It is every mother’s right to make parenting decisions in the context of her own situation, because it is a position that she alone understands. (Jaclyn Wu, Neon Tommy)

After the Dallas Morning News published an article on January 19th poking holes in Davis’s biographical representation, upon which her campaign has been based, Davis’s opponents have continued to reference these inaccuracies to attack her character and fitness as a mother.

Their intended takeaway message, Draper correctly iterates, is that Davis’s ambition has come at the unconscionable price of her family’s cohesion and her daughters’ upbringing. That if she were “out there,” earning a Harvard law degree and improving the lives of her constituents, then she couldn’t have been at home, being a wife and a mother. 

Draper’s article makes a powerful contribution to the Wendy Davis narrative by elucidating the “true” version of Davis’s biography and remarking on the disheartening implications of the conservatives’ trial by media. But it fails to make a more important point, one which has escaped both her supporters and detractors: why does Wendy Davis even need to “have it all?”

What Davis found particularly galling, she said, was ‘the allegation that I abandoned my children. And…that that was not the case.

In the interview of Davis featured near the end of the article, Draper presses the candidate to defend her decision to pursue a law degree thousands of miles away from her teenaged children. Instead of entire paragraphs dedicated to insinuating that Davis’s campaign had exaggerated her ability to juggle school and parenting in order to maintain a Supermom image, Draper should have ended this line of questioning after Davis responded, “…as their mother, I made the choice that was best for them.” 

Because that is Davis’s prerogative. It is every mother’s right to make parenting decisions in the context of her own situation, because it is a position that she alone understands. However, voices in American society have consistently denied mothers parental autonomy in matters ranging from public breastfeeding to attachment parenting, leaving women to fight over how best to mother in the “mommy wars” arena. For a high-profile female politician such as Wendy Davis, especially one who has embraced her biography as her primary campaign tool, the level of scrutiny is even higher. But even if we put the other pieces of her story aside, the fact remains that American voters do not look kindly upon a woman who places her personal success above her duties as a mother, which we typically interpret as being omnipresent in the daily lives of her children. 

But that is only one of many ways to parent. 

We cannot claim that the soccer mom who picks her kids up from school every day, checks their homework and tucks them into bed will necessarily have more well-adjusted or successful children than the woman who works 60 hours a week and hires a nanny for the everyday details. We want to, because the idea that a specific parenting formula produces good kids is comforting to those undertaking this daunting task. Parenting isn’t a job in which hours clocked bears a direct correlation to commitment - “being there” for one’s children can take on more abstract forms than physically spending time with them. Davis’s opponents have unjustly snubbed the ways that her advanced education and political prominence have undoubtedly benefited the lives of her daughters. They have been exposed to a world that they could not possibly have experienced under traditional mothering, had Davis continued to live in a trailer park and work at a dead-end waitressing job. 

Children who see their parents actively contributing to society, who can look up to them as models of success in the working world, gain unique advantages under that upbringing. They mature with confidence and foresight, ready to be assertive and contemplative in any situation they may find themselves in. They are more comfortable interacting with adults, inquisitive beyond their years and more likely to hold their own at a younger age because they don’t have a parent attending to their every need. And most importantly, they are more realistic in their view of the adult world as a direct consequence of their tutelage under someone who interacts with it every day. 

In this way, Wendy Davis is a Supermom. But not the kind found only in our imaginations—this woman exists in every middle and working-class family in her home state, where parenting and paid work are coexistent responsibilities. When we do away with all the campaign airbrushing, we find that Davis’s narrative is just that: a Texas story.