At the lake's edge: Dancing toward love and liberation

Tomorrow, June 22, 2018, I will marry Charles Chabetaye Dabah. I will take him as my partner in marriage.  Charles and me in June 2017 when we decided to get married. I have struggled long and hard with the concept of marriage, with the idea of being a wife and having a husband. While that is not the language we choose for ourselves, those are the loaded terms that society will now assign to us.  I have so much internalized baggage. Since I was a young girl, I’ve always felt I had to prove myself.  To be strong and to keep up with the boys. And at the same time, to be soft and weak, a damsel in distress for some man to swoop in and save me. For years, even though my parents celebrated my intellect and the kind of person I was in the world, I still measured my worth based on if boys were attracted to me.  I have many fears about being married, chief among them is that I will suddenly become a 1950s house wife. (I have tremendous respect for women w...

As many of you know, my mom, Mary Rita Luecke ran in the open Democratic primary on March 20, 2018, in Illinois’ 17 th state house district. This piece is divided into three sections:  Background on the political landscape and our analysis throughout the campaign The many feelings I felt as a daughter and an organizer throughout the campaign and a paragraph about why organizing is so important My personal takeaways, which is largely me kvelling (Yiddish for bursting with pride) about my mother The background   When my mom first floated the idea of running for state representative six years ago, I selfishly wasn’t so excited by the idea. My dad was still in state government, I was organizing around state-level legislation and the idea of having both my parents so intimately connected to my public life seemed less than ideal. My mom interviewed with Mike Madigan’s people and her independence and progressive politics scared them away. They chose Laure F...