by P.D. Lesko

Former Second Ward Council member Stephen Rapundalo was not popular. He had earned a reputation among constituents and city staffers as being nasty. One police officer, when asked about Rapundalo prior to the November 2011 general election in which Rapundalo was ousted from office, said with a chuckle, “Oh, we don’t like that Rapundalo.” While running for re-election, Rapundalo did not link from his campaign website directly to local news coverage of his race. He created PDF documents of the news articles and posted those to his site. One look at the comments in response to AnnArbor.com articles about Rapundalo and it was clear why the Council member chose not to link directly to the pieces. The comments about Rapundalo were often scathing, even in response to AnnArbor.com’s October 2011 endorsement of the MichBio CEO. One AnnArbor.com commenter described Rapundalo “…a cancer to this city and to the people of it. If you have any doubts, talk to him sometime. That is, if he’ll even give you the time of day. He’ll speak to you when it benefits him. Otherwise, you don’t amount to much…”

Ouch.

Second Ward Council member Tony Derezinski is the closest thing to a Good Ole Boy there is on Ann Arbor City Council.

Derezinski, who was a state senator (pictured right in 1977) when Gerald Ford was in the White House, has voted in lock-step with Hieftje and his Hive Mind Collective. Derezinski is a skilled panderer and a capable glad-hander. At 70 Derezinski is the oldest member of City Council and it shows. There have been complaints he is unengaged during meetings. In videos of Council meetings, Derezinski can be seen making repeated trips to the Council snack room while meetings are in session. Since 2008 he has compiled one of the worst attendance records of any of the 11 Council members. Likewise, since 2008 Derezinski has missed scores of meetings of the Council committees to which he has been assigned—again, more than almost any of his colleagues.

Despite his lackluster attendance record and lack of engagement at meetings, Tony Derezinski not only wants to be re-elected to City Council, AnnArbor.com recently ran a piece that suggested 70-year-old Derezinski wants to run for Mayor in 2014.

The 2011 election was the first ever during which Democrat Stephen Rapundalo was forced to field questions from the mainstream media about his past Republican candidacies, as well as the fact that he had openly supported the Republican gubernatorial candidate in 2010, as opposed to Democrat Virg Bernero. Unlike Rapundalo, Tony Derezinski (today, pictured left) never ran for office as a Republican, nor did he donate to Rick Snyder’s campaign. Like Rapunds, however, Derezinski donated nothing to Bernero’s campaign. Derezinski’s inner-Republican can be traced to his 2008 campaign finance forms, where he accepted donations from many Ann Arbor Republicans and Democrats who went on to support and donate to Republican Rick Snyder in 2010.

Democrat Derezinski’s 2008 campaign finance forms document donations from then Chair of the Michigan Republican Party Ron Weiser ($500), his wife, Eileen ($500), and Mark Boonstra (now Chair of the Washtenaw County Republican Committee). Dem Rene Greff, co-owner of Arbor Brewing Company, donated to Derezinski in 2008, and went on to donate almost $4,000 to Snyder in 2010. University of Michigan Musical Society Director Ken Fischer also donated to Derezinski in 2008 and to Snyder ($300) in 2010.

As well as having attendance and engagement issues, Derezinski is trapped under much of the same political baggage that cost Rapundalo his seat.

For example, months after a 40-year friend sent a letter to the editor of the Ann Arbor News that referred to Derezinski as “a man of great integrity with a strong moral compass,” it was revealed that Derezinski has been misusing email during open Council meetings to make fun of constituents, give out awards for pandering to the public, allegedly violate the Open Meetings Act, and rig votes, according to reporting by the Ann Arbor News.

Derezinski voted to spend $50 million to build the new city hall. He also voted to construct the Fifth Avenue underground parking garage, which will be paid for by property tax dollars and not parking revenues, as Hieftje and others initially told the public.

In 2010, Derezinski told the Michigan Daily he favored a city income tax. In April 2011, Derezinski told the Ann Arbor Observer that he thought it was “more than fair” for taxpayers to pay a city income tax.

Derezinski, like Rapundalo, has consistently supported the diversion of over $2.2 million in tax dollars (including money from the road millage and utilities) for Public Art. Like Rapundalo, Derezinski has also consistently refused to vote to reduce the amount of money given over to the Percent for Art program.

