Lauren Rankin

Last month, as the Democratic Party was making history by officially nominating the first woman candidate for president from a major party, my phone buzzed. It was a text from my mom. “Also want u to know feeling proud of what’s going on at DNC. It’s a big deal for this old lady.” As history was being made in that moment and throughout the week, I reflected not just on what this means to me as a woman and a feminist, but what this must mean to my mother, and on both her and Hillary Clinton as people.

Though I am now a supporter of Hillary Clinton, I didn’t always feel this way. I was a fervent supporter of Barack Obama during the 2008 primary, and I scoffed off any mention of Hillary Clinton breaking the gender barrier. The truth is, I hadn’t yet learned what it means to be a woman, to move through the world marked in that way. More than that, I had absolutely no idea what it was like for women of my mother’s and Hillary Clinton’s generation, the seemingly endless structural barriers and omnipresent microaggressions. I, like many young millennial women, didn’t know. To arrive at this moment was, for my mother, truly unbelievable and incredibly moving.

The significance of this nomination is not lost on me. But I’ve come to embrace Hillary Clinton not just because of this significance or her solid record on some issues that matter most to me, but also because of something more ineffable: she reminds me of my mom, Amy Rankin.

My mother has been a feminist for nearly five decades. She came of age during the women’s liberation movement in the early 1970s and raised me to follow her feminist path. I remember looking through her high school yearbook as a child and seeing note after note addressing her as “my favorite radical feminist.” Ever since she was a teenager, Amy was busting patriarchal norms and breaking barriers: in high school, she led a successful challenge to the rule that female students could only wear skirts; and while attending the all-women’s college Douglass College within Rutgers University, she was the first woman to work in the Rutgers press box, covering a college football game.

The barriers she broke are significant, and to break them, she had to be tenacious. In truth, this used to embarrass me. There was the time my mother stormed out of a store because they insisted on holding our shopping bags at the front while we perused the racks. Or the time that she showed up to a school board meeting to excoriate the leader of the abstinence-only sexual education program that I was forced to endure for promoting a sexist agenda and failing to protect students.

The discomfort that arose when my mother would raise her voice in indignation was palpable; why is this woman so angry, people seemed to say? Why is she yelling? Why isn’t she smiling?

These are exactly the same kinds of questions that American voters, journalists, and pundits alike continue to ask about Hillary Clinton. These questions are rightfully marked as sexist, but that doesn’t answer them. I know the answer: these women seem angry, these women are “yelling,” these women aren’t smiling because they have work to do. They are tenacious because they’ve always had to be.

It’s not just this tenacity, but the way that my mother enacts it. She is a behind-the-scenes kind of person. While I thrive at public speaking and performing, my mother has always been the problem-solver, the fixer. No matter the problem, even if it is seemingly unsolvable, Amy is committed to finding a way to make it better, even if it’s small and seemingly trivial. “Well, what can we do? How do we fix this?” That was her response to almost everything, including break ups: how do we solve this problem?

I have a strong feeling that the same is true for Hillary Clinton.

During his speech during the second night of the Democratic National Convention, President Bill Clinton contextualized Hillary Clinton as a leader and a person. “She just went out and figured out what needed to be done and what made the most sense and what would help the most people,” he said of his wife. “And then if it was controversial, she’d just try to persuade people it was the right thing to do.”

This is my mother to a tee. Never content with the status quo, she is constantly trying to make things better. This tenacity and solutions-mindedness, both of which Hillary Clinton seemingly shares, can often be mistaken for coldness and aloofness, as Clinton herself noted in a recent Humans of New York post. I mistook it in my mother several times. In truth, it is the direct opposite. Problem-solving is a practical way of showing that you care. Developing solutions is a tangible expression of what you value and what matters.

Problem-solving isn’t glamorous. It isn’t celebrated by rancorous applause or rapturous parades. But it is the hard and meaningful work that women of my mother’s and Hillary Clinton’s generation had to learn to do, because no one else would do it for them.

