison. It kills me a little inside that after all the work that has been done by women like my mother, and all the apparent progress, that we are where we are in 2017.

When my mom heard about the march, she told me she wanted to go. I was dubious but she pushed me, and I got tickets, and a hotel room. She wanted to make sure that she was counted among the hundreds of thousands of others who were going to make the trip. Like everyone else, we had no idea it was going to be quite so big. I am not sure if I get to be proud of my mom – it’s a little like being proud of the sun or the moon – but I sure am inspired by her. Lots of people at the march were inspired by her as well. She got compliments on her purple hat (she “didn’t care much” for the pussy hats, she told me with a slightly pained expression, so she wore her own hand-knitted wool beret). We got special treatment from the kind women in the hour-long bathroom line, and on our way through the ridiculous wall of people lining Constitution Ave, and on the subway, and in the taxi we resorted to in the morning because the line at New Carrollton Metro Station was simply absurd. Our driver Malik took my credit card and told me – no admonished me - to be careful, and reminded me that I had an elder with me.

Several people asked mom if they could take her picture (“I must look so old!” she said). She’s not actually very frail but with her white hair, she looks like she might be. Though she was happy to have the portable seat I got on Amazon, my mother walks farther on her treadmill in a day than I typically do in a week. She lives alone, mows her own lawn, plants her own garden in the spring (most of which she gives away), insists on waiting on you hand and foot when you visit (and is politely insulted if you don’t want a cup of tea or a glass of sherry, depending on the time of day). She refuses to take any medications, (except for a baby aspirin a day, she always reminds me when I brag about her). Even ibuprofen and acetaminophen are rejected for the pain in her hip, which is a pretty constant companion these days. “It’s not good for you,” she always says.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that those of us who came of age since the early 1970s owe it to our mothers’ generation to fight like hell to preserve the rights they won for us. We owe it to our grandmothers and great-grandmothers to fight like hell to use the rights they struggled (imperfectly) to win for us, so that we could participate in this (imperfect) democracy. And not just by voting a couple of times a year. We have our jobs, and our kids, and our parents, and our social lives to tend to, sure. But if we do not have each other’s backs - including the backs of women who look different than we do, speak a different language, listen to different music, worship differently - then we have failed our mothers and our grandmothers. We have to be there for each other not just in personal and private woman-to-woman ways, which we’ve been doing since the beginning of time, we have to be there for each other in plain sight: in front of law makers, in the courts, in our places of employment, and in the places we go to pray. We have to stand up for women in restaurants and bars, in classrooms, in coffee shops and in the media. We have to be relentless.

“I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” my mom said to me on the bus on the way home when I asked her “are you glad you came?” I’m so glad that we went, three generations, in the company of relative strangers who enfolded us into their lives, protected us, cared for us, looked out for us. We need to do that for each other every day and never stop. Yesterday, mom told me she plans to live until she’s 95. I don’t doubt it.  I’ll be doing my best to keep up with her, fighting the fight because that’s what women do. You get up every day and do it again. You keep going.