The failed Fuller Road project enjoyed the full support of both Rapundalo and Derezinski. It has been estimated that officials wasted over $4 million dollars in fees to consultants, architects, etc… on an attempt to build a parking garage for the University of Michigan on a river-front parcel of parkland.

Derezinski has consistently voted in favor of cuts to both police and fire staffing levels, as had Rapundalo.

Rapundalo and Derezinski voted to approve the wildly unpopular pedestrian crossing ordinance.

Derezinski, like Rapundalo, pushed to outsource operations of Huron Hills Golf Course, enraging Ward 2 residents who formed a neighborhood group, printed up signs and pressured Council into dropping the plans to hand over operations to the company of a man whom Hieftje had conveniently appointed to the Golf Courses Advisory Task Force.

Rapundalo and Derezinski spent almost 12 months and thousands of dollars of staff time on a failed effort to ban cell phone use while driving.

Pandering, of course, is predicated on a listener who, well, is willing to be fooled. Given the fact that the Michigan Daily’s editorial board has repeatedly fallen for the mile-wide, mile-deep malarky fed to them by Hieftje and his cronies, it’s easy to conclude the students need some serious remedial work. Over the past six years, the Daily editorial board has not consistently measured actual political progress against the many political promises made to them by local politicos.

In 2010, Derezinski told the Daily’s editorial board he was in favor of redistricting the city. Can you spell LMFAO? Derezinski can, and he probably did after he left the meeting with the U of M student newspaper editorial board.

More pandering? The Michigan Daily endorsed Derezinski in 2010 in part, because, he was in favor of increasing the miles of bike lanes. Sounds good, huh? However, since 2008, when Derezinski joined Council, the total number of miles of bike lanes in Ann Arbor has fallen. How?

In September 2009, John Hieftje and Fifth Ward Council member Carsten Hohnke announced at a City Council meeting there were “48 miles of bike lanes.” That same month, city officials, sent out a press release published, as usual, verbatim by AnnArbor.com in which officials trumpet, “City officials announced today that Ann Arbor has increased its on-road bike-lane system by 500 percent this decade – going from 8 to 48 lane miles. ”That more than surpasses the city’s goal to increase the amount of on-road bike lanes by 300 percent in five years,” Mayor John Hieftje said in a press release.

According to the City of Ann Arbor website as of 2012, “The City of Ann Arbor added over 10 miles of on-road bike lanes in 2010-2011, bringing the total to 36.2 miles.” That means, of course, when Hohnke, Hieftje and Derezinski were telling the public and The Michigan Daily editorial board there were 48 miles of bike lanes—with big plans for more— and that Hieftje’s administration has increased the miles of bike lanes by “500 percent,” there were, actually, 26.2 miles of bike lanes, 21.8 miles fewer than was claimed in 2009.

Tony Derezinski faces multiple challengers this time around. Like Rapundalo, who began reaching out in earnest to constituents as soon as it became clear he was going to be challenged in the election, Derezinski launched a new “blog” on February 19, 2012. It’s the first time he has bothered to update his website since August 5, 2008 (he ran unopposed in 2010). He’s also hosting a Ward 2 meeting at his home in February to “update” constituents.

Against candidates who can raise money and who stake out positions in favor of reasonable spending, responsive government and engaged representation, it’s quite possible Tony Derezinski could find himself voted out of office despite being a perfectly pleasant fellow.

A2P Notes: At A2Politico.com everyone is a political insider. That’s the way it should be. Local, state and to a lesser degree national politics have increasingly become the baileywick of professionals: candidates, their staffers, ad agencies, and political analysts. Voters go to the polls less informed than ever before in increasingly smaller numbers. As the stakes get higher, the American public has become more polarized. In the January 2012 issue of Esquire magazine, former President Bill Clinton told the interviewer: “MSNBC has become our version of Fox.” Rachel Maddow, who works for MSNBC, rankles at such comparisons, as she did in a recent interview in Slate. We have “progressive”  and “conservative” bloggers, who present news from predictable and somewhat simplistic perspectives. What we don’t often have, however, are people who work in politics, who have a deep understanding of the political process, and who are willing to share their secrets and insider perspectives. Joe DiSano is just one such writer.

