Bernie Sanders Is Not the Godfather of My Children

We always imagine that an alternate future would have been better. But there's a 50/50 chance it would have been worse. And a non-zero chance it would have been much, much worse...

It’s Mother’s Day, and some years everyone seems to feel called to make a pronouncement about it. Motherhood is great, motherhood is hard, those who aren’t mothers are happy that they aren’t or wish they were or any number of variations.

I am grateful today that I got to spend Mother’s Day with my mother, and that she is still with us, driving, and preaching at church at 81! I know how blessed I am to have her in my life. I went to her church were she was filling in for the pastor who is out of town, and then we went to Wegman’s for lunch and shopping. A nice Mother’s Day, though I’m coming down with a cold and a thunderstorm just started.

As a woman who never had children, I have almost never felt conflicted about the matter. I never had children because I never wanted children. Year after year, people would ask me, “When are you going to get married and have kids?” “I don’t want kids.”

“You just haven’t found the right guy yet,” they’d often say, as though it’s part of a script.

“No, I’ve found several good guys, I just don’t want kids.”

As I got older it became more ridiculous. Some people would say that I should have kids because even though I was not married and did not want children, it could still be done!

Finally at the age of 51 I seem to have passed the point when people pressure me to have children. I strongly support people having children, and one of the best things about many of the jobs I’ve had has been covering for parents who have family emergencies and have to be out. I am far from anti-children or anti-motherhood - I think those are wonderful, indeed necessary things. I just never wanted kids myself.

The closest I ever came to getting married and having children was a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Or, rather, in Vermont, which may as well be another galaxy.

I was 27, running the biggest organizing campaign ever to be won in Vermont and the biggest one to be won in the AFL-CIO that year, 2002. The plot line was complicated when I started dating Vermont’s most attractive single man. He had never been married and was 46 at the time, but looked much younger and was the only man in Vermont who could properly wear any item of clothing from Brooks Brothers.

He was an up and coming City Council Member (they didn’t say Councilman) in Burlington, VT, and a former high up staffer to Bernie. Even then, one needed not say, “Bernie Sanders.” Just “Bernie” was explanation enough.

I think his party was actually called the Progressives. He was as progressive as progressive can be. He was widely believed to be the heir apparent to his mentor Bernie, and as we got quite serious, I imagined it was just as likely that I might end up the wife of the junior Senator from Vermont someday. He had political ambitions, to be sure, and I would have been a great accessory… and even better at running campaigns.

He loved golf, his two cats, and the Red Sox. I have never been a baseball fan, but he tried to convert me with all the enthusiasm of an evangelical at an altar call. He gave me seven books to read about baseball. I read the books and enjoyed them, especially one about the players’ union. But when he took me to a game at Camden Yards while we were in Baltimore, he seemed disappointed when I asked if it would be okay if I read.

Things didn’t work out, and I went home to Philadelphia where I belong, to take over as Director of Organizing of the union where I was for a decade. But if we had married I am fairly sure we would have had at least one child. And given his close relationship with Bernie and the political ties involved, there is a good chance that Bernie would have been godfather to my child.

My son or daughter might have addressed Senator Sanders as, “Uncle Bernie.”

Some wise person whose book I can never find wrote something to the effect of:

We always imagine that a different future would have been better.

But there is a fifty-fifty chance it would have been worse.

Or as my best friend is fond of quoting an old labor movement icon with a strange sense of humor: “If the queen had wheels, she’d be a wheelbarrow.”

While I greatly appreciate and support the mothers (and fathers) out there, especially those who are trying to raise their children with traditional values in a world that seems to want us all turned into terrorists with pink hair and unflattering outfits, I am just as happy that I am not one of them.

Sure, there is some alternative universe where I married and had a child or two and became the wife of the junior Senator from somewhere… or the Senator myself.

But I could have ended up with a child who calls Bernie Sanders “Uncle Bernie.”

I’ll stick with life as it is.