Ohhh, my friends...

I’m feeling particularly salty (and expletive-y) today, so let's begin by taking some deeeeep cleansing breaths. Which can’t fix everything but it does help.

This from Evan Hurst at Wonkette about DT’s latest primary results was great and I want to expand on it. In the piece, Evan refers to polling, calling it bonkers, which is apt:

Despite how generally bonkers polling has been lately, one constant has been that voters are saying over and over again that if Trump is convicted of crimes — any crimes — they’ll be far less likely to support him. Well, he looks like a stone cold loser already, unable to make his $454 million bond in the case where he was found liable for rampant fraud in New York. He managed to make his bond in the E. Jean Carroll case, the one where he defamed the woman he’s been found liable for raping.

And I wholeheartedly agree. Especially because the one thing his base can’t stand is “losers.” And polling has indeed been a mess ever since 2016, if not before. Because it only measures the people who show the f**k up. Which means that polling, like so much of what we encounter *out there* (like social media), is fed by extremes.

The mantra I repeat to myself whenever I read about polling is “among registered Rs,” or “among registered Ds,” or if it’s related to a particular issue, “among those who responded,” etc. I wish the media would do the same instead of talking about polls (and what election results “mean,” especially primary ones) like they’re some sort of gospel. Pollsters still haven’t figured out how to ask the right people the right questions. Especially where women and caregivers are concerned because 1) who even opens those giant envelopes, 2) WHO HAS TIME to sit down with those things and answer long surveys? And 3) you know who actually answers their phones? People with nothing but time on their hands! Otherwise, I’m screening that shizzle!

Poll questions never give me the options I need because they’re all about absolutes. They leave zero space for nuance. And hello! LIFE. IS FREAKING. NUANCE!!! And the vast majority of us humans are nothing if we’re not nuance personified.

Polling relies on one thing: folks’ willingness to participate. Which is the same with voting results. And if we’ve learned anything from every election from 2018 (just look at my home state Michigan, y’all!), 2020, 2022, and every special election since (I see you Tom Suozzi, NY! 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼), is that when it counts—like if we didn’t believe it before we ever so much do now since an unelected #bogusscotus overturned Roe—people SHOW UP for reproductive freedom and justice. Why? Because we’re alive. Because we are human and we’re caring for other humans. And life is freaking nuance. It isn’t about binaries. It isn’t about absolutes. It’s about our collective humanity. And most of all, it’s about love, goddamnit. And that’s what we’re busy doing every day.

When you’ve got garbage coming at you like, ohhh I don’t know … MUSKY of all people being given an “award” created to celebrate RBG?!?! During Women’s History Month?!!!!!!! THE NERVE! Talk about a slap in the face! Gimme a break. Everything feels like it’s on freaking fire and I don’t know anyone who has time for that nonsense. You literally have to just put your head down and focus on what’s real. You can’t do life otherwise, especially as someone who cares for other humans.

I ran for state senate in Michigan in 2022 because we had a reproductive freedom for all measure on our ballot and I was an abortion rights storyteller. We knew my race was doomed going into it, I was running against leadership in a deeply red district, and I am the farthest thing from your typical candidate. I managed to put out one 10,000+ piece mailing in the days before the election, targeting registered voters who hadn’t actually voted since 2012. It said:

Quiet the noise. Trust what YOU know.

“Dear friend.

I know you're tired. I know how hard you’ve been working to fill an awful lot of gaps for far too long. I have been too. I've heard from so many of you that, like me, you're feeling angry, unmoored and - ever since about 2016 - like we got off on the wrong wrinkle in time. Probably long before... When Roe was overturned I was enraged. I felt defeated, erased, and like none of the sacrifices I've made to keep my family and my community going mattered. Nevertheless. I did what women and people who care for others do. I put my head down and I kept f**king going. I had to. I had to keep fighting for the people who were more broken than I was. I had to keep fighting for my daughters, for my granddaughters, and for all the people for whom reproductive healthcare became harder to access than it already was. —Kim”

Let me tell you something else: I don’t know anyone and I didn’t meet anyone when I was campaigning who “plays” victim except TFGs—the very guys who stack every deck in their favor and squeeze families and caregivers like you and me so hard that we can’t breathe—so … yeah … I take polling these days with many, MANY grains of salt.

So. Just…find the cracks you need to breathe, to read, to write, to create, to love, my friends…. And get to know amazing, wise, affirming folks like Josie Cox from Women | Money | Power (this post is exactly the sort of medicine we need to combat all the absolutist and binary noise these days), Virginia Sole-Smith from Burnt Toast (this podcast episode of Burnt Toast with author of UNSHRINKING, Kate Mann will help unpack the sources of misogyny, sexism, fat phobia and their origins in racism). And most of all, Jessica Valenti at Abortion Every Day—one of the few absolutes I believe in wholeheartedly, as in the absolute authority in daily news on abortion care across the country. I need you all to listen to every word from Jessica’s testimony (beginning at minute 25:45) at a recent abortion rights briefing in Washington, D.C., before Democratic Senators Patty Murray, Chuck Schumer and others. The whole thing is two and a half hours, critically important and deeply worth watching.