DiSano is a long-time veteran of Michigan politics and has experience in races across the United States. Before establishing Message Design Group, DiSano served in various key staff positions for the Michigan House Democrats and Congressman John Dingell. In 2002, Message Design Group was retained by the Michigan House Democratic Fund. DiSano was active in Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s 2001 campaign where he co-authored the field plan and contributed to the direct mail program. DiSano was the manager of Michigan State Representative George Mans’ 1996 campaign and was lead strategist on Doug Spade’s 1998 long shot race for the Michigan House of Representatives. Spade went on to become the first Democratic House member from Lenawee County since World War I. DiSano founded Main Street Strategies 2007 alongside Kelly Johnston and Todd Cook. Main Street Strategies offers political candidates and advocacy group top-notch campaign advice and strategic communication plans. Clients of Main Street Strategies include Progress Michigan, Planned Parenthood of Michigan, Michigan AFL-CIO, Environmental Defense Fund, Operating Engineers Local 325, Warren Mayor Jim Fouts, Flint Mayor Dayne Walling, State Representative Andrew Kandrevas along with dozens of others.

In his debut piece for A2Politico, DiSano explains why Michigan power brokers are lining up behind Representative Gary Peters, a white-bread, middle-aged politico, in the Michigan 14th Congressional District which is primarily African-American—one of only two black majority Congressional Districts in the state. The primary in that District has been dubbed “Michigan’s most interesting primary.” Peters is running against Representative Hansen Clarke, who is of Bangladeshi and African-American descent. Clarke chose not to challenge Representative John Conyers, but instead decided to run in the Gerrymander 500. Roll Call referred to the Michigan 14th Congressional District as one of the “ugliest” examples of gerrymandering in U.S. DiSano explains why Michigan power brokers are not keen to send Hansen Clarke back to Congress.

Politics is about choices. Some are easy. Many are excruciating and Democrats in Michigan’s new 14th Congressional District face a tough choice in August. That’s when incumbent Congressmen Hansen Clarke and Gary Peters face off in a new district that stretches from Detroit north to Pontiac.

The past few weeks have seen a slow but steady momentum towards Peters as power brokers choose sides in the primary. The latest being the UAW and SEIU announcing their endorsement of Peters. The reasons are simple but clear. Peters has raised more money than Clarke and Peters has the superior political organization both are critical to communicating to voters is a sprawling district like the 14th.

But ready access to cash is not the entire reason Peters is rapidly becoming the prohibitive favorite in this primary. Many of the decision makers just don’t take Clarke seriously. They point to The Hill naming Clarke as one of “50 Most Beautiful People for 2011” as only the most public example of Clarke’s lack of gravitas.

And Clarke’s desire for the limelight has not come without a cost. Courting the DC elite stole precious time Clarke could have used to building a formidable political war chest. Instead of playing to The Daily Beast, Newsweek, Time, Huffington Post and The Washington Post, Clarke should have tended to the home fires with the same intensity. The lack of focus has cost Clarke with the major endorsers among Michigan Democrats.

The time spent courting the DC elite and national Press would have been better spent tending to the often mundane problems of real-world voters. Clarke’s constituent relations and outreach efforts are considered among the weakest of Michigan’s Congressional delegation.

But perhaps the most damage to Clarke’s reelection is his inability to make peace with the remnants of former Representative Carolyn Cheeks-Kilpatrick’s organization. Clark defeated Cheeks-Kilpatrick, but has done little to sway her supporters to his side. The defeat of Cheeks-Kilpatrick was ugly and created resentments that Clark has done little to repair.

Clarke needs Detroit voters to support him as a block if he is to defeat Peters. That seems unlikely with the wounds of the 2010 primary unhealed and the presence of fringe candidates such as former State Representative Mary Waters or Southfield Mayor Brenda Lawrence in the race. If either of them picks up even a little momentum it greatly damages the odds of Clarke returning to the DC limelight in 2013.

Perhaps the biggest mistake Clarke has made in his first term is the decision to challenge Peters in the first place. Clarke could have challenged Representative John Conyers and potentially had an easier road to re-election. Conyers is ripe for the picking and has many of the same ethical and personal issues that caused the downfall of Carolyn Cheeks-Kilpatrick. Clarke has refused to explain his decision not to challenge Conyers, but its clear Clarke has great admiration of the elder Congressman. That courtesy may cost Clarke a seat in Congress.

