The “wine mom centrist” speaks (the 2020 primary election sucks)

Since people are sharing their stories of supporting Elizabeth Warren while not being “elite,” here’s mine. I think I’m inspired because some rando “socialist” bro just referred to me as a “wine mom centrist” on Twitter, and I have lost IQ points just writing those words. I have supported a couple of different candidates in the Democratic primary of 2020 (aka, this hellscape timeline we find ourselves in). As of now, I support Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar, and some of the others are okay too, and some really fill me with the opposite of excitement. (Spoiler: I am currently “elite.” I’m not stupid enough to think I am otherwise, but like everyone I came from somewhere else.)

I was brought up poor enough to qualify for Aid to Families with Dependent Children and Food Stamps (aka, “welfare”). My Republican grandparents refused to let my single mom, after she escaped her abusive marriage to my father, apply for welfare because it was against everything they believed in. So, they subsidized a place for my brother, my mom, and I to live, gave us one of their Social Security checks each month (they figured it was an even trade, since they didn’t believe the government should be handing out Social Security, either; I guess they thought old folks who hadn’t been able to save enough to retire should just eat cat food or work until they died). Along with the check, we got a big, regular serving of shame—that somehow magic had not happened, and my mom, who had married the wrong man and not finished college, had not become a big, financial success on her own, in the small city where she grew up, and had not overcome the limitations that come with small children, the very real and continuing threat of violence from someone she had loved, and a lack of childcare and the lack of a college degree. We had no health insurance; my mom’s job at the local domestic violence shelter at one point offered some kind of insurance, but it was too expensive to purchase it for the three of us, so we went without. I got regular medical check-ups and shots, and we paid medical bills in installments that never seemed to get any smaller. Once, when my brother was about 11 or 12, he went to the emergency room. My mom was still paying installments on the interest on that bill when he went to college.

I was raised on want and resentment and had a lot to prove. So I was awarded a full scholarship to an “elite” college, where I struggled because I didn’t have a lot of the built-in advantages (a regular schedule and a habit of work, parents with regular and full-time employment, two parents at home, money to take lowly internships that didn’t pay but that would look good on a resume). I barely graduated, and with a very low GPA. (I like you, though, Vassar, it’s not your fault I wasn’t a grownup yet.) Although I had a full scholarship, I still had student loans to pay, from the way the student aid packages work (they always included a family contribution package, even for people as poor as we were). So that was several thousand dollars that I didn’t have, where any missed payment would mean threatening phone calls, that went well with the threatening phone calls from my credit card company for often missing my minimum monthly payment. As a present to me, my new boyfriend paid my remaining student loans when we were in our mid-twenties, because he couldn’t believe such a small-ish amount of money could make anyone so miserable.

With my “elite” degree, I worked at temp jobs that were so boring they made me want to cry, and then a couple of decent full-time administrative jobs that still didn’t pay the bills. A graduate degree would have been the fastest way to make more money. But because I had been such a terrible student, because I had a hard time being the first person in my family to attend college, no graduate school would admit me. (I don’t count my father as the first, even though he was the first; he was pretty absent from my life and worked blue-collar jobs all of the time I knew him.) So I worked a full-time administrative job and took extension classes at the university. Getting my homework done was hell, but I really wanted not to be typing stuff and making other people’s appointments forever, even though I was grateful that with this job I finally had actual health care that included dental and eye benefits. I begged and finagled my way into public health graduate school. My fantasy had become becoming some kind of health provider that would find low-cost solutions to make everyone, especially children’s lives better—I though a lot about vaccinations and doctor visits and universal affordable/free and decent childcare long before I had children, because I knew that stuff like that would have made my mom’s task of raising us on her own much easier. I ended up working in cancer research, which also felt necessary because the cancers I studied happened at the other end of life, and having policies in place that prevent long-term illness (like tobacco and clean air regulations; healthier food widely and inexpensively available; food stamps covering healthy eating) was another kind of doing-good.

I’ll spare you the rest. My life is very different now from the way it was when I grew up. Lucky me. But I support candidates who have tangible, realistic plans and a history of working with the other legislators they need to make and enforce good policies, to make the impediments in my early life, and to my mom’s life, a thing of the past.

And I don’t think these policy changes we need, as horrible as everything is right now for everyone who is poor and struggling because of debt and lack of affordable medical care, can be done by fiat or executive order, unless we are all okay living in something other than a democracy.