This is why I’m voting for Hillary Clinton: she, like my mother, knows what it means to get things done in the face of structural limitations; she, like my mother, is a problem-solver committed to genuine forward progress, even in small ways. I am voting for Hillary Clinton because I have seen firsthand the value and meaning of a commitment to tenacious problem-solving. I am voting for Hillary Clinton because my mother helped make these values clear to me.

We are now on the precipice of making history once again. We did it in 2008 and we are poised to do it again. My mother was thrilled to see Barack Obama become President in 2008; we all supported his candidacy from its early stages. But I’m not sure anything could top the feeling of joy and pride that would accompany a Hillary Clinton victory. It will signal to her that the practicality and dedication she has spent her life cultivating are indeed valuable, as she always knew they were.

So, you may have noticed that I haven't been around much lately. I haven't been writing. I haven't been tweeting. I haven't been doing much of anything in the online feminism world. I haven't been existing in a digital space.

That has been intentional.

Twitter can provide a great sense of community for those who don't have those kinds of networks in their geographic vicinity. Twitter allows us to interface with entirely new people and thus can open us up to new experiences and ways of thinking. Twitter can be great, right?

Except, of course, when it's not.

Nevermind the horrific trolling and outright abuse that so many of us experience every day, simply for being women online. While I have experienced that and it can be scary, especially when you have threats of sexual assault or even death lobbed at you, that's not what ultimately drove me away from social media.

So why did I stop tweeting, then? Why did I largely abandon the 7,000+ people who follow me and engage with my ideas? Why did I more or less check out of online feminism?

To be honest, because twitter sucks. Because twitter brings out the worst in people. Because I've come to view twitter as more of a problem than a solution. 

Obviously, connecting with people who are different from you is critical for social justice; coalition-building across geography, gender, class, race, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, etc. is imperative for the cause of making a more just and compassionate world. But for me, twitter didn't really do that. Twitter propped up a false sense of connection, all while my real-world connections were falling by the wayside.

When we lose tactile connection in place of hashtags, when we replace tone and inflection with characters and emoticons, when we mediate our relationships through a screen, I can't help but feel like we have lost a part of what makes us human. At least for me, anyway, because for me, being human is about moving, breathing, touching, sharing, feeling. Being human is about being real, and I couldn't be real in the confines of keystrokes and scrolling. 

That's the thing; you may think you know someone on twitter, I mean really know  them. You know their twitter style, you exchange witty banter back and forth, you rely on them for certain types of information. But that is one side, a digital side, a mediated side of a person. The Lauren Rankin that you saw on twitter is a far cry from the Lauren Rankin who swears like a sailor and cries at the thought of her elderly dog dying and fears commitment (any commitment) and reminisces about Christmases gone by. 

Here's an example:

A few months ago, I had dinner and drinks with my college roommate. We hadn't seen each other in quite a while (at least 9 months), except for our interaction via text and twitter. We were laughing, drinking beers, and sharing stories -- I felt completely at ease and was really being myself. Then, my old roomie confessed that she thought I would be different, that on twitter I was so nice and professional, that she was surprised (hopefully pleasantly...) to see that I was my same old, snarky, cynical self. 

It was a quiet epiphany -- I'm not myself on twitter. And if I'm not myself on twitter, who else isn't themselves on twitter?

The answer? Probably everybody, because that's more or less the nature of the medium. That's totally okay, if you understand that going into it. But so many people think that a person's twitter feed is indicative of their core, their soul. We think we really know one another from the 140 character bites we emit into the ether. I can personally testify to the utter falseness of that assumption.

For me, twitter became an escape rather than a pathway. It was a source of anxiety and performance, and unless I'm getting paid to do it professionally, I don't perform anymore. I'm not discounting twitter's value for some people; maybe it's been great for you. If it has, I'm glad. I have seen firsthand some good come out of twitter, but I have also experienced firsthand the ugliness it often encourages.

Some of the people I met on twitter are terrible people in real life. Truly terrible, narcissistic, insufferable people. But some aren't. A couple of my real-world friends are people I initially interacted with on twitter. Now that we have transitioned into a real-world friendship, with genuine conversations and face-to-face contact (when possible). I don't think of them as twitter friends. They are so much more than their tweets.