Peters is not without his detractors though. Many consider him wooden and lacking Clarke’s charisma. In addition, Peters’s voting record is decidedly less liberal than Clarke’s. Peters’s supporters say that even though his record veers into Blue Dog territory, that was more a result of the conservative nature of Peters’s old district and not a reflection of Peters’s real loyalties. Peters’s liabilities are tempered with the cold reality that Peters is a tenacious campaigner with the ability to buy more air time and put more boots on the ground than Clarke.

Endorsements and money are flowing to Peters because the decision-makers know that Peters spends more time tending to the people who elected him than Clarke does. They know that Peters lacks Clarke’s flair, but Peters is more reliable and much more of a work-horse than Clarke.

Clarke’s bad decisions are making a tough decision easier for Michigan Democratic power brokers.

By P.D. Lesko

Operation Hilarity may not be quite so funny to Markos Moulitsas Zuniga. Moulitsas Zuniga owns the liberal blog Daily Kos which has over 300,000 registered users and serves up 2,000,000 pages per month. Moulitsas Zuniga launched Kos because he believed “the liberal Ivy League mandarins, consultants, and wonks, many of them refugees from the Clinton administration, insiders…have run the Democratic Party and the progressive movement into the ground, by valuing compromise over confrontation. To him, it’s not that these people have the wrong values or priorities. It’s that they are failures.” At least that’s what Washington Monthly published in a 2006 profile of the founder of Daily Kos. Moulitsas Zuniga’s company is currently being lambasted by the mainstream media for suggesting that Democratic voters manipulate the Michigan, North Dakota, Tennessee and Vermont Republican primary elections. Operation Hilarity is simple: Democrats in Michigan, for instance, would pledge to vote in the open Republican presidential primary and cast their ballots for Rick Santorum. Should Santorum win Michigan instead of Mitt Romney, the Republican primary season will be extended—an outcome Moulitsas is convinced will benefit President Barack Obama.

On February 16, 2012 A2Politico posted a piece about Operation Hilarity. One commenter on that piece suggested that the Daily Kos community was “self-correcting” and all the whoop-la about Operation Hilarity would be resolved by the site’s own 1.6 million readers. Another A2Politico commenter suggested that Daily Kos needed to keep its political nose out of Michigan politics. Period.

On February 18, 2012, Operation Hilarity got coverage in the New York Times. In an email response to Times reporter Sarah Wheaton’s questions about concerns of Daily Kos readers and volunteer writers about Operation Hilarity (one Daily Kos responder called the idea “cynical and even a bit un-American,”) Moulitsas Zuniga wrote that “most of the resistence was coming from idealists ‘who somehow see voting in open primaries as under-handed. It’s not, of course.’” If Moulitsas Zuniga does say so himself.

The Times reported that Moulitsas Zuniga had called Daily Kos “community” critics of Operation Hilarity “pearl clutchers.” The comment fit in with Moulitsas Zuniga’s own description of himself in a 2006 interview with Washington Monthly. He told writer Benjamin Wallace Wells, “Everybody says I’m an asshole, and they’re right, I am.” A “pearl clutcher,” for those not on the Junior League, PTO/PTA circuit is an insulting term used to refer to an uptight person, usually but not always female, usually but not always of conservative mores, who reacts with shock, feigned or otherwise, at other people’s violations of decorum, propriety, morality, etc…

In response to their efforts to “self-correct” the Operation Hilarity situation, Moulitsas Zuniga insulted his own company’s “community” members using a rather sexist term. It wasn’t the height of progressive, inclusive, or politically aware behavior. Then again, Moulitsas Zuniga used to be a Reagan Republican and voted for Bush in 1992. The Kos flap was reported with just a hint of snark by the New York Times. The first sentence of the Times piece outlines several important facts. Sarah Wheaton writes:  ”There is dissent in the Kos kingdom.” A kingdom. of course, is ruled by a king who may be benevolent or a despot, but kings ultimately have the final word, especially in their own “communities.”

Moulitsas Zuniga’s Operation Hilarity was a copy of Rush Limbaugh’s Operation Chaos which urged Republicans to go to the polls and vote for Hillary Clinton, who was on the verge of dropping out of the Democratic presidential primary race. Of course Daily Kos was no friend to Hillary Clinton. On March 17, 2008, Moulitsas stated that Senator Hillary Clinton did not stand for the principles behind Daily Kos and said Clinton “doesn’t deserve fairness on this site.” He equated the Democratic primary to a “civil war.” His statement was precipitated by a strike by several prominent pro-Clinton bloggers, even though none of these posters were paid or in any way officially linked to the site. Moulitsas noted that if bloggers were dissatisfied, there were plenty of other websites at which to blog.

In essence, one question might be whether Michigan Democrats ought to be playing hardball or by the rules. The current Chair of the Michigan Democratic Party, Mark Brewer, is known in certain circles in Lansing as the man who helped Republican Rick Snyder win the 2010 gubernatorial election. Markos Moulitsas Zuniga is of the opinion that confrontation is a better political tool than compromise. He’s all for hardball, even with his company’s own cash cows—the writers who produce content for free and the readers who read and comment on it generating page views for the advertising Daily Kos sells. Officials in the Michigan Democratic Party said this when asked about whether Operation Hilarity and other such efforts to manipulate primary elections were useful tools in hardball politics. “No.”

Certainly, Michigan is a key state in the 2012 presidential election and political pundits have already concluded that President Obama will have a more difficult time taking the state than he did in 2010. However, a February 2012 poll has Obama ahead of Mitt Romney by 16 points.

Truth be told, the flap at Daily Kos really isn’t really about  the 2012 presidential primary elections, pearl clutchers, Michigan or Rick Santorum. It’s about a king and his kingdom, a blogger who might spend a little more time browsing his own archives. If he did, he would find a 2005 piece by then Senator Barack Obama about “how to bring meaningful change to this country” in which Obama writes:

The bottom line is that our job is harder than the conservatives’ job.  After all, it’s easy to articulate a belligerent foreign policy based solely on unilateral military action, a policy that sounds tough and acts dumb; it’s harder to craft a foreign policy that’s tough and smart.  It’s easy to dismantle government safety nets; it’s harder to transform those safety nets so that they work for people and can be paid for.  It’s easy to embrace a theological absolutism; it’s harder to find the right balance between the legitimate role of faith in our lives and the demands of our civic religion.  But that’s our job.  And I firmly believe that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, or oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose.  Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose.  A polarized electorate that is turned off of politics, and easily dismisses both parties because of the nasty, dishonest tone of the debate, works perfectly well for those who seek to chip away at the very idea of government because, in the end, a cynical electorate is a selfish electorate.

A a cynical electorate might be selfish, but a cynical king, well, one of those can be downright dangerous.

by Sophia van Buren

She sat there on the couch across from me, arms crossed, chin slightly jutting out from her face, her sharp features contorted into a look of disapproval.  Her pale blue eyes looked sternly into mine, like a mother admonishing a child.  It was a look I’d seen before, many times.

Every mother, every woman who found out I’d let — chosen, you could say — my children live with their father, had given me this look.  Not all of them had taken it to this level of uncensored judgment, which lingered on her face while she spoke to me.  Not all of them said exactly what was on their minds, but today, Kara did.

I sighed.  Here we go again.  I’d been battling my own inner demons of guilt and regret since I’d let the children go to live with Mike months earlier.  The young woman across from me on the couch was only echoing questions I had often posed to myself.

Almost daily, an inner war was being waged within my own head about what was best for the kids, what was best for me, what they needed, and what I needed.  I never seemed to find that calm, still place of assurance that I’d done the right thing.  I constantly played an imaginary recording of what phantom critics might say about me, and the choices I’d made.  I imagined the worst and put those words into their mouths before I heard them come out – things like “What kind of mother would give up her children?” and, “She must be unfit.  No decent loving mother would abandon her babies.”  Maybe they thought I’d abused or neglected them.  Or maybe they thought I did drugs, or I’d chosen to be a prostitute instead of volunteering for the PTA.  Maybe they thought I’d run off with another man, leaving my children and their father behind in a hazy wake of selfish smoke.

We had all been had been drinking wine that afternoon.  After a few glasses, the questions I supposed she’d been wondering to herself, ever since I started showing up in her mix of friends with Noah, were given voice.  She’d asked Daniel, I was sure, maybe even Emmett, but as Noah’s best friends, they must have either completely avoided the questions, or had never interrogated Noah.  Men were different than women in that respect, I thought.  Men seem to trust the choices and decisions of other men rather unconditionally.  Women, in my experience, seemed more apt to judge each other and question each other’s motivation, and almost try to find fault, if at all possible.  Sometimes women were each other’s harshest critics.  The Bachelors had not asked me why I was the non-custodial parent – it didn’t seem to occur to them.  They accepted me into their fold, no questions asked.  I assumed they believed if Noah liked me, they would too.

Their girlfriends, however, were another matter.  I had, in some ways, replaced the girl Noah had been dating, who some of them had recently travelled with to Europe with for a wedding.  The girlfriends seemed slightly leery of me.  I felt like I had to prove myself to them, to win them over.  Being an older woman, a single mom without custody of her children, was not a good start.

“Divorce is hard on children.  I think married couples should do everything they can to stay together.  Kids don’t need the stress of a broken home.”

I knew Kara was trying to enlighten me, but she was only echoing the voices that had bounced around in my head for years.

“How could a parent not be with their child?  I just don’t understand it.  I’d do anything and everything to keep my family together.”

I smiled blandly and nodded.  I’d gotten good at smiling and nodding, politely deflecting people’s judgment.  I had heard Kara’s disapproving lecture before.  In fact, I had imagined far worse things people might think about me and my situation.  But the hardest part of taking it on the chin, of letting people think I was a shitty, uncaring, heartless excuse for a mother was knowing what had really happened, and realizing, because the whole story was so crazy and unbelievable, that it wasn’t worth trying to explain.  I wasn’t about to start saying, “Before you give me that look one second longer, I need five hours of your time to make you understand the entirety of what really happened,” to every woman that gave me a sideways look when they found out I was a non-custodial mother.  Even if I did, would anyone believe it?  How could anyone possibly understand it, without having lived through it?

All of it — from the Big Bang, to losing my house, to not knowing if the kids would have health insurance — who should I tell my story to in order to make things better, let alone get off the hook from the “Perfect Mothers (and Future Perfect Mothers) Club?”  It seemed preposterous, even to me, that a seemingly normal, happy, suburban family would blow up in the style and fashion my family did.  I didn’t have the time to explain all the details, and even if I did, it was embarrassing, much too personal, hurtful, and exhausting.  Reopening wounds I still didn’t fully understand was something I wanted to avoid.  Instead, I let people think what they would.

Like many before her, I did not try to correct Kara.  She was young (in her early 30s), well-educated, recently married, and her parents had probably provided a very secure upbringing and future.  She didn’t have a clue what I’d been through (how could she?), and I didn’t fault her for that.  The wine had emboldened her, and the questions she had kept to herself for at least a couple months were spilling forth, unguarded, chased closely by her strong opinions.  She was resolute in her harsh examination of my scruples.

Noah walked into the living room to see me sitting on the small chair in Emmett and Christine’s living room, only to hear Kara ruthlessly questioning me.  He immediately came over and sat next to me, putting his arm around my shoulder.  I leaned into him.

“Hey, Emmett, do you mind if I put on a record?”

He quickly changed the subject, and before getting up, searched my face for signs of anger, sadness, or self-consciousness.  He was worried about my being cornered and put on the spot, but I was numb to those feelings by now.  Kara didn’t mean any harm, and I knew it.  She was just asking what most people wanted to ask, but were too polite to do so.

The week before, I’d visited Claire and Jackson’s school to meet with their teachers for parent-teacher conferences.  The teachers were polite, but somewhat reserved in their interaction with me.  I couldn’t help but think about how different the meetings were from when I was a stay-at-home wife and mother.  I imagined that when a divorced dad went to his children’s school conferences, the teachers would be impressed.  A “good” divorced dad was defined by the fact he was still involved with his children at all – that he picked up the kids on his weekends, paid child support on time, and not much more than that.  If a mother, however, perfectly fulfilled the same duties, something must be seriously wrong with her.  Or at least, there must be some drastic reason why she didn’t have physical custody.

Claire had shown me around her classroom, explaining the science projects the class was collectively working on, the garden they had planted just outside the classroom door, and the chapter books she was reading.  She took me into the hall to show me her artwork, a painting and writing project about heroes.

Her painting was of a tall blonde man.  She’d sketched herself holding hands with her dad, and had written in careful fourth-grade cursive, “My Daddy is My Hero.”  Seeing that stapled to the wall on bright, red butcher paper struck a chord of irony in me, and made me momentarily dizzy.

“Beautiful work, Honey,” was all I could say.

There was no way my children could know what had transpired.  No way the teachers could know, or the other children’s parents.  When I stood behind Wanda at Jackson’s tee ball game, as she handed out cupcakes with frosted tops designed to look like whipped cream baseballs, I just stood by, feeling helpless and worlds away from being a “good mother.”

The unfairness of my plight often stuck in my throat like a giant hairball of emotion, and I choked down the urge to scream out to Wanda, as she looked at me smugly with her after-game treats for my children in front of their friends.  I wanted so badly to tell her the truth.  But I never did.  I had made the decision to bite my lip.  I’d always admired that superheroes and the strongest characters in the Bible and literature never let their missions be interrupted by misperceptions that people or society might hold of them.  Every hero has a choice – to face the darkness or be consumed by it.  People judged Batman harshly at first, but he just kept doing what had to be done anyway.  Hellboy was resigned to the fact that, although he looked like a monster, he was the hero, and saved the exact people who were afraid of him or condemned him.

I felt like the Hellboy of moms standing there, behind the other parents, as Wanda handed out her cupcakes at Jackson’s game.  I felt like a mutant, an undercover mother, stripped of the matching sweatsuit-and-keds uniform.  Instead, I wore high heels and a fitted business suit to the field, having come straight from work.  Making me stand out even more was the fact I didn’t have my own folding sports chair or a spot on the roster indicating which day I was supposed to bring snacks for the kids.  I was displaced.  I was on the outside, looking in, at my children’s lives, no longer a part of the “Mommy Sorority.”  That part hurt, but I tried to remember to look at the bigger picture, which was the wellbeing of my children.  And every time I could make it to one of their events, I watched them closely to make sure they seemed happy and well-adjusted.

My responsibilities now included not only trying to navigate the waters of being a non-custodial mother, but also how to survive, and hopefully succeed, as a career woman.  I had to live a new life, and I wasn’t very keen on explaining to people what my former life was like, let alone how I’d ended up here.

I looked at Noah gratefully as he veered the conversation away from Kara’s interrogation.  I’d been turning the other cheek for awhile now.  The kids’ dad and Wanda had called me selfish, and an irresponsible parent.  According to Mike, he was the ideal father figure, and a much better parent than I was.  He looked like it to the unknowing public, too.  But Noah knew the whole story.  He knew me.  Not only was he being protective, but I knew that to him, I was brave, smart, and a loving mother, even though I felt like a mutant-mom.  He thought of me as the opposite of a “bad mother,” and I loved seeing myself through his eyes, as a courageous woman who would do whatever it took to protect the unknowing little ones around her.  He knew I was misunderstood, and he was protective of me and my reputation.

Kara didn’t look ready for the conversation to be finished, but everyone had followed Noah’s cue.  She got up from the couch and headed to the kitchen.  The record Noah had put on was still playing.  Thom York’s voice carried throughout the apartment…

“I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo, what the hell am I doing here?  I don’t belong here.”

Silently, we all sipped our wine and shifted uncomfortably in our seats, wondering if we’d had too much alcohol, or not enough.

by K. Frank

I line up with about twenty others in the waiting room. Each one of us is holding a white envelope containing information and forms to fill out to apply for food stamps. We’re escorted by a uniformed police officer through the door, down a hallway, past cubicles where workers have photos of their families, potted plants, and sweaters hanging over chairs. Social services looks like any other office I’ve been in except for the armed police officer’s presence.

We’re ushered into a classroom with rows of tables. In front of each chair is a numbered file folder. The police officer stands at the doorway after we are all assembled and gives a small speech on the seriousness of the process, the need to follow directions carefully and the necessity to fill out all forms honestly.

A young woman sits at the head table with clipboard in hand. She takes roll call. Another young woman, standing next to her is looking over the room. Papers in hand. She is dressed casually, jeans and a hooded sweatshirt. This is the woman who will teach the class.

She begins by telling us to put our photo identification, social security card, and any other documents we may have to verify residence, income, medial condition, etc., in the file folder in front of us. She gathers them up, looking in each folder to see what is there. She hands the folders to the roll call lady who disappears to make copies. The instructor continues.

“Listen up! This is the class for food stamps. Please follow instructions carefully and DON’T JUMP AHEAD! You will make mistakes if you do, trust me, some of these forms are difficult to understand. I see groups like yours every day filling this room and there’s always a