Dear Senator Kerry, good to see you today!

I was the woman in the second row, Senator, who asked you the question, "What can you do for the 26% of our kids in Multnomah County who live in single parent households? What can you do for these families?"

It was good to hear you say that you want to fund afterschool, daycare options, and intervention programs -- on behalf of all working families. I also wonder, myself, if it isn't time for us to institute full-day school for most grades.

The days when parents could pick up their children at 3pm and go home and do chores or crafts or help them do homework before dinner are gone, on the whole. Most of us work (although at the moment, I'm out of work -- and possibly the best thing about this is the extra time with my son!) until dinnertime. Other parents work odd hours, and need better and cheaper daycare options.

In our state, it's a felony to leave a child under 10 years old unsupervised, and yet there are children of all school ages who are left as latchkey kids because of the economic realities of this world. It's that much harder for single parent families where there is only one income from which to skim childcare/afterschool payments.

But I'd like to bring up a deeper issue here. We talk about non-traditional families when we speak of single parent households -- yet today, over 50% of the children born will live in a single parent household before they are out of K12. We have a new tradition, and a new norm. Single parent households are a silent faction in civic life, especially low income single parents. You will rarely see these families represented at the PTA, on the school board, testifying before city council, active in nonprofits and civic affairs. What do we do with our children while we go to a meeting that runs past bedtime? How can we maintain the energy to put back into our community when we are trying to earn an income and be fair to our children?

On behalf of the 26% of the children in Multnomah County who live with single parents, I'd appeal to you to consider in your policies some ways to suggest to the states that the open meeting laws include childcare options (with notice, and perhaps even at a nominal cost). That meeting planners be obligated to record the proxies somehow of all the people who can't make the meeting due to childcare restrictions, timing, or the location of a meeting far away from public transportation access. All these circumstances are as exclusionary as lack of disability access to public buildings -- but they exclude over one in five parents.

When I was growing up, our idea of how to live was just different. In my own family, my mother never worked full time. My father raised three children and supported a wife on a rural minister's salary. We lived modestly, but we owned a thirteen room house with a big yard, and we had a new car every seven years or somesuch. I didn't know my family was "working poor" -- we were well educated people accepted in middle class professional circles.

But I remember the thrill when I was sixteen and had enough money (I think it was $8) from babysitting to buy the first item of new clothing I'd ever bought from a store that wasn't underwear.

This was a world where my mother was a full time mom and a key volunteer in so many church and other projects. She and many other ladies in our little town of Montpelier, VT were always doing something to make our community better. Children were considered a fact of life at these affairs, not an embarrassment and a burden -- because so much of the glue that held our community together consisted of stay-at-home moms doing good work for no pay.

Women's lives held our community together in a way that doesn't happen anymore. Folks like Robert Putnam have commented on this. If you want to see a stronger America, find a way to bring working parents back into civic life.

Sometimes I feel like the media has stolen the dignity of single parent families and the working poor. But there is much that policy can do to reinvolve us, and make us feel like full participants again -- and by extention, help us raise our children as good citizens and good participants in their own communities.

Please think about these things, programmatically, in your policy, and in the compassion you must maintain in the face of the huge pressures of your office. Remember the people like me and my son who are sacrificing time we can ill afford to help you gain high office. We are participating despite the odds against us because we know this election will transform our country, and we feeled called to duty as much as any candidate for office, to make things change.