My one wish is that Brittany Watts’ testimony had been included, because if we don’t all quiet the noise and trust what we know from the breadth of our own reproductive experiences, and what Black women have been trying to teach us for millennia, her experience will belong to all of us.

My first baby is expecting her second baby in Tennessee of all places, y’all. And it’s only slightly less terrifying than it was twenty-two months ago when my granddaughter was born. This is now. It does belong to all of us today. White women especially need to step up if we aren’t already. And even if we are, we need to use our gifts and the tools we have at our disposal and do more, but maybe on a more individual level if we possibly can.

Like, starting with each other.

Back in 2020 I was on a SisterSong training with Loretta J. Ross and other greats from Reproductive Justice, which is a broader scope developed and defined by Black women activists for reproductive freedom than exclusively fighting for access to contraception and abortion care. In the training, Ms. Ross was asked what she would say to white women who want to *help* the reproductive justice movement. Her answer: “I don’t need white women to help me. […basically, my community is accustomed to being strategically and systemically underserved and therefore helping itself…] I need them to help themselves and get out of the way.” Ooph! Profound! Her words have informed every moment of the work I’ve done since, including running for state senate in 2022.

For some of us, especially in households where our partner’s votes usually cancel out our own—my twice downsized husband was one of them in 2016; that hasn’t been the case ever since, in fact all three men I live with (husband, son and nephew) vote with me—maybe it begins with the person you sleep next to who needs to understand the direct costs (just for giggles maybe check out https://www.billthepatriarchy.com) to the household and the family you share that are associated with lack of access to reproductive healthcare, to lack of access to things like affordable childcare, safe, free and fair public education and paid leave, ffs.

In that spirit, I’d love to recommend another Substack, The Double Shift, by Katherine Goldstein.

As James rightfully points out, “Old-age policies affect everyone. Affordable home health care aides, for instance, would primarily benefit the millions of middle-aged people, mainly women, who are currently doing most of the nation’s elder care for free.” This is no accident. The reliance on female relatives to do this unpaid labor is a deliberate policy choice and is deeply under-discussed in our larger conversations about the gender wage gap and women’s economic advancement. This is also a policy choice that will become more and more unsustainable as baby boomers age. 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 every day, and waiting to greet them at the pearly gates of retirement (if they can even afford to retire!) is a patchwork, outdated, and extremely limited safety net. So as is America’s disappointing pattern, caring for them is thrown back on individuals and families. The economic realities of this are a complete catastrophe and make my blood run cold. The Federal Reserve points out that many boomers don't have enough money to cover long-term care costs, and 43% of 55- to 64-year-olds had no retirement savings in 2022.

Because these are exactly the dots we need to connect. Every time someone is denied access to abortion care, to contraception, to paid leave, to childcare, to public education, to basic healthcare, to housing, to higher education, to transportation, to full time job opportunities that include the benefits that so many of us enjoy—or, like me, has to make choices they don’t prefer because those things are made more difficult by policies that do harm rather than policies that support and empower families and caring for one another—it has a cumulative negative economic impact on individuals, on families and on communities. One that women—and our children; the boy ones and the girl ones—pay a far greater price for, like we do everything, as we age. Because then individuals, families and communities—like my very white affluent one—must work to fill those gaps instead of the institutions that were created to fill them. And that’s thanks to the people most often socialized to vote anti-taxation (*cough* dudes) who end up voting against their own and their family’s best interests. Our collective resources end up going toward pulling up those invisible bootstraps of ours and paying more than our fair share instead of building security and wealth. Which only serves to burden society as a whole.

So, just keep doing what you need to do to get through these next seven months. Because we know whether or not we’re better off between the economic disaster bookends of 9/11 and Covid. And we know exactly who will show up in November. Because we know who is underestimated by polls and by everyone and everything. And we know who shows up every freaking day: WOMEN, that’s who. Women and the people who know us, believe us and genuinely f**king celebrate us.

Please subscribe and stay tuned for more posts to come, because this is How We Dare, where I’ll be loosely serializing my book (in progress), Mother Activist: Raising Ourselves and the Men We Fall For, a love story; part memoir, part political commentary about the prices we pay when we “get political,” what it costs us when we don’t, and the secret sources of imposter syndrome, how it silences us and, most importantly, how to live bigger.