Oh, hey there! It's me, Lauren, enjoying a TACO and a BEER and FUNDING ABORTIONS FOR THE NEW JERSEY ABORTION ACCESS FUND. That's right -- I took the Taco Or Beer Challenge! Please watch me eat a taco/drink a beer/fund abortions, and then go do the same for the Abortion Fund of your choice!

The reason that buffer zones are often created specifically for abortion clinics is because this kind of harassment and intimidation simply doesn’t exist in any other branch of health care. A patient seeking care for tonsillitis isn’t told they’ve defiled their body, that God will punish them for this decision. A patient seeking care for a broken arm won’t be filmed against their will and have their images spread across the Internet with the words “murderer” and “sinner” underneath. But a patient seeking abortion care is subject to all of this and more. A patient seeking abortion care is often treated as less than human, all in the name of “free speech.” 

So, there actually is NO teen pregnancy crisis in this country. Not even a little bit. In fact, teen pregnancy rates, teen birthrates, and teen abortion rates are at HISTORIC LOWS.

South Carolina, Kansas, Alabama and more take aim at reproductive rights.

Decisions about end-of-life care are always difficult. They can be even more difficult and heartbreaking when the patient in question is pregnant. But if Louisiana Rep. Austin Badon (D-New Orleans), has his way, some families won't have to make these decisions anymore: The state will do it for them.

For much of my life, my father was a sort of enigma to me. He was there but he wasn’t always “there.” I was emotional, loud, boisterous; he was reserved, quiet, contained. I was such a sensitive girl -- I felt everything so intensely, took everything so personally -- that his exhaustion after a hard day’s work or business trip to Japan affected me more than I cared to admit. 

My mother was the parent in whom I confided. We would go for secret ice cream trips to Dairy Queen. I came to her when I wanted to start taking birth control. She talked me through the various ups and downs of my romantic life, in college and beyond. I could always tell my mother the truth.

Simply put, my teen years were a nightmare for the household. What I realize now was chronic depression manifested in emotional volatility, and I’m sure my parents felt simultaneously helpless and frustrated. My mother was always the one to try to break through, to ask me if I needed to talk to someone, to comfort me when hot tears of shame and sadness once again sent me racing up the stairs to my bedroom from the dinner table. I sometimes felt like my father didn’t care.

But looking back (something my nostalgic heart cannot help but do), I now see so clearly how untrue that is. My father cared; he still cares. He cares deeply. What I thought was my father failing to understand me was probably his inability to know how to communicate with me. His logical mind and my volatile heart struggled to overcome a sort of linguistic barrier, which makes the moments when we did connect even more powerful to me.

The moments I remember most vividly of my relationship with me father are all emotional turning points for me, for us. Here are a few of those moments.

In the early summer of 2002, the summer before I entered my junior year of high school, I was dreamily waxing poetic about last year’s summer, which I had spent at the North Carolina School of the Arts summer session. I wanted to go back, to relive that magical experience, to know that it was still there for me whenever I needed to touch it and feel it. I begged my parents to let me visit the few friends I had who returned this summer. My father agreed.

We drove the nine hours to Winston-Salem as my heart raced with excitement and anticipation. He dropped me off on the campus and returned to our hotel, giving me the evening to galavant and reminisce. But though the setting was the same, everything was different. New people, new relationships, new energy. Rather than blending back into my idyllic summer memories, I spent the next hour crying on a curb. I learned an important lesson that day: you can’t ever go home again.

I did something I rarely do: in a fit of tears, I called my father. I begged him to pick me up. He did. We drove back to the hotel as I deflected every attempt he made to understand what had happened, what went wrong. I told him I wanted to go home. The next day, less than 24 hours after we arrived, we did just that.

