Not Just a Mom

Photo source here

One thing that cannot be assumed about Ann Romney is that she is “just a mom,” implying that she lacks something that could have allowed her more choices. What is really clear is that she is a phenomenal human being: smart, capable, kind, lovely, and particularly supportive of family members, whom she clearly loves.

She is also a survivor of MS and breast cancer. And not just a survivor, but one capable of going on the campaign trail, with all the intensity and interference with real life that that entails. If we have one evidence (and there are many) that Mitt Romney is a brilliant man who makes wise crucial decisions, it is that he chose Ann to marry, back when they were too young to know who they would eventually become. In fact, I think they have become who they are because they chose each other.

At some point I hope to be able to express—especially to women who don’t naturally understand this—that making the choice to stay at home and raise children is a career choice with possibly more benefits to society as a whole than any other career choice. There are many many ways women can contribute; women have the brains, the ideas, the abilities to do almost anything that doesn’t require simply sheer brute force (and even there, some women surpass many men). But when you look at this couple, more than forty years ago, talking it through together, deciding how their family would look, Ann’s volunteering to cover the childbearing and being home tasks must have been an incredible relief to him.

All of their five sons talk about how their dad was very involved in their upbringing—taking them when he did service, teaching them the value of priorities (like the story of losing an anchor, and he left his important guests to go out and dive for it with them, because he needed them to teach them to care for what they had as responsibilities). So it wasn’t so he could give Ann all the dirty work of child rearing. It was that he had in her a helpmeet—the very definition of Eve, when she was given to Adam. And she chose to be the helpmeet from home, because handling five boys without someone always present might have been riskier than they were willing to try. Finding the best way to accomplish something is the Romney way.

I loved her speech Tuesday night at the GOP convention. She said so much about the value of women, totally without the competitive man-hating so prevalent among “feminists.” She also told the human Romney story—as she has been doing all along for years, but this time with a somewhat more attentive and certainly larger audience.

She started out talking about love—love that everyone in the room was feeling together, combined with a love of our country, but also the specific love between Ann and Mitt and their family.

I have often said about Mitt Romney that I have known many men like him, successful, hardworking, and decent. He is not uncommon among Mormons, just more successful than most. Ann Romney is like many Mormon moms I have known—only more so. There was a story this week about media people finally being invited to their vacation home in New Hampshire. The media shows up, and Ann is doing the laundry. They are stunned. The narrative has been that these people are too rich and out of touch with the rest of America. But it also came out that they do their own grocery shopping—and they’re thrilled with the great bargains you can get at Costco.

This is exactly what I have seen. I know many well-off, if not wealthy, Mormons. Everyone does their own laundry and their own shopping. Here in Texas is the only place I’ve been where it is common for people to hire someone to do their lawns (not us—we still mow our own, but we’re not among the wealthy). I’m somewhat distantly acquainted with another very successful Mormon businessman and family, who also used to live in Belmont, Massachusetts, who have raised about as many kids as the Romneys, and the mom suffers MS. Yet I believe she still does her own laundry and shopping. Certainly her own cooking, which is somewhat legendary (as is Ann Romney’s—she ran a little cooking school at one time). I don’t think it ever occurred to them that you don’t do the household “work” just because you can afford help.

If you’re raising kids, and you have an abundance of money, does it help you raise better children if they see you hire help for all the menial tasks, or to do that in front of them and train them to do it? Depends on whether you want them to think they’re better than others and entitled to ease, or whether you want them to value hard work and valuing other people as equals. Could the Romneys have taught their children the best values if Ann had chosen some other career and then hired out the household tasks? Maybe, somehow. But we do know that they could do it the way they chose to do it.

This is not to say that it’s somehow wrong to hire help. It’s just to say that people have made assumptions about the Romneys because of their wealth that simply aren’t true. Their money, as Ann said, allowed them the opportunity to provide for their children’s educations, and opportunities for service. Here’s how she put it:

It allowed us to give our sons the chance at good educations and made all those long hours of book reports and homework worth every minute. It’s given us the deep satisfaction of being able to help others in ways that we could never have imagined. Mitt doesn’t like to talk about how he has helped others because he sees it as a privilege, not a political talking point. And we’re no different than the millions of Americans who quietly help their neighbors, their churches and their communities. They don’t do it so that others will think more of them.

I think we need to believe Ann when she tells us what she knows, as the person who knows Mitt Romney best:

This is the man America needs.

This is the man who will wake up every day with the determination to solve the problems that others say can’t be solved, to fix what others say is beyond repair. This is the man who will work harder than anyone so that we can work a little less hard.

I can’t tell you what will happen over the next four years. But I can only stand here tonight, as a wife, a mother, a grandmother, an American, and make you this solemn commitment:

This man will not fail.

If you didn’t hear the speech, treat yourself to the twenty minutes here: