Oh, how I wish my mother were here. Not for the debates or the steady stream of bombshells, which would have made her steam and stomp around, her face frozen into a permanent look of incredulousness.
I just would have loved to see her open her ballot and see a woman listed as the Democratic Party nominee for president of the United States. Even better, to see three other women beside Hillary Clinton nominated to the Oval Office: Alyson Kennedy of the Socialist Workers Party, Gloria Estela La Riva of the Socialism & Liberation Party and Jill Stein of the Green Party.
Whatever their politics, this election means a lot to women who've fought for equality and civil rights all their lives, and have withstood every man-made justification for why they weren't fit for the White House: Hormones. Lack of leadership skills. Because God said so. (Feel free to jump in.)
Charlotte Walsh is 95 and lives in a retirement home in Redmond, Wash. Her son John Walsh went over the other day to help her fill out her ballot.
"Mom does not know if it's spring or fall, morning or evening," he told me. "However, she understands that she can vote for a woman for president, and she's stunned."
Charlotte Walsh was born in 1921, one year after the 19th amendment granting women the right to vote was ratified. She cast her first vote for Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1940 and has since voted in 18 more elections _ twice for President Obama.
"I never thought I'd see it," she said of the potential for a female president. "I can't believe it has taken this long. It's astonishing."
Mind you, she didn't vote for Hillary Clinton just because of her gender.
"I thought that she was a better qualified person," she told me.
John Walsh remembered his mother's support of the Equal Rights Amendment, and how she said women being paid equally "was like breathing in and out." It should just come naturally.
He thought about that as they cast her vote for the first woman nominated by a major party for president. The things his mother has lived through.
And the things some of us take for granted.
"The campaign has been so ugly that I lost sight of how revolutionary it is," John Walsh said. "It's such a huge thing to her. I started looking at it through her eyes.
"She filled out her ballot, and she glowed."
Ruth Bardach is 96 and has been an activist for most of her life, starting when she was a shop steward in a transformer factory during World War II.
She has picketed at the United Nations, and in 1983 attended the Seneca Women's Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice, inspired by the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, which gave birth to the women's movement. She and her late husband, Manny, even hosted Eleanor Roosevelt in their West Orange, N.J., home.
Early on, Bardach's extended family supported Bernie Sanders. But she didn't.
"I asked her, 'Mom are you going to vote for the socialist, or Hillary as the first woman president?'?" her daughter, Reggie Bardach, remembered.
"I'm going with the woman," Ruth Bardach replied.
"It was an immediate response," Reggie Bardach said. "It was a very clear decision in her mind to vote for a woman. It was time. She has been a feminist all her life and felt that it was time for a woman to be president."
Ruth Bardach doesn't have the capacity to project much more than that.
"But I think that there's a pride," her daughter said. "That yes, it's the right thing. We deserve a woman president now."
Her vote was in keeping with a lifetime of activism _ experiences and beliefs that have inspired her daughter.
"You have to change things, you have to fight for things," she said. "That's why women have the right to vote. That's why integration is law. These are things my mother has been involved in and committed to all her life.
"So to have lived this long to see this ..." Reggie Bardach said, her voice trailing off.
Indeed, it's a great moment for her mother, for Charlotte Walsh, and for any woman who has seen so much, but always saw a woman on the presidential ballot as the white whale of American politics.
I just wish my mother were here to vote with them.