The car ride was quiet -- I remember listening to The Beach Boys (a shared love of my father and me). I felt mortified, like a complete fool. Mostly, I felt devastated and confused -- I was growing up and moving on, an act that was distinctly painful. I figured the car ride would be Hell  -- what would I say to him? How could I face him when he knew how foolish I had been? But I don’t remember anything like that. I remember my father being with me, quietly. He didn’t pry or push; he was just there. It’s as if he could sense how ashamed and crushed I was, and there was no real need to talk about it -- I just needed someone to quietly love me. In that moment of utter heartbreak, of learning the obvious yet painful truth that the past remains the past, my father was there with and for me. 

On a frigid January weekend in 2008, my family came up to Evanston, Illinois to see my latest show, one of my last as a student at Northwestern University. I was cast as Nettie Fowler in Northwestern’s production of Carousel, which meant that I got to sing two of the biggest musical numbers in the show -- June is Bustin’ Out All Over and the iconic You’ll Never Walk Alone. I connected so deeply to You’ll Never Walk Alone; it wasn’t a song that I sung, but rather a song that sung me. For that brief two minutes of each show, I knew I could just be. I wasn’t competing, struggling, or even trying. I just let that song flow out of me, into the auditorium, through ears and hearts and souls. It was me, honest and open.

After the first performance my family came to see, I changed out of my costume, tidied up my dressing room, and headed to the lobby for what was more or less the performers’ “Praise me!” moment. We all loved it; it felt like greeting an adoring public, no matter how silly or terrible the show, and it fed our delusions of grandeur for half an hour. I spotted my family and instantly knew something was different this time: they were all in tears (except for my little brother; it’s okay, Nicholas!). My mother, my grandmother, my grandfather, my cousin -- their faces were wet with tears of joy and amazement. I then looked at my father and felt a thrust of emotion in my gut and throat -- he was crying, too. 

I’ve only seen my father cry a select few times in my life, and all have been etched into my miserable excuse for a memory. I can’t help but cry whenever I see him cry; it’s as if our emotions are linked and I feel what he feels, as he feels it.

As I watched his eyes swell with tears of pride and wonder, I felt my face grow hot. I hugged him and as he held me, he told me how incredibly proud he was of me, how hearing me sing that song was one of the greatest moments of his life. I muttered a meager “Thank you, Dad,” as my emotional core was rocked. He saw me as me, he understood me. He was proud of me.

I’m not a professional performer anymore, not that I ever really was. I love to sing, more than anything else in the world, but the business of musical theatre was too harsh. When I sing, it’s a reflection of me -- it’s not an act. My voice is a part of who I am. I couldn’t help but take it personally when I didn’t get a role or when someone told me that I wasn’t right for something. The rejection was always personal because my performance was always personal.

I wondered for a while whether or not my father was disappointed that I couldn’t hang with it, that I gave up, that I moved on to something else. The pride he expressed after hearing me sing You’ll Never Walk Alone was so poignant, so deep, that I wondered if I had betrayed him in some way by abandoning it.

But this Christmas, as my mother, father, aunt, uncle, brother, and boyfriend all celebrated together in what will always be one of my favorite holiday memories, I learned yet again that my hunch wasn’t true. After we all had several glasses of wine, I noticed that my father got that look on his face again. I watched him as his eyes swelled with tears, his throat became a lump of encapsulated emotion, and he leaned in across the table towards me. He looked me in the eyes and said, very quietly, “I’m proud of who you’ve become.” He smiled, nodded his head, and that was that.

Today is my father’s 62nd birthday. In some ways, he’s still an adolescent -- put on a doo wop song or a Pink Floyd record and watch as the layers of his nostalgic heart, just like my own, peel back before you. He’s reserved a lot of time (unless watching a Northwestern football game, in which case look out!), but the moments of joy with him are unlike anything else. When he’s happy, you feel happy -- his joy is infectious. Not many people can do that.

In some ways, my father is still an enigma to me, but I’ve come to realize over time how alike we are, beneath the surface layer personality types and our differing linguistic styles of logical vs. emotional. My father feels, and he feels deeply, just like I do. He’s just better at keeping it to himself than I am.

Except in those moments, the ones I hold so dear, when he quietly lets his feelings seep out and you feel the universe shift. I treasure those moments.