Poll working
In an earlier post (Mama Needs Obama – October 17, 2008) I noted that my mother is an aging woman with no health insurance, a lifelong Republican who has always voted a straight Republican ticket and always will. I wrote about her newest health issue, sciatica, which joins diabetes and a cluster of other related conditions, and the fact that she has neither the means nor the job with health insurance to effectively cope with the many things that ail her.
It takes all of the nearly-forty-year-old maturity that I can muster up to control myself and not pop off sarcastic and angry words that I’ll regret when I talk to her on the phone. A few days before the election, I had to work double-time at keeping myself in check. My mother told me that she’d taken her second Vicodin of the day, waiting until the pain in her left leg was nearly debilitating. She mentioned that she would be working about 16 hours on election day as a poll worker. The job doesn’t pay much, but it supplements the wages she earns from her regular part-time job. Both the poll supervisor and I urged her not to work the full day, or to sit this election out due to her painful condition. But she refused. She didn’t even pretend that it was about the money or pretend that John McCain was likely to win in her blue state. Even more annoyed that ever, I got off the phone quickly and fumed aloud to my husband about her obtuseness.
It was well before Obama’s eventual win when I began to think about what I could find that I could respect in my mother’s insistence on manning the polls on not just any election day, but the heaviest voting day in my lifetime. Her political opinions resemble mine less with each passing year, which is ironic since religion and political affiliation are so often matrilineal.
But that got me thinking about how she reacted when I took the long path to converting to Judaism ten years ago. I wrote about this a little in an article in the Dovetail journal in 2005 (http://www.dovetailinstitute.org/journals/Dovetail_14-1.pdf). She not only accepted the choice, but she has always encouraged our religious practice and worn it among her friends as a badge of honor. When she visits us, she expresses as much enthusiasm about going to synagogue services as she does the progressive United Methodist church she loves attending in my neighborhood. My husband and I concluded that, as a religious person, she was pleased that I’d found the spiritual path that best suited me now that I was an adult. It now occurs to me that my mother seems to be satisfied if not thrilled that I am an involved and politically-minded citizen, even if the politics differ from hers. I am guessing that she sees that I have learned something from her example, and that sustains her.
