How Stay At Home Moms Bring Unrivaled Benefit To Public Service
Common sense elevated by challenge
Sometimes I can see that a women in elected office is a mother and maybe even grandmother who really spent time invested in her family.
She was not just a career woman, delegating authority to a care provider, but instead, she was one who prioritized family over the many other distractions offered by the world.
You can tell by her hard-to-miss presence of 1.) principles and 2.) boundaries.
She could have chosen to live in a bigger house, could have driven a nicer car, could have had 4 weeks more time of tropical vacations a year, but she gave up those luxuries of life to be even more invested in raising a family.
Thousands of women in every community have that story to tell, but the world says “only a stay at home mom” about them.
Dear reader, as an activist of many years, I know the word “only” has no place being used to limit such a force for good in the world.
She heard all the cries of the world in her younger years and said “the cries of my baby will be a higher priority.” This is a defining moment for many mothers and one that the world is quick to dismiss. How clearly I see it though reflected on government boards even decades later. That is one of many examples of how fundamentally such an ordering of priorities can impact a woman for life.
That ability to parse the meaningful and the empty and to discern between them is a life skill that many people fail to ever develop. The stay at home mom often has it developed. It is one of her advantages.
And on a government board, public servants like this dissect problems with unparalleled sensibility and unparalleled sensitivity that I have only seen from women who choose more time at home with family than the world thought was appropriate.
That part is important: choosing more time at home with family than the world thought was appropriate.
You may simply see a stay at home mom, I see a woman who asks all the right questions about how a bunch of unelected bureaucrats run amok are not being properly kept in check.
And that behavior of hers frightens them.
It frightens them when someone smart, invested, and discerning speaks up.
They, the bureaucrats, far prefer a different situation. They want the proverbial babysitter sitting on the government board — disinterested, paid by the hour to be there, gabbing on the phone with friends while the kids are playing with matches, doing her trigonometry homework while your kids use rusty old steel-tipped umbrellas to joust with each other.
What could go wrong?
There’s a good reason not to let the unelected bureaucrats choose the babysitter to keep an eye on them.
And instead they get the stay at home mom: care, investment, boundaries, order, one who takes it personally when her board fails, just as personally as she would if her family failed.
And it’s not all moms I speak of here, though moms too bring value that non-moms may not have in the same way. It is specifically the stay at home moms l speak of. It is, even more specifically, the ones who stayed home longer than the society around them thought was important.
At a young age, she learned that it didn’t matter what the rest of the world thought of her. At a young age, she learned to stay focussed on what matters.
At whatever age she is now, she still carries that life lesson with her. How easy it is for me to spot, and likely how easy it is for the bureaucrats to spot.
Which is exactly why the bureaucrats must attack her, why they must attack all stay at home moms with that quality.
Attack them for what? For anything other than the things that matter. Do you know why? Because if there were a sober presentation of the things that mattered, they would have nothing impeachable to say about such a stay at home mother.
She would get elected in a landslide each time. In fact, if we were looking for a metric for identifying who is more likely to have principles and boundaries in a position of public trust, we would elect such mothers to boards based on who spent more time at home with her children, who bucked the trend even more. But that’s not what we do.
We let the stupidest, most pointless smears be the reason for voting or not voting for a person. We let distractions get treated as if they were fundamental.
Well, the candidate’s job is to organize the foundation of a campaign that can withstand such nonsense and to emerge victorious on Election Day.
There are plenty of ways popularly spoken of to make that happen — most of those don’t work.
I will get you back to the common sense basics. I will get you back to what works every single time to guarantee a win in local elections.
Tap here to join There Is No Substitute For Victory.
Allan Stevo