Memory Monday: Voting in Our Family

My Mother

VOTING IN OUR FAMILY

A number of years ago—after my father passed away, my mother moved to the same town where my family and I lived. I remember asking her about voting. She told me that my father and she had never voted and she didn’t plan to now. I thought how sad never to feel a part of the larger happening of our country.
Do you remember how you looked forward to getting old enough to finally vote? I do. The thing was that when I was 19 or 20, the voting age changed from 21 to 18, so the “first time” I could vote passed me by. The first time I got to vote, I was just one of lots of others that were voting. OK, I got over that—kinda.
Through the years, my husband and I have always voted—well, to be completely honest, there were a few school election/budget votes we forgot about. After we had children, we always took them with us, even into the voting booths and showed them how we marked our ballots, then put them into the voting machines. For years, our daughter called it “boting.”
Now that we have a two-year-old granddaughter (and get to watch her while her parents work), we decided to take her with us when we voted earlier this month. We talked about it from the time her daddy brought her before work until we left to go “bote”—yes, she used the same word our daughter had years before, even though we tried to get her to say “vote.” We had planned to vote about 10 in the morning, knowing from past experience that would be the least busy time, and we, and our little granddaughter, would get in and out quickly. We were in for a rude awakening. The parking lot was filled (that had never happened before). When we peeked inside, we were told that the line waiting to vote was at least an hour long. No way could we keep our little precious corralled that long, especially as lunch (and nap) time was approaching. We started to leave when she got really upset. She kept calling out to vote—or in her words “bote.” All the way home, she cried out to bote. We ended up waiting for her mother to pick her up, then we voted—the line was so long we still had to wait an hour. I think our daughter took her to vote with her, so our little one didn’t totally miss out on voting day.
I just hope our granddaughter keeps her enthusiasm for voting and does it every time she can once she is old enough